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1 Corinthians 12:3
Jesus says:
“‘Lord,’ you said to me, ‘I prefer this to what I was then.’ You have thus grasped how much greater it is to serve God and love Him than to love and serve a man. You have reached that point of intelligence, then, which ought to be in creatures, but is possessed so rarely.
“As a strict teacher, I have had to make you travel a whole painful road of teaching to bring you to this knowledge.
“A strict teacher does not allow his student to have toys or other objects with him which are capable of distracting his attention from study with the remembrance of affection for family members or friends. That teacher seems to the boy to be too strict, even cruel, and he almost comes to hate him. But, when he has become an adult and arrived at a higher culture enabling him to be someone in society, he then blesses his unbending teacher and understands that his present intellectual manhood, his current well-being, and his strength of character are attributable to the constant strictness of his teacher.
“And, on reflecting, he also realizes that the discipline was much more rigid at the beginning, whereas it gradually relented more and more towards the end. And he wonders, ‘Why? Wouldn’t it have been better to be affectionate when I was still a child and excessively perceived the difference between my mother’s sweetness and the strictness of school? Wouldn’t it have been more proper to tighten the reins when adolescence and early young manhood had made me less hungry for caresses?’ But later, precisely because he was wisely educated, the student, now a man, recognizes that in this respect, precisely in this one, lay the merit of his education, and precisely for this reason he is now a strong person in life.
“A strong one. What poor men are those who, brought up in soft conditions, are faced, as adults, with the struggles of life, which is certainly not so tender as a mother’s heart or so benign as a family environment, but full of harshness, enmity, battles, and efforts. They are the ones who are eventually overwhelmed by life, or, in order not to be overwhelmed, they end up becoming dishonest, obtaining what they are unable to obtain by their merit by way of cunning.
“I have been a very strict Teacher with you because I wanted you to be strong in spirit. You were too weak. Like a tenuous field bindweed, you needed to cling to others to give them the joy of your flowers of love and give yourself the joy of having someone to hold them up without seeing them fall under the foot of indifference and die that way, after having blossomed to no avail. I created a void around you, leaving one single trunk, very rough and immense, on your heath - too rough for the poor, slender bellflower, that was afraid of it.
“You thus remained on the ground, experiencing scorching heat and earth and the very unpleasant taste of the arid dust. If you wept over being trampled on and struck by those who had not even seen you when passing by, whereas you had hailed them joyfully from a distance and had tried to lift your small branches, which joy had covered with flowers - joy and hope - the weeping thus got mixed with the dust of the ground and sullied the silk of your flowers with the even more repugnant mire of the dust. Poor flowers, which were stained with earth, whereas their mission, for which I had created them, was to be filled with Heaven!
“Weary of being alone, trampled on, and soiled with what could not satisfy you - humanity, with its harshness, selfishness, and poor human affections, false, egotistical, and sensual, which did not understand you and could not suffice for you - you began to think of the trunk remaining faithfully in its place, at your side, whereas the other stems - reeds bending before every wind, nothing more than reeds - were being roused by a force which was mysterious for your ignorance at that time, but whose name was Divine Love.
“What effort, poor Maria, to direct yourself towards that vault, to raise yourself until throwing the first ring around the trunk that was so rough, so rough for your weakness, so hard to embrace. With the tears wrung out of you by the pain of this harshness and fatigue, you had to wash away all the dust of humanity to become lither and lighter. For dust and mire become encrusted and weigh one down. But what joy when you saw that your first flower, blossoming against the rough trunk, was not struck by human harshness, did not wither in the dust, and was not sullied in the mud, but was able to give off its scent, caressing its support, become beaded with dew, only with dew that was fresh and purifying, and with ruby-like gems raining down from the top of the trunk to make your corolla more beautiful and stronger. Your first corolla to be filled with Heaven.
“You wanted to have this joy again and ascended once more. Two, three, ten rings higher and higher on the rough trunk, and more and more strength and fragrance, and increasing dew and sky and rubies on the ever-more numerous flowers. When you were halfway up, you found out the name of that trunk: it was my cross. And it spoke to you in its voice of pain and love.598 On its wood you read the truths which are life, written with the Blood of your God; you kissed them, tasted them, and wanted to rise up to the top, to the place where a painful Face dripping tears and blood - your dew and your rubies - was smiling at you. You wanted nothing but this.
“Your Master and Redeemer then made the trunk of his throne smoother, ever smoother and sweeter to help you to rise. For love obtains love in return, and mine, which already loved you to the point of wanting you entirely for itself, now that you loved it with your whole self, loved you preferentially.
“Here you are, little voice, having arrived at the knowledge of your Good. From the top of our scaffold as redeemers/lovers, you gaze, not with desire, but with mercy, at the far-off Earth, the poor stems unable to come to the Cross, and you gaze at Heaven to pray on their behalf, because, united to Christ, you share his divine thirst for loving and saving souls. From the height of the Cross, you learn the highest knowledge and, like a bird at the top of a very tall cedar, you sing his teachings so that the poor stems will hear them and come towards the Light.
“You have received the greatest gifts. But the gift of gifts has been love. And I teach you to rise more and more on the way which is sublime: that of love. If, moving from true love to small love, you went back to loving yourself in creatures - meditate on this great truth, which is the key to all human affection - your supports would loosen their grip on the sublime trunk, and you would recognize the bitter mire which fills, but does not satisfy.
“Love - Me above all things. Because of all the good I have given you. Love your neighbors in Me, hoping for nothing from them, demanding nothing. Love them precisely because they are so unable to love and so unhappy because they cannot love. Love them, considering that all your neighbors are the work of God and that I died for all of them. Love them, thinking of my pain in Gethsemane, in which every sob corresponded to the name of someone for whom my death would be useless. Love them supernaturally, forgiving, pitying, instructing, being patient, and suffering for them.
“Are you poor? It does not matter. Love does not have money as a means for expansion - supernatural love. Are you sick and powerless? It does not matter. Love does not have physical health and strength as a means for expansion - supernatural love. Are you isolated, and does the world ignore you? It does not matter. Love does not have material freedom and notoriety among the crowds as a means for expansion - supernatural love.
“My Mother was poor and ignored, isolated first in the Temple and then in her shy virginity. And yet She gave you the Treasure. And yet She brought the Word among men. She was silent and powerless, because She was a woman, and was regarded as a ‘nonentity’ by Judaism. And yet no other creature, except for Me, has spoken and acted as She did.
“Supernatural love, perfect in my Mother, has worked the miracle of arriving at Heaven, opening its gates, drawing out its Treasure, introducing the Word that is Knowledge in the midst of the silence and ignorance of the sinful world, and distributing Life with the Blood which, like a river, had its source in the rock of purest diamond which was her virginal womb. She was able to give you Grace, the gift of gifts, O wretched men, who were like animals because of sin, offering her Jesus in silence and love, from the moment He took on Flesh to the moment He bore his Flesh into Heaven.... Oh, separation! The martyrdom of my Mother! A martyrdom of waiting, waiting to ascend to his throne!
“‘Let it be done to me according to your word,’ She said before the ange1,599 in the grotto at Bethlehem, in the Temple, in Nazareth, on Golgotha, and on the Mount of Olives - every time the Father asked Her for a sacrifice, and a higher and higher one, of her will and her love. Not so much because She is the Mother of God, but because She has known Charity - and prompt obedience to the eternal will is the royal water which tests the gold of charity - She was and is sublime.
“Gifts come from God. Love is your merit. In the eyes of God, then, your merit resides in the love you possess.
“I, the Teacher, with strictness before and with sweetness now, instruct you in the sublime Knowledge so that through it, as along a safe way, you will go very high. Charity fortifies you with its blessing so that you will always proceed on its ways.”600
598 This seems to be a clear reference to the vision on April 22, 1943, in The Notebooks. 1943.
599 Luke 1:38.
600 For August 7 the Italian edition includes a vision of “The Martyrdom of Stephen” which was later rewritten in definitive form for the Glorification cycle.