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Sunday at Dawn
Jesus says:
“My poor little star, left submerged under the storm of her Jesus’ pain, hidden, eclipsed, and annulled behind my infinite pain, like a little star behind the sun; my poor little violet, weighed down to the point of bending under the blood of her Jesus, like the grass you have seen soaked in my red sweat in the garden - do you know what I have done? I have taken you to ‘shared love,’ which is the perfection of the love involving fusion, which I spoke to you about in the autumn.168
“Now it is springtime - no longer autumn. ‘The winter has passed.... The flowers have appeared in our land.... Come, my beloved!’169
“The love involving fusion is lofty. Very high, at the summit of that height, is ‘shared love.’ In the former you annul yourself, with your human personality, in your Beloved. In the latter you take the place of your Beloved; you surround Him: He is the soul; you, the body of the soul. And you feel in this body of yours the afflictions of your Love while, within you, He cries out his spiritual and moral tortures and makes them known to you, just like thought, which makes the mind’s impressions known to the flesh, and you receive material impressions.
“It is compassionate love. Cum-passio - that is, the Passion lived through by Christ and by the adorer of Christ.
“I have done this to you. And if I have introduced you into the ‘wine cellar’170 and the smell of the wine has so inebriated you as to make you fall as if dead, know, my beloved, that this wine is my Blood. It is this which fills the cellar with its divine fragrance, and it descends into your heart with this blood, and it rises into your thought with this blood, giving you insights and lights which are no longer earthly, but supernatural, divine, for it is I who speak in your thought, and there is no word of mine which is more divine than the one spoken by my tortures as the Redeemer.
“ ‘ In the shade of the One I desired I have taken my seat.’171 That tree is not, however, the apple tree laden with apples, but my Cross, from which a single fruit hangs: your Christ. Well then, I come down from it - I have come down from it - to ‘sustain you’ with the flowers of charity, to ‘comfort you’ with my caresses, for ‘you were languishing’ with compassionate love.
“Dear one, whom I love because of your love! Your tears on witnessing my weeping, your tears on hearing the hiss of the scourges, your tears on seeing Me fall against the stones, and the other tears you will shed before my supreme torture and my extreme desolation. I have already savored them, and for Me they - along with the tears of your sister souls in shared love - were sweeter than wine filled with honey. They were in the chalice which the angel offered Me to attenuate the bitterness of my Father’s chalice, to invigorate my Humanity, languishing in a cruel agony.172 He, the angel of my pain, to comfort my downcast spirit, cited for Me the names of all those who would love Me, love Me completely, to the point of sharing my tortures, and among them was your name, little violet, little star, little John.173 Maria, my Maria. Thank you, soul that I love!
“I would have gone and would go more slowly in introducing you into my suffering. But it is necessary to speed things up. I know. I must thus quicken your knowledge. Even if it makes you feel very bad on plunging into you in a mass.
“And if someone says the words already uttered in the Gospel174 - ‘And couldn’t He, who healed the man born blind, keep this woman from suffering?’ - I reply, ‘I need her pain for a great work.’ I could also be asked, ‘Why didn’t You begin with the preparatory pains, at least from the Supper on?’ I respond, ‘I needed this soul to be already soaked in this weeping. To make her more proficient, more clear-headed, and more purified to see the ineffable Mystery of my dying to redeem you.’
“The impure and the carnal do not go up - should not go up - to the altar. But if they can still go up to your altars because you are blind and I am forbearing, only those who have purified themselves with the incense of love and the water of weeping and annulled the flesh on the pyre of sacrifice, letting the spirit alone live, can come to my altar to be present at my Mass.
“I follow my method, then, not yours, and I would like you to be less burdensome in desiring certain explanations of such insignificant details, which have value as curiosities and not as revelations.
“Leave my John alone.175 This soul seeing her Jesus being tortured cannot busy herself or concern herself with examining everything so as to state whether Caiphas has a square or pointed beard, whether Herod is dressed in red or yellow, whether Pilate is tall or short - perhaps adding how many centimeters shorter than I he is - or whether the room in the Pretorium is long or short, square-shaped or rectangular. If you were to see the person you love most being tortured, would you be concerned about the first one who passed by? No. You would look only at your dear one, or you would close your eyes to see nothing. You would not observe a woman’s dress, the height of a passer-by, or someone else’s nose.
“Stay in place, men, stay in place, when the tortures of a God are being revealed. And let this be observed with the other revelations as well.
“My little John is looking at Me and at Mary. She has eyes for nothing else. And if, at the beginning of a vision, she can describe the environment or nature, once the revelation of Ourselves by my Mother or Myself begins, she loses her ability to see what is not Us. And only Us. To give you clarification, We direct her attention to a secondary circumstance, such as clothing, a gesture, or a change in light, as regards the background and setting of a scene. The ‘spokesman’ would otherwise not see anything else, except for Christ or Mary, or the Saint who is involved.
“This is for your guidance and for the serenity of my little John, who is already too occupied, occupied beyond her strength, to gain additional capacity - and, furthermore, she would be unable - to satisfy useless curiosity.
“And now, come, soul of mine. Come with Me. Close your eyes to the world and open them where I tell you to and look. Look and rest. Now there is blessedness. Tonight I shall render the vision brighter, and you will write it down. My blessing is upon you.”
The person who should have come did not come today.
At 12:30 p.m., when I was sure he would not come, I gently complained to Jesus, “Ah, Lord! Today there is no Mass on the radio and no Bread for my spiritual hunger. And I so eagerly awaited both the former and the latter this morning!” And He said, “It doesn’t matter. Kiss my Hand. The Eucharist is Flesh, but it is also Blood, and my Hand is red with blood.” And I received Communion that way... and am blessed.176
168 The date “October 11, 1942” has been added here, in handwriting which does not seem to be Maria Valtorta’s. But the year should be cited as 1943, for there is an evident reference to the dictation found in The Notebooks. 1943.
169 The Song of Songs 2:11-13.
170 The Song of Songs 2:4.
171 The Song of Songs 2:3.
172 Luke 22:43.
173 See notes 76 and 119.
174 John 11:37.
175 To be understood as “little John,” as in the references mentioned in note 76.
176 An entry for “the evening of February 13, 1944” follows in the original notebook. It contains the episodes of Jesus’ being poorly received in Nazareth and his questioning his Mother about his disciples, which are followed by a dictation on the humanity of his apostles; all of these texts are included in the cycle on The First Year of the Public Life.