I write as best I can in the twilight.
One of the poor creatures has left who contribute to making this place of exile752 even more unbearable for me. She left after having made a display of her... culture. As I listened to her, I thought of You, my Master, and your lessons, true lessons which educate in a knowledge which is bread for the spirit in addition to the intellect. And... I felt repugnance at this other poor science, which does not have the taste of You. I cannot pray because I am still thinking... and You lead me to see.
There You are: I see You, my Incarnate God, blazing and majestic, standing upright in the purest ether. You are alone. I see only You, glorious in your appearance as King of creation. Your robe of immaterial, pearly substance shines, and your glorified Flesh, which is at once flesh and light, shines more. O Beauty, unknown to so many who do not take care to act in such a way as to know You one day! O my Beauty, who cancel out all my affliction by showing Yourself!
Jesus does not speak, but He invites me with his gaze to go to Him, And I go. My spirit rises, breathed in by his desire and spurred on by mine, up to my King.
And He says, “Look. Know. Compare.” And with his luminous hand, on which there is the ruby of the wound, points to a boundless heavenly horizon. Yes, for I am elevated beyond spaces, beyond the stratosphere, into realms where there is nothing but stars and ether. No more clouds or dust or winds - that is, there is still one wind: the singing, harmonious wind created by the movement of the stars.
I comprehend that Jesus, without words, wants to show me the “truth” of this stellar sign. Oh, how different it is from the poor conception stated a little while ago and all the others I have known until now. I shall make an effort to express it.
The stars already formed race straight on like projectiles fired point blank from a cannon, slither like snakes in the blue, rotate, while running, on their axes, and dance like festive children on the ethereal meadow. The light throbs with every movement, almost as if the joy of motion and of obedience to the laws of the Creator made their burning bodies more incandescent. The only fixed one, the sun, an enormous globe of gold fused to burning topazes, metal, and jewels compared to which our most beautiful ones are filthy pebbles and dull brass, beams out its light, ever the same. It looks like a huge votive lamp adoring the majesty of God.
How many stars! My gaze, goes on and on... and stars and planets are everywhere.... How many unknown stellar lives! How much unknown radiance! How many mysteries of words up here! And of lives!
Stars purifying themselves in their swift race by losing their aura and scoriae, which fuse with those of other stars and create the nuclei for new lives, star dust forming a way for numberless little lives - small in comparison to planets and incalculably large in comparison to the nothingness of a human body. And this way, entirely luminous, a real fishpond of stars, every once in a while lets one of its lives of light escape, a flower abandoning its native flowerbed, and it goes to complete itself - by a process I am unable to explain - feeding on substances it carries off on its way.... And a new star is born - or, rather, has been isolated, to say to the man discovering it, “I, too, exist.” And other stars still in the process of being formed move along, with the wake of their combustion and solidification as a mantle of flame or head of hair unbound and extended by the wind of movement. And all of this on a meadow of an ethereal blue where the purest turquoise and the most precious bright sapphire are so pale and dull by comparison that they lose value.
Oh, the light of the heavenly fields! Oh, why am I unable to express better these unions, formations, and separations and this inexhaustible flourishing of lives, the obedience, beauty, and majesty of the world of stars?
But, although the light of this boundless garden of stars which is the firmament is such that the mind of a poet or scientist cannot even remotely conceive of it, Jesus now makes a movement. He simply removes his gaze from the stars to turn towards the left and behind Him. An order must be darting from his Thought, a desire. But I hear no word. An angel swiftly comes and prostrates himself in adoration at the Savior’s feet. And Jesus says to me, “Compare this light to those lights.” He says nothing else. Indeed, the angel - and there is just one - is shining more than all the stars together....
752 St. di Compito.