Today, we experience Lent as a privileged moment of inner pilgrimage towards Him who is the source of mercy. It is a pilgrimage in which He Himself accompanies us through the desert of our poverty, sustaining us on the way towards the intense joy of Easter. Really, what does “divine mercy” mean?

In the Cross —painful and lovingly accepted by Jesus— we understand that God’s mercy is not a kind of “unconditional forgiveness” (a so called “mercy” would have been a “cheap grace”). God cannot ignore all the evil of history as something irrelevant and insignificant. Injustice cannot simply be ignored; it should be put to an end and overcome. Only that is true mercy. God takes all that into His passion and, thus, shows His “unconditional” divine goodness, a goodness that cannot be in contradiction with the truth and the corresponding justice.

—We must let ourselves be immersed in the Lord’s mercy, and then our “heart” will also find the right path.