Young Helena had no intention of entering religious life, but at age 19, while attending a dance with her sister Natalia in Lodz, she had a vision of a suffering Jesus, who asked her: “How long shall I put up with you and how long will you keep putting me off?” After praying at the cathedral, she departed for Warsaw, where she joined the Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy. On April 30, 1926, at the age of 20, she was clothed in the habit and received her religious name.
3. Jesus described to her how his divine mercy image should look.
Faustina wrote that on the night of Sunday, Feb. 22, 1931, while she was in her cell in Plock, Poland, after partially recovering from tuberculosis, Jesus appeared wearing a white garment with red and pale rays emanating from his heart. According to her diary, Jesus told her to “paint an image according to the pattern you see, with the signature: ‘Jesus, I trust in You’ [in Polish: “Jezu, ufam Tobie”]. I desire that this image be venerated, first in your chapel, and then throughout the world. I promise that the soul that will venerate this image will not perish.”
4. She saw a vision of hell.
In October 1936, during an eight-day retreat, she was led by an angel to what she called the “chasms of hell,” which she described in her diary as a place of “great torture” and “fire that will penetrate the soul without destroying it — a terrible suffering.” This hell was filled with darkness, and, despite that darkness, “the devils and the souls of the damned see each other and all the evil, both of others and their own.”
5. She was shown different levels of hell.