Half an hour after having received the dictation, I was on the verge of dying from a very serious cardiac crisis resistant to all treatment. But I did not care.... My heart was content over the Mother’s words. I would rather have ten crises a day or an hour than excellent health and the spiritual state of the month from April 10 to May 10!
Since Saturday I have been carrying out a special penance for the poor people who are in despair. I have always pitied them, even before this tremendous trial. But now...! Every day, as long as I live, I shall thus make a special offering to God for my “despairing brothers and sisters.” That God may take them off that pyre of agony where they writhe, scorched and raging, and give them his dew, his peace, faith, hope, and charity.
It is too horrendous not to love You, not to hope in You, not to believe in You, and to feel You no longer, my God! Do not do this, do not do this with anyone. Keep Satan and the world from leading men into desperation; fortify spirits, even if they are unworthy; fortify them out of mercy so that they may avoid despair. Punish them with other misfortunes if they are unworthy of your benignity. But not this one, not this torture, my Father!
If I can manage to, I shall also say those ejaculatory prayers Father Migliorini told me to say in those tremendous days: “My Jesus and God, help me”; “My God, save me. I believe in You.” I have always said them, even when I was mad with pain. With the pain of abandonment by God.
And here I want to explain something so as not to be misunderstood. It is not that I have rebelled when the extraordinary manifestations were lacking. I have never wished for them. I have never demanded them since they were granted to me. God gives them freely, and none of his children can order Him to grant them. But the abandonment He has had me endure has been to feel separated from God.
Before these manifestations, throughout my life, even when it was I who drifted away from Him because I was extremely imperfect, I felt my God to be near me. I felt that I was watched over by Him and that every good action of mine, every prayer, and every sacrifice was immediately accepted by Him. He was there, bending over me, precisely to gather in these crumbs of goodness from me. Even if He did not grant my requests, He always gave me the sensation that He was close to me because his peace was in me, or at least around me, and I got the feeling I was never alone. All of this had now disappeared. God no longer existed. Heaven no longer existed. Who could I pray to? Paradise seemed like a myth to me. The firmament, beyond which we imagine the existence of God and his Paradise, was uninhabited for me.... I was praying to Nothingness.... Whoever has not experienced this does not know what horror is. On other occasions I felt that God existed. But to curse me. I think it is what the damned experience when they see their God in the private judgment and when they see Him in the universal one. The terror of God as one who punishes and curses those who have offended Him. Whoever has not experienced this, too, does not know what it is.
Today, Sunday, for example, I have not received any dictations at all. But I feel that Paradise is around me and am serene and supernaturally joyful. I feel that my prayer rises to God and that my love exchanges kisses with God’s love....
A thousand sufferings, but this union with God, even if hidden, is something which does not cause prostration, but exhilaration. It is like someone who is blind in a room. He does not see or hear a sound around him. But he knows that if he needs something, it is enough for him to call out softly, and there is someone nearby who will come to his aid at once, and this encourages him. I don’t know if I am managing to get the right impression across.
I think - and I am sure I am not mistaken - that this room, in which I am suffering greatly because it is not the room where so much Paradise manifested itself to my indigence,345 will become dear to me if the eyes of my Lord shine in it. More than dear - sacred. But I already love it a little because I am now feeling his peace here. And I have heard the words of Jesus and Mary. I did not before. I hated it in the first days and was afraid of it.... I did not feel God here. And if I do not feel God, I am afraid of everything.
345 She had to leave her home in Viareggio because of an evacuation. See note 312.