Autobiography

18. “To offer oneself to Love is to offer oneself to all sorrows.” — St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus

St. Theresa of Avila writes in her Way of Perfection, “What a difference whoever has experienced human and divine love must find between one and the other!”

It is true. The dawn of a misty winter’s day and the clear, pure dawn of a radiant summer morning; a little pool with a tightly bounded shoreline and the open sea, whose limit is the measureless horizon; the small fire with a few dried twigs and that of a blast furnace; and the trembling flicker of a modest oil lamp and the dazzling sun all resemble one another more closely than do human love, even the most dizzying kind, and divine love.

I had loved twice. Once with the ardor of my youthful years—and in this I had known the fevers of the flesh; a second time I had loved more with the soul than with the flesh, and precisely because it was love of the more select part, it had given me ecstasies and elevations which were much more noble and long-lasting than the former one. Strictly human love is destined to have a short life, even if it was extremely ardent in its fleeting hour, while the love combining soul and body, with the attraction of spirits and matter, love-friendship, is more tenacious, and not even disillusionment puts an end to it. In this the colonel had been quite right in prophesying to me that I would love Mario as I had not even remotely loved Roberto.

But now, now that I loved Jesus in a manner more intense than that common to the great mass of believers in Him, I understood the difference between this supernatural love and my human love—or, rather, loves.

My life was now entirely thrown into this love. External things still existed and occasioned thoughts, joys, and sorrows. Above all, sorrows. But now I saw these things from other regions, as if through a glass, a lens which changed them for me, rendering worrisome thoughts bearable, joys not indispensable, and sorrows sweet. I now viewed everything through God. He was the lens making me see things in a light different from the one they would have had for me and for everyone if we had looked at them with human sight and judgment. I now believed that everything took place according to a law of love—a jealous, overbearing love, perhaps, but whose jealousy and overbearance attested to its being a great love.

Oh, yes! Jesus knows how to be jealous and overbearing! With a divine jealousy and a divine overbearance, which, if you have once said yes in full awareness, you no longer escape. Jesus had asked me for that “yes” at school, and now, after having convinced me that on earth everything is sadness, He was asserting his rights.

All I am saying might seem to contradict what I said at the beginning of this story of mine. But it does not. I then stated that God does not impose Himself, but in order to act wants the soul to be willing to be moved. Only then does the avalanche take shape. That’s the way it is—there is no contradiction whatsoever.

In adolescence I had said, “Lord, I am at your disposal.” And the first layer of snow had formed, gradually becoming enlarged afterwards with the continual acts of desire the soul formulated at that time.

Next there had been a pause. Something had restrained the formation and more intense onrush of the avalanche. And it had been my human period, the period of distractions—or, rather, of deviations. And Jesus had waited. Only at the most tremendous moment involving them, to save me from ruin, had He made a gesture to call me back. He had come with the dream to convey his gentle reproach, to make me reflect and stop in my race towards evil.

And then He had waited again. Patient and good, He had given me all the time to heal morally and meanwhile worked to isolate me, though not seeming to. Oh, in this He was quite active! He wanted me—and took everything away so that I would be left with nothing but Him.

When I later cried out, “I want to be yours!” He took possession of me completely, and I no longer had a heartbeat, breath, glance, word, or thought which did not pass through the divine filter of his love, just as nothing came into me from outside without passing through the same divine filter.

This has lasted for twenty years now, and the identification has constantly been growing closer, and the filter, ever more perfect, so that the evil which may come to me from others is muffled by that divine protection and the good I may do expands over my fellow men ever more purely, for love cleanses it of all human imperfections. I still suffer greatly, for it is my destiny to suffer, but the pain coming to me from men is assuaged by the joy coming to me from Christ. I therefore tell myself—and I am convinced of what I am saying—that I have come to grasp that the only real sorrows of a heart are those which come from God to try us or to punish us.

The sorrows coming from men naturally make us weep. Jesus also wept. But we, too, like Him, in weeping feel a sweetness merging with it, on reflecting that even the sorrow coming to us from our neighbor serves to redeem, to expiate, to obtain for our fellows. When, however, God strikes us by withdrawing his invisible presence and leaving us apparently alone, then we suffer much, indescribably. I believe it is a reduced figure of what the souls in purgatory must suffer—and I don’t even want to think of the damned in hell.

O pain of mine that come from God and have a thousand visages, may you be blessed! Blessed are you as you are now: the pain of illness, the pain of advancing poverty, the pain of incomprehension on the part of my fellow men around my sick bed, the pain caused by numberless things at present! And blessed are you as you were in past years: the pain of being derided for imaginary illness, the pain of not seeing my father in his final hour, the pain of not being understood in my apostolic ardor, the pain of my mother’s lack of love, ever and ever again the same! And blessed were you, pain, when, not understanding you in your regal robe, I did not love you: my pain at age twenty and that of my broken love! O blessed, blessed Pain that have taken me from the world and given me to God! Blessed for the knowledge which has come to me from you! Blessed for the charity you have infused into me! Blessed for the wings you have restored to my self whereby I have been able to collect myself in heaven with all my holiest desires! Blessed, O Pain, that have joined me to Jesus on the same cross, in a single mission, which has been perpetuated for twenty centuries, to bear souls to the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of God to souls! I shall never cease to bless you, O Pain, O my joy, for in you I have found peace!

It was in the spring of 1923 that I wrote my first offering to God. That prayer, which I repeated for eight years, must still be in one of my books of devotion. In it I humbled myself in the sight of God for my past faults and asked to be forgiven in the name of his Divine Mercy.

But since I was beginning to see with increasing clarity what the Will of God was for me, I also felt that asking for forgiveness did not suffice, as loving Him did not either. My love had to be a penitent love—like that of the Magdalene, whose life had so struck me during that sermon in the Exercises of 1912.

Everything which is asked of God is found, I said at the beginning of this story, but everything which God has sown is also found, provided the soul bends over itself, seeking the divine seed. I now recalled that on that distant day of November 1912 Jesus had told me, “You will not be like Agnes, the pure and innocent one who saw nothing but Me. You will be one who comes to Me by other ways, after many experiences, and who loves

Me through repentance and continuous, long, and hidden sacrifice.”

In that first offering of mine I thus asked Jesus to grant me “the grace to have time to expiate the evil done and to make reparation for all my hours of despair, to make me live in pain all the years I had spent in error and the unholy impatience to leave life.”

As you see, I was still praying selfishly. For my soul, it is true; to make reparation to Him, it is true, but not yet perfect prayer. Later I prayed better.... I was at the beginning then, and when one is—learning the alphabet, one cannot seek at once to write a letter. Don’t you think so?

I also asked in that offering that God grant me the joy of bearing souls to Him, especially those of my parents and Mario.

But even here, though the request was good in itself, I was mistaken in the means. I still did not know that prayer signifies much, but sacrifice is everything. The word is effective, but the silence covering an immolation does a thousand times as much. In my zeal as a convert, I spoke a lot at that time. But I was still opposed to suffering much. I felt I was already doing a great deal in not lamenting over the pain striking me, undergoing it with resignation and thanking God for it. I later went much further....

And yet, how good Jesus is! God granted a first conquest to his Maria, whose zeal was still lame, quite soaked in humanity. It was an old woman aged seventy-two.

As a result of a set of painful circumstances, she had been separated from God for thirty years, blaming Him for all the misfortunes which had befallen her. She was in the same state I had formerly been in, but with the difference, to her detriment, of having remained that way for so long and not abandoning her condition even when age suggested that death was near.

I could not boast of having been better than she. God’s goodness had accelerated my resurrection in a thousand ways, but precisely for this reason I wanted to be an agent of good for my old friend—I would say nearly a guiding light. I regretted seeing the old woman continuing with that rancor, that tremendous bitterness of nonfaith until the end. I wanted to give her old age the comfort of youthfulness in her heart. A second youth, but sweeter and more useful than the first. I succeeded. My dear old woman returned to God and is still with Him, for she is still living, notwithstanding her age of ninety-two....

I was proud of it with a holy pride. I had already borne two souls to Jesus, my own and the old woman’s. In my case—if He had not been the one to bear it off, I really would have been done for...! But the fact is that after his initial assistance I went forward with good will.

After this, my first conquest, I constantly improved. My desire to be an instrument of God increased, and in my mind a whole program of penitent life was outlined, made even more difficult by our family’s way of living.

For Mother does not share certain ideas. If she regards even frequent visits to church and Communions as excesses, just imagine what she thinks of theories on mortification...! I always have the feeling I’ve got a gag over my mouth.... I try to speak as little as possible—or, rather, I tried to speak as little as possible of spiritual things, even when the force of love was such as to give me a real longing to speak of them. I now speak without restraint, thinking that something will penetrate into that heart, so closed to the supernatural. But I get the impression I am speaking in Turkish or Hindi.... She does not understand, and it’s a great grace if she remains silent and does not label me a “lunatic.”

It does not matter. I go forward just the same. To be regarded as a lunatic out of love for Christ is something filling me with joy. All those truly in love with Jesus are mad, divine madmen: martyrs, penitents, the cloistered—what are all who renounce liberty, life, human reputation, wealth, and health out of love for God, if not lunatics? Madmen whose madness is the same as that which led Jesus to the Cross, the “madness of the Cross” of which Paul speaks, the Apostle with ardent words and a bold heart.

The first offering, which I felt to be incomplete and fouled by still too human veins, was no longer enough for me. Jesus’ glance was increasingly alive in me and was drawing me higher and higher.

All of 1923 and a good part of 1924 passed that way. In my family there was only intransigence and despotism, but I took refuge in God....

In September 1924 we had to come to Viareggio. In Florence the landlord demanded the apartment, under the deceitful pretext of putting up his son there, who was getting married, but with the real intention of renting it out to new tenants and multiplying the rent tenfold. An old and ever new story.

My father then decided to write to our relatives in Calabria to see if they could find us a little house there. But what would have been easy in 1921 was now difficult. People were flowing back into Reggio, which was rising up again from its ruins with new houses and pretty streets, and there were never unoccupied houses. Even at the hotel, where they would very gladly have put us up before, they had now made do with other relatives, who helped them to keep an eye on the personnel. Add to this a bit of resentment over Father’s obstinacy, which had lasted four years, and you will understand that everything ended in “You can’t come.”

We then came to Viareggio.... We had acquaintances here who facilitated the purchase of our house. I was quite content to be coming to the sea, which I love so much, and to be leaving Florence, full of bitter memories for me....

The house was bought on September 21, and on October 23 we took possession. A new and different period in my life thus began in which I grew more and more in God.