An Invitation into Loving Kindness in Turbulent Times
“Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loosen the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke"? IS 58:6-7NIV
The Daughters of the Heart of Mary, United States Province including Canada and Haiti, wish to extend a message of love and peace and an invitation to join us in simple acts of Loving Kindness and prayer during this Lenten season.
Loving Kindness, the Jewish hesed that informs our Catholic faith, is at the heart of life everlasting, as witnessed by Jesus and attested to throughout the centuries. Loving Kindness is the expression of unconditional love. As Daughters of the Heart of Mary, we give our lives over to Love and lean into the promise of bearing witness to Love faithfully in our daily lives.
As in the days of the founding of our order, we live in turbulent times. We recall with hope the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. that “Love is stronger than hate.” We wish to emulate his faithful witness of Loving Kindness in the face of hatred and the terrible mendacity of racism in the United States.
Therefore, in the name of Love and in the spirit of Loving Kindness, we invite you to join us in informed discernment and action by calling out those systems and leaders who insist on mendacity. Let us resist, call out and repudiate systems and leaders for who and what they are. Let us continue to strive to transform personal and communitarian sin into occasions for grace. Let us continue to walk with God and neighbor in times of peace or war. May we be transformative witnesses, especially in those times when a mindset of violence and power-seeking mendacity may be met with an invitation to a mindset of peace and mutual interdependence.
Like Jesus, we practice Loving Kindness as we walk with those who are displaced, oppressed, isolated by oppressive systems and leaders. We mourn with, and feel the sharp sword of agony, as vital support systems are broken and untrusting. We feel the pangs of hunger, disappointment and poverty as quality-of-life opportunities are swept away while profit greedy industries grow more bloated by the minute. Children’s lives are disrupted, and the threat of war looms. We know the temptation to violence, the urge to try to force the arc of heaven to bend just a little more obviously towards justice today.
In the spirit of our founders Marie Adelaide de Cice and Pierre Joseph de Cloriviere, we walk on with prudent and audacious courage – with our neighbors on every side of the ideological spectrum – in faith, in hope, and in charity, bearing witness to the transformative power of Love.
In the spirit of unity and love, we invite you to join us daily this Lenten season, wherever you may be, in pausing to contemplate the Divine and to pray in gratitude for life, for the expectation of justice and mercy, and for the transformation of people and nations to mindsets and practices rooted in Loving Kindness.
“Peace with each one of us; with the way we look at others, listen to others and speak about others.” Pope Leo XIV
February 26, 2026
