Jesus says:
“Come. Come out of your jail for a while. Place your hand in mine. I want to take you with Me. The heat of my wound will warm the cold in your hand and will warm your heart more.
“Do you know how grafts are made? In two ways. One, radical, is when you want to turn a wild plant into a good plant. The foliage is then totally amputated, and on the poor remaining stumps, open and - if plants had a voice - moaning with pain, the shoots to be grafted are inserted into the clefts. They are then bound, and you wait. The sap of the good tree mixes with that of the wild plant, and if in the latter there is a capacity for fusion and attraction, the beneficent sap becomes dominant and wins out. The tree becomes good and fruitful.
“There is, moreover, the perfection obtained by experts to make a new, very good superquality out of two good plants. Then the plant is not brutally amputated. There is no longer any need because it is already good. The two good plants are merely drawn together; one or more branches are sheared off from the plant to be fecundated with this vegetable marriage, and against the trimmed sections - a wound which hurts and burns, but which will give glory to the tree - other branches from the fecundating plant are pressed very tightly and are bound in such a way that the buds of the latter are joined to the former’s wound and branches emerge from it which combine the virtues of the graft with the original virtues.
“Maria, Baptism and the Sacraments in general are a total graft inserting Grace into the bad plant of man, stained by original sin, and maintaining It for successive grafts, for man as a plant has a nature which rejects the effects of Grace, the divine graft.
“Not always - indeed, rarely - my Blood, my Flesh, my Martyrdom, and the Paraclete Fire can make you, that are wild, into plants with heavenly fruit. The will to become such is lacking in you. But in those who have this will - and that is the dominant note in their song of love - Love practices another graft. And it is that of fusion with Me. I then take their hand, and the scar on my hand, never completely healed, pours its warmth and its seeds into your being and brands you with indeleble fire.
“It is not necessary to be pollarded as with the first graft. Grace is already in you. But it is necessary to be lacerated by Pain, my Herald, so as to be able to receive beneficial contact with Me with immediate vitality. And the larger the wound harming you is, the more room there is for Me to rest my Wounds thereupon. If you are one big wound, if from your head to your feet you are nothing but laceration and pain, then I clasp you to Myself, and to every Wound of mine there corresponds one of yours, and, as if by a spiritual transfusion, the Blood passes from Me, wounded, to you, wounded. The suffering is atrocious. I know. But the reaction is sublime.
“I am resting on you, Maria. You do not realize. You cannot realize because you are dying of pain. From the sixth hour to the ninth hour, I did not see even my Mother.... Pain made Me able only to feel pain. Heaven, sun, crowd, and shouts and moans and the whistling of the wind - everything was canceled out in the atrocious pain of the final agony, of the Redemption. I knew that my Mother was at the foot of the cross. But, more than the thicker and thicker darkness, pain hid Her from Me. The pain of one tortured and the pain of one abandoned by God. And only I know how much I would have liked to see Her to find comfort in such desolation...!
“But now I take your hand and say to you, ‘Come down from your cross and accompany Me, away from the darkness for a while. I want to speak to you about a point which someone dear to Me and to you wished for, and I did not speak about this topic before because I was reserving it for now’ “My Peter says, ‘The devil, your adversary, is prowling around you like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour; withstand him, strong in faith, knowing that your brothers and sisters, scattered over the world, share the same sufferings you endure.’322
“In the African regions where the lion dwells, men and animals know how to orient themselves with respect to him. I once took you with me to the east, alongside a fount rich in water... and I said to you, ‘Be like this.’323 Today I am taking you with Me into the eternal forests, whose giant trees are the descendants of the ones emerging from nothing by the will of the Father and admired by the astonished eyes of your first parents. You will thus see something different from what is making you gloomy.
“Look. The peaks of these millenary green giants stand tall against the sky, a darker blue than my own eyes. And they interweave up above to speak to the winds and the stars about the events below which they do not see, for the green roof conceals them.
“Beneath is the undergrowth, as thick as an intricate labyrinth, with lianas and roots that look like serpents, and adorned with deceitful necklaces which are snakes lying in ambush. Even further down is the thick plush grass, emerging on virgin land rich in a thousand juices, where it is sweet for antelopes and gazelles to find pasture and rest, and for millions of birds of every kind of song and color to find food. Flowers, ferns, necklaces of corollas, green caverns, moss-covered grottoes, and fresh currents of water, and a green light, resting in the midst of the sun, which dazzles wherever it penetrates, on roads opened up by human exertion or along a watery mirror, so vast that it forces the vegetable dome to open out into a green well.
“In these forests the lion is the king. No one else stands up to him among those running or leaping, or crawling or climbing, or flying or walking. Man, passing by with his herds on the fringes of the forest, migrating towards areas where there is pasture or a market, constructs fences with sharp points for himself and his fellows to protect the herd on cold, peaceful nights. The animals hole up in the brush or huddle at the top of plants as night falls, to flee from his assault. For the lion does not attack as long as the sun is in the sky. He waits for the night, the deceitful shadow of the moon, or deep darkness, to go after his prey. He goes out and roars as the night comes on. He roars around man’s enclosures and the caverns of animals. He does not penetrate - he waits. He waits for the imprudent one who comes out of his refuge.
“There is always so much imprudence! The desire for relief, being curious to see, being in a hurry to arrive. The lion is there. He waits, tasting his prey in advance, beating his sides out of impatience and wrath over the long wait, and circles around, seeking the point where the imprudent one will come out, and when he finds him, he is on the lookout, or studies the signs of his habitual movement and lies in ambush. And he is now silent, for he knows that the imprudent one is coming. He is silent to leave the impression that he is no longer there. And he is never there so much as when he is silent.
“Maria, the devil acts like the lion. Taking advantage of nightfall, he circles around your souls. He does not dare to come out and attack as long as the Sun is high over your spirit. He roars, but does not attack. And what does it matter if he roars? Let, him roar with rage. Remain in the Sun, your God, and do not be afraid. Do you no longer see the Sun? But He is there. If an hour of trial makes you blind, be able to feel Him from his warmth, since you cannot see his appearance. Don’t you know that you would die of cold if your Sun were dead for you? If your spirit lives, though God has made it blind, it is because the Sun is still kissing it.
“Oh, if souls were able always to remain under the eternal Sun and, even in the darkness of trial, not emerge from the solar zenith, and say, ‘I will stay in my place. God will find me here, where He left me, for I do not change my way of thinking as regards faith and love’!
“The devil goes around looking for an aperture to stretch out his claws and tear away the incautious one who is too close to the opening - to temptation. Or he waits for him to come out - as a voluntary prey through the allurement of sensuality. Or he may be silent and lie in ambush -this is the craftiest trick. And those proceeding without a connection to the divine fall into his trap.
“I repeat: as long as he roars, he is not very dangerous; when, after letting himself be heard, he is silent, he is then dangerous to the utmost - he is silent because he has discovered your weak point and your habits and is already prepared to leap upon you.
“Be watchful. If the light of God is upon you, it illuminates you, and nothing else is needed. But if you are in darkness, remain anchored in faith. Let nothing move you from it for any reason. Does everything seem dead and nullified? Tell yourselves, ‘No. Everything is as before.’ Say to Satan, ‘No. Everything is as before.’
“Before you, how many have endured the same tortures as you! ‘Your brothers and sisters scattered over the world.’ Your brothers and sisters. Around the world. World, here, is not so much this Earth, which you inhabit, with those living on it. World is the Communion of all the living. ‘Of all the living,’ I say. That is, of all those who are in eternal Life after having been willing and able to remain in ‘Life’ while they were on Earth.
“Well then, these brothers and sisters of yours, scattered like eternal flowers in my celestial gardens, not only remember their past combats and are thus able to understand yours, but, because of the Charity which is now their Life, they suffer, in blessedness, on seeing you suffer. A suffering of love which does not dull their joy, but mixes into it a vein of superactive charity and makes them merciful and helpful in regard to your troubles. All of Heaven reaches out to you that struggle, with my Name in your hearts and for the sake of my Name, and helps you.
“Do not go outside the threefold barrier of the theological virtues and the secure defense of the fourfold cardinal virtues. Faith, hope, and charity. Justice, temperance, fortitude, and prudence - this is your defense. Satan’s claws break against them, and he loses his power, not harming you.
“When the Sun, your God, returns to shine on your spirits, victorious over the night which tortured you, you remain astonished on seeing what a labor of liberation the devil himself has carried out, against his own will, by circling furiously around you. In his impotent fury, by placing you on the defensive he made small imperfections, like tenuous blades of grass stepped on excessively, die definitively and the light descend triumphantly onto the bare ground to make your flower, your spirit, created to live in Heaven, grow more vigorously.
“Go in peace. Go back, in peace, onto your cross and into your darkness.324 And take this memory of sunlight with you. Go. Believe in Me and in my Mother, even if in these hours, which are between the sixth and the ninth one, you cannot see Us because pain blinds you.”
322 1 Peter 5:8-9.
323 On June 21, 1943. See The Notebooks. 1943.
324 This refers to the terrible state of abandonment which the writer had been experiencing since April 9.