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The Evening238
Who can I tell what I am suffering to? To no one on this earth, for it is not earthly suffering and would not be understood.
It is a suffering which is sweetness and a sweetness which is suffering. I would like to have suffered ten or a hundred times as much. I would not like to stop suffering this for anything in the world. But that does not remove the fact that I am suffering like someone clutched at the throat, clasped in a bite, burned in a furnace, pierced to the heart.
If it were granted to me to move, isolate myself from everything, and be able, by motion and song, to give vent to my feelings - for it is the pain of sentiment - I would get some relief. But I am like Jesus on the cross. I am no longer granted either motion or isolation and must clench my lips so as not to display my sweet agony as food for the curious.
It is not just a phrase: to clench my lips! I must make a great effort to master the impulse to utter the supernatural cry of joy and affliction smoldering within me and rising with the impetus of a flame or a spurt.
Jesus’ misty eyes of pain - Ecce Homo - attract me like a magnet. He is in front of me and is looking at me, standing upright on the steps of the Pretorium, with his head crowned and his hands tied over the white robe of a madman with which they have wished to mock Him, and they have instead dressed him in the whiteness worthy of the Innocent One.
He does not speak. But everything in Him speaks and calls me and asks. What does He ask? For me to love Him. I know this and give Him this to the point of feeling myself die, as if I had a blade in my chest. But He asks me for something else which I do not understand. And which I would like to understand. This is my torture. I would like to give Him ever He may desire at the cost of dying of agony. And I cannot.
His painful Face attracts and fascinates me. He is handsome when He is the Teacher or the Risen Christ. But that way of seeing Him brings me only joy. This one brings me a deep love unsurpassed by that of a mother for her suffering child.
Yes, I understand. The love of compassion239 is the crucifixion of the creature following the Master to the final torture. It is a despotic love impeding any other thought in us except the thought of his pain. We no longer belong to ourselves. We live to console his torture, and his torture is our torment, which kills us, not just metaphorically. And yet every tear wrung from us by pain is worth more than a pearl, and every pain which we grasp to be similar to his is desired and loved more than a treasure.
Father, I have striven to state what I experience. But it is futile. Among all the ecstasies which God can give me, it will always be the one involving his suffering that leads my soul to my seventh heaven. I find that to die of love while looking at my suffering Jesus is the most beautiful death.240
On the 12th there was no dictation. On the 13th I did not want to write. And you know why. On the 14th, still pouting, I gave way because ...because on letting Him speak without halting his thoughts I feel my breath and life being taken away. But I am still pouting. Without a doubt. And if it were not for the fact that today is my birthday241 and his words are the most beautiful gift for poor Maria, I would still hold out to see if, by this means, He grants me the grace I am requesting for all.
Since last night - when you came He was already saying this - Jesus has been repeating:
“And haven’t you understood that I allowed you to know Mary’s torment for your guidance and comfort in this hour?242
“I had enwrapped my Mother’s passion in a veil, for it is something so holy that it should not be served up to pigs.243 Just for Father,244 so that he would receive guidance in judging and absolving the souls that pain brings to the point of delirium; just for you, so that in your suffering you would know that the Mother understands you, for She suffered, and learn how to pray while one’s heart is in a fire of agony and tame one’s feeling rebelling against a will whose aims you do not know, prostrating it under the spirit’s certainty about God’s goodness - a certainty which the spirit instills into reason and feeling, imposing it as a yoke upon the two rebels, for their own good - just for a few other dear, blessed souls of this ‘little flock’ of mine have I granted the words of my Mother in that tremendous hour, inferior only to mine at Gethsemane.
“And you have not understood! If I did not know you as you do not know yourself, I would have to be severe to you. I instead caress you and do not let you go, poor little sheep of mine, entirely enveloped in thorns. Look: I am removing them one by one, extricating them from your fleece, pricking Myself so as not to let you be the target.
“I am here even if you do not want to look at Me. And we shall see who wins.” Later, this morning, after a night of agony leaving me with a face not very different from that of Jairus’ child,245 He says:
“Do you see that you can’t remain without Me? Without your Mass, whose Gospel is sung and commented on by your Jesus, whose blessing is imparted by your Jesus?
“Oh, poor, poor Maria, who are in such a bad state on earth! I really must take you with Me. You are not suited to the brutal clashes of the world. But I still need you. Think of my Mother. She had to remain still for a certain period of time to serve Jesus. Don’t you want to remain to serve Jesus? Let’s go, let’s go! Your reproaches are still love and faith, for you think Jesus can do all and that your total loving and believing ought to work the miracle.
“Martha and Mary also reproached Me in Bethany for not having hastened my return, for having kept at a distance while Lazarus was dying.246 But I loved them for this, too, for there was love and faith in that reproach. ‘If You had been here, our brother would not have died,’ the two sisters said. And in the reproach their conviction was evident that I could work the miracle, and their great love, in the confidence making them dare to reproach Me.
“Peace, peace, soul of mine! Peace between you and Me. And say in my Name to those who might comment irreverently on my Mother’s words247 that She, in that hour, was the Woman. The Woman who summed up in Herself all the sorrows of woman, brought to woman by the sin of the first woman, and She had to redeem them, just as I had summed up in Myself all the sorrows of man so as to redeem them.
“Say to those who deny that Mary was able to suffer because She was holy, that She suffered in every way, like no other sister of her sex, in every way, except in the pains of childbirth, as the sin and curse of Eve were not in Her, and the pains of physical agony were not, either, for the same reason.248 She gave birth to the Son of her immaculate womb and gave God her unstained spirit, as the Creator had decreed that all the children of Adam would have given them to Him if sin had not joined them to Pain.
“Tell them that I, since I was the main Expiator, manifestly had to suffer the pain of death, too - and that particular Death - and I was the Holy of holies.
“Tell those who deny that Mary could suffer in her soul, in her mind, and in her flesh, in the expiatory hours of the Passion, that if I can have one of my male or female servants share in my sufferings and be marked with my wounds - creatures who love Me, but who are always very relative in their love - how can I have failed to associate my Mother with these sufferings and render Her a partaker in them - so that the value of the suffering of the Son of God would be increased by the value of the suffering of the Woman Full of Grace - Mary the Holy One, Mary-Charity, inferior only to God, the One who loved Me to perfection, as a Mother, for in her immaculateness She had the perfection of feeling, and as a believer, for in her holiness She loved Me as no one else did?
“She was a Mother, men. She had borne, generated, given birth to, and raised Me. She was not made of unfeeling substance, but was endowed with nerves and a heart. She was flesh, not just spirit. Pure flesh, but still flesh. If I wept and sweat blood, can She have failed to weep and weep blood?
“I was her Son, men. I was not a phantom man. I was Flesh; I was her Flesh. And in it and upon it She, by her perfect foreknowledge, saw the scourges falling, the thorns penetrating, the blows descending, the stones hitting, and the nails piercing, and by her holiness She received them in Herself.
“O men, reflect. You say you believe in the Communion of the Saints, which is the union of prayers and sufferings with the infinite merits of Christ for the needs of spirits, and can’t you accept that the first one to take part in it was Mary, my and your Holy One?
“Say this, sulky little John, to the men with faith and ideas deformed by a rationalism which they don’t even know they have and which, like couch-grass, has deceitfully invaded even the spirits most sincerely desirous of being in the truth. Remember, though, that John never sulked, not even when I reproached or overlooked him and the others disputed with him.
“Go in peace. I bless you, even if you are so flighty today. Be good! Be good! Consider that I have loved you to the point of making you my spokesman. Go in peace. I bless you once more.”
238 We omit the episode involving “The Little Benjamin of Capernaum” and the dictation containing instruction which follows it, which are found in The Third Year of the Public Life.
239 See the dictation on February 13.
240 There follow several passages which are omitted here: the “Annunciation” and two dictations containing instruction on it (March 8), found in the Preparation cycle; the dictation on “Pilate’s Conduct Towards Jesus” (March 10), found in the Passion cycle; and the episode involving “The Woman with a Hemorrhage and Jairus’ Daughter” (March 11), found in The Second Year of the Public Life.
241 The writer was celebrating her forty-seventh birthday, having been born on March 14, 1897.
242 In the vision on February 19.
243 Matthew 7: 6.
244 Father Migliorini, whom she frequently addresses.
245 See the episode cited in note 240.
246 John 11:20-32.
247 Regarding her agony, as cited in note 242.
248 Genesis 3.