The tide swells. I no longer know how to withstand so much physical and moral affliction. If my spiritual strength were to give out, it would be complete, irreparable ruin.
For the time being, this strength is still intact. But will it hold up? I can’t be sure about myself. If God helps me very, very much, I shall withstand. Otherwise I will give in. Afterwards I might also get up again. But I find that the experiment is always dangerous, for one does not always get back up again in time, and I would not like to die at a moment when I loved You less. To offend You is to love You less, O my God. Have mercy on me.
You have so much mercy, but also grant me the “great mercy.” You know what this great mercy is which I am requesting. To take me back to my nest of love. To my nest of peace. To my nest of Heaven.477 Even if You make celestial fragrances descend from Heaven, as You did last night, they cannot last here, where there is too much conflict from humanity and animality. I thank You for having attenuated my suffering with heavenly aromas. But they are not enough. They are not enough for your little “voice,” in order not to die and, above all, not to die a miserable death. Have mercy
Later. Jesus makes the following remarks for me:
“On observing the Hour of Mary’s Desolation, I want you to consider the three periods of Mary’s pain.478 For your information and guidance in suffering and knowing the Justice which will judge all of you on the way you suffer.
“In the first period it is the woman, the mother, who cries out her torment. God grants that, in the most atrocious moment of pain, the creature may rave and use harsh words regarding those who have occasioned this pain. Mary, the Holy Woman, cannot stop Herself from calling men ‘beasts, jackals, and hyenas,’ calling the Jews ‘their step-parents,’ proclaiming that She has to do Herself violence to put up with them, and branding them with the name of God’s Cains and the disgrace of the human race. Mary, the Holy Woman, cannot stop Herself from calling Jerusalem a ‘cruel mother, killer, plunderer, vampire, and vulture.’ On Calvary She could only howl, ‘I no longer have a Son!’ She was a woman.
“In the second period, She is the believer who wants to be faithful to her faith, even if the facts seem to contradict every promise of faith. Her heart as a mother and a woman struggles with her spirit as a believer. The spirit triumphs because it really is nourished by faith. The woman is superseded. The believer remains.
“In the third period, the believer, imposing herself more and more in faith, rises, by way of resignation, to reunite Herself to God, from whom pain separated Her. Oh, pain, I know, is like the blow by a wicked boy to the soft wings of a varicolored butterfly! He knocks it to the ground. It seems dead. But it gradually recovers strength and motion. It first walks, then climbs, then tries to move its wings, then makes its initial timid flight, and finally launches out and reconquers the blue sky....
“I am reading your thought: ‘But if the blows continue, and every time the butterfly begins to soar, it is knocked down again, it ends up dying on the ground.’ In human terms, this is true. Only this can happen. But for that reason I am present. To gather in the victims of earthly brutality. It is enough for them not to distrust Me and not to accuse Me, with hatred, of being their executioner.
“Give to God what is God’s and to man what is man’s. Give just judgment to each one. Meditate honestly on your torments, all of you that suffer, and you, personally, who are suffering to the point of dying from them. You will see that every torment bears the name of a man. Never that of God. Oh, you are still a creature, and it is not licit for you to know the secrets of what is supernatural! But when you know them, you will understand so many things.
“Mary, in the third period of her desolation, is no longer the believer - She is the Daughter of God, the Holy Woman speaking to the Father, the King, with the solemn security of one knowing She can speak because She has conquered the right to be heard. No longer the obscurity of human desolation, no longer the anxiety of the believer who wants to and cannot reach peace in pain. But the joy of suffering: a joy of the soul underneath the weeping of the flesh, which is the last to die, but which is left to weep, for - you said so479 - when one arrives at certain points, flesh and sentiment are garments thrown over the spiritual self, the true self. And the creature, sanctified by heroism, can come to say, ‘On account of that “yes” I uttered, listen to Me!’
“Say this - you, too, Maria. Say, ‘I have said yes to You so many times; on account of these yesses, listen to Me.’ And hope. Do not give a name to your hope. You would always give it earthly names. Hope in Me. In Me alone, and let Me act.”
My Note
But, in the meantime, I have been in a galley, an insane asylum, a hell, for two months. And I am sinking deeper and deeper into it. Two months! Two months since I was torn away from that place where my true life was.480 They tore out my heart, for You know, You know what that house meant to me. And the more time passes, the more the wound hurts. Because, in addition, there is no medicine for it.
No longer an enlightened word.... And I don’t believe - I cannot believe in human terms - that I am hearing your voice. I am too unworthy of it.
No longer a Communion received properly. I say it is received properly when not only the one receiving it, but also the one administering it does so with the reverence which that Sacrament merits and which serves to make the mystery perceptible. Here... it is preceded and followed by chatter like that arising with just anyone. From the laundress to the friend coming to visit me - anyone could say the same words and make the same gestures I see on the poor Communion mornings. Oh, how wretched! Resentment, gossip, and self-interest....
Where are you, solemn moment of the Communions in Viareggio? A moment when I would see You, for - yes, I shall now say it, since I shall perhaps die or go mad soon, and I must say this - when I would receive Communion from the hands of Father Migliorini, he would disappear, and Jesus would appear to me as the one administering it. Almost always. Or He was at Father’s side and blessed us. This made me sure of the priestly fiber of my Director. Father Giosue481 also came.
But it was different. Still a paradise compared to now: an earthly paradise in which I felt God, but did not see Him. With Father Migliorini it was the real Paradise. And I no longer have it. I need it more than ever and no longer have any of what was the necessary atmosphere for my soul in order to hear the Word which is my life. Do you that are reading understand what has been taken away from me? Two months of hell....
And the usual question of May 24:482 “But why didn’t You have me die before I was taken from my house?”
477 Her house in Viareggio. See note 312.
478 In the vision on February 19, in the dictation and vision on June 3, and in the vision on June 23, in addition to the Passion episodes found in the writer’s life of Christ.
479 On June 22.
480 Cf. note 312.
481 Father Giosue Bagatti, of the Friars Minor, chaplain at the Viareggio Hospital.
482 Mentioned on June 21.