A Prayer...

... for this second Sunday in Lent.  This was posted on FB by a friend of mine from college, and it struck me as a good prayer for Lenten devotion.

"Lord, I am in this world to show Your mercy to others. Other people will glorify You by making visible the power of Your grace by their fidelity and constancy to You. For my part I will glorify You by making known how good You are to sinners, that Your mercy is boundless and that no sinner no matter how great his offences should have reason to despair of pardon. If I have grievously offended You, My Redeemer, let me not offend You even more by thinking that You are not kind enough to pardon Me.
Amen."

By Father Claude La Colombière, the confessor and spiritual director of Margaret Mary Alacoque.  I am told, by the same friend who originally posted this, that when Margaret Mary began having her visions of Christ, Father Claude tested the reality of the visions by telling her to ask the Lord what his (Father Claude's) greatest sin was - something which Margaret Mary could not know.  Apparently, she came back with the answer from Christ "I don't remember."  Although the cynic in me thinks that sounds like an easy out, it also sounds remarkably like the sort of thing Jesus might say, perhaps with a little bit of playfulness.