Jesus says:
“On reading the Gospel in a distracted way, as you do, too many truths escape you. You take in the major teachings - even these, poorly, and adapting them to your present way of seeing.
“Anyway, know that it is not the Gospel that must adapt to you, but you to the Gospel. It is the way it is. Its teaching was that way in its first century of existence, and it will be that way in the last one, even if the last century were to come in billions of years. You will no longer be able to live according to the Gospel - you are able to do so very little already - but not for this reason will the Gospel become different. It will always say the same vital truths to you.
“Your wanting to adapt the Gospel to your way of living is a confession of your spiritual wretchedness. If you had faith in the eternal truths and in Me, who have proclaimed them, you would strive to live out the Gospel integrally, just as the early Christians did. And don’t say, ‘But life now is such that we cannot follow these teachings to perfection. We admire them, but we are too different from them to follow them.’
“The pagans of the first centuries were also very - excessively - different from the Gospel, and yet they were able to follow it. Lustful, greedy, cruel, skeptical, and dissolute, they managed to tear all these octopuses away from themselves, lay bare their souls, make them bleed to wrench them away from the tentacles of pagan life, and come to Me, so wounded in thought, affections, and habits, saying to Me, ‘Lord, if You want to, you can heal me.’279 And I healed them. I closed their heroic wounds.
“For it is heroism to be able to wrench from oneself that which is an evil out of love for a law that is totally accepted. It is heroism to slash from oneself all that is an impediment to following Me. It is the heroism which I have indicated: ‘In truth I say that to follow Me it is necessary to leave home, fields, wealth, and affections. But whoever is able to leave all to come to Me, out of love for my Name, will be given a hundredfold in the other life. In truth I say that whoever has been regenerated in following Me will possess the Kingdom and will come with Me to judge men on the last day.’280
“Oh, my true faithful ones! With Me, with Me you shall be a jubilant, radiant multitude in the hour of my triumph, of your triumph, for all that is mine is yours; it belongs to my children, to my beloved lovers, my blessed ones, my joy.
“But it is necessary to be ‘regenerated,’ O men, to be mine. To be regenerated. John, too, says so, just as Matthew does, quoting my words - the latter, when speaking of the rich young man, and my beloved disciple, when.speaking of Nicodemus.281 It is necessary to be reborn. It is necessary to be regenerated. To make oneself a new soul, O new gentiles of the twentieth century. To remake it by stripping oneself of the world’s compromises and ideas, to embrace my Idea and live it out. To live it out truly. Integrally.
“That is what the gentiles of the first centuries did, and they became the glorious saints of Heaven. And they brought civilization to the Earth. This is what you must do, if you really love Me, if you really care for the other Life, if you really work for civilization on Earth. The Earth now! More uncivilized than a tribe buried in the virgin forests! And why? Because it has rejected Me. Calling oneself a Christian does not mean that one is. It is not having received Baptism for the sake of form that constitutes one as such. ‘Christian’ means to be as Christ said one should be. As the Gospel repeats to you.
“But you read the Gospel very little. You read it poorly. You trim it of what bores you in the major teachings. And, what is more, you don’t even notice the more delicate ones.
“But tell me something. When an artist is preparing to carry out a work, does he limit himself to creating a rough design, if he is a sculptor, to doing a sketch, if a painter, or to raising walls, if he is an architect? No. After the work of approximation, he gets down to the details. These take much longer to finish than the preparatory work. But it is these that create a masterpiece.
“To perfect that creation how lovingly the sculptor works with chisel and hammer on the marble, which already seems to be alive to those who are not expert! He is so precise and intent in his work that he resembles a goldsmith. But see how that face of stone takes on life under the caress - it is so attentive and light that it is now a caress - of the tool. The eyes seem to be adorned with a glance; the nostrils seem to swell with respiration; the mouth becomes as soft as the curving of slightly warm lips; and the hair, ah, is no longer hard in the stone, but airy and pliant, as if the wind were flowing through it or a loving hand were tousling it.
“Observe that painter. The cloth is already finished. It is beautiful - it looks lovely, perfect. But he does not rest. Look, here a blue-black shadow is needed, and there, a touch of carmine. On this flower shining in the hand of this virgin a spark of sunlight is needed to make it stand out in its pearly whiteness. On this cheek a teardrop is needed to bring life to the ecstatic joy arising suddenly in the midst of torments. This flowering field, where these flocks pass by and graze, should be sprinkled with dew to bring out the flowers’ silkiness. The painter does not rest until the work is so perfect as to prompt the exclamation, ‘It’s real!’ Nor does the architect or the musician or all the other true artists who want to give the world masterpieces.
“And this is what you must do with the masterwork of your spiritual life.
“But what do you think? That I, who was so foreign to discourses, added words for the pleasure of saying them? No. I said what was strictly necessary to bring you to perfection. And if in the great teaching of the Gospel there are the resources to give salvation to your souls, in the most minute touches there are the resources to give you perfection.
“The former are commands. To disobey them means to die to Life. The latter are counsels. To obey these means to have a more and more ardent sanctity and to approach the Father’s Perfection increasingly.
“Now, Matthew’s Gospel states, ‘Because of the multiplication of iniquity charity will grow cold in many.’.282 O children, this is a great truth which is meditated on very little.
“What are you suffering from now? From a lack of love. At root, what are wars? Hatred. What is hatred? The antithesis of love. Political reasons? Living room? An unjust border? A political offense? Excuses, excuses.
“You don’t love one another. You don’t feel yourselves to be brothers and sisters. You don’t remember that you have all come from one blood, that you are all born in the same way, that you all die in the same way, that you are all hungry, thirsty, cold, and sleepy in the same way and need bread, clothing, housing, and heat in the same way. You don’t remember that I said, ‘Love one another. From the way you love one another people will understand that you are my disciples. Love your neighbor as yourselves.’283
“You think these truths are the words of a fairy tale. You think this doctrine of mine is the doctrine of a madman. You replace them with many poor human doctrines - poor or wicked, according to their creators. But even the most perfect ones among them, if they differ from mine, are imperfect. Like the mythical statue,284 a great many of them will contain precious metal. But the base will be made of slime and in the end will bring about the collapse of the whole doctrine. And in the collapse, the ruin of those who have relied on it. Mine does not collapse. Whoever relies on it is not ruined, but rises to greater and greater security: he rises to Heaven, to the alliance with God on earth, to the possession of God beyond the earth.
“But charity cannot exist where iniquity resides. For charity is God, and God does not coexist with Evil. Whoever loves Evil thus hates God. In hating God he increases his iniquities and separates from God-Charity more and more. This is a circle that one does not come out of and that clasps you to torture you.
“Whether powerful or humble, you have increased your sins. Having neglected the Gospel, derided the Commandments, and forgotten God - for those living according to the flesh, those living according to mental pride, and those living according to the counsels of Satan cannot say they remember Him - you have trampled on the family, robbed, blasphemed, killed, borne false testimony, lied, fornicated, and rendered the illicit licit. Here robbing a job, a wife, or a patrimony; there, higher up, robbing power or national freedom, increasing your thievery with the sin of lying to justify to peoples your conduct, which sends them to their death. The poor peoples, that ask for nothing except to live in peace! And that you incite with poisonous lies, hurling them against each other to guarantee for yourselves a well-being which it is not licit for you to obtain at the price of blood, tears, and the sacrifice of whole nations.
“But individuals - how much they are to blame for the great sin of the great! It is the heap of little individual sins that creates the basis for Sin. If each lived in a holy way, without greed for flesh, money, and power, how could Sin be created? There would still be evildoers. But they would be rendered harmless because no one would serve them. Like well-isolated madmen, they would go on raving over their obscene dreams of overbearance. But the dreams would never come true. Even if Satan helped them, his aid would be nullified by the opposing unity of all mankind, rendered holy by living according to God. And, in addition, mankind would have God with it. A benign God towards his obedient, good sons and daughters. Charity, then, would be in hearts. Alive and sanctifying. And iniquity would fall.
“Do you see, O children, the need to love as not to be iniquitous and the need not to be iniquitous in order to possess love? Strive to love. If you loved.... Just a little! If you began to love. The beginning would suffice, and then everything would go forward by itself.
“The harvest cannot be gathered if the ear does not mature. The ear cannot mature if it is not formed. And it cannot be formed if the tuft has not formed. But if the farmer did not cast the little seed into the sod, could the green tuft supporting the glory of the ears like a living chalice emerge from the furrow? The seed is so small! And yet it breaks the glebe, penetrates the earth, sucks on it like an eager mouth, and then exposes to the sun its blessed pomp of future bread and with its color of hope or its gold rustling in the wind and shining in the sun sings the blessing to Him who gives the Bread and bread to man. If the seed no longer existed - so small that many of them are needed to fill the gullet of a sparrow - you would not even have the Host on the altar. You would die of physical hunger and spiritual starvation.
“Place a seed, a little seed of charity, in every heart. Let it penetrate there. Make it grow in you. Turn your naked greed into a fertile flowering of holy works all arising from charity. The earth, now tribulations and thorns in its entirety, would change its visage and its harshness, which torture you, into a placid, good dwelling, a foretaste of blessed Heaven. To love one another is to be in Heaven already. For Heaven is nothing but love.
“Read and read the Gospel, and read it even in its most minute sentences. Live it out in its shades of perfection. Begin with love. It seems to be the most difficult precept and counsel. But it is the key to everything. To all Good. To all Joy. To all Peace.”
279 Cf. the leper’s words: Matthew 8:2; Mark 1:40; Luke 5:12.
280 Matthew 19:28-29; Mark 10:29-30; Luke 5:12.
281 Matthew 19:16-30 (and also Mark 10:17-27; Luke 18:18-30); John 3:1-21.
282 Matthew 24:12.
283 John 13:34-35; 15:12.
284 Daniel 2:31-45.