The mercy of Christ...

Let my trust be in Your mercy, not in myself. Let my hope be in Your love, not in health, or strength, or ability or human resources.

If I trust You, everything else will become, for me, strength, health, and support. Everything will bring me to heaven. If I do not trust You, everything will be my destruction.

Thomas Merton. Thoughts in Solitude. (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux) pp.29-30

If we are to trust God, it is in his mercy we are to put our trust. Jesus, in his faithfulness, sacrifice and glorious resurrection, is for us the mercy of God. To trust in that mercy, to surrender ourselves into those arms open on the Cross itself, is the beginning, and the end, of our following. .He is the living word, the beginning and the end. In him and through his and for him all things came to be, and all people. Truly, if he is for us, who can be against us?

It's in realising this, in understanding that in and of ourselves we can do nothing, that we find that in surrendering everything to him, in absolute trust in his mercy, all things will become for us “strength, health, and support.” This is our penitence, the fast that we are called to in Lent: a fast from the self-sufficiency, ambition, and power that were offered to Jesus at the end of his own long fast in the wilderness (Luke 4.1-13) a giving up that prefigures our own dying into the endless mercy of Christ “the power of God and the wisdom of God.” (1 Corinthians 1.24)

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner...