Autobiography

27. 1940-1942 – Crux sancta sit mihi lux

1940, appearing in an already blood-stained world, began very sadly for me.

Though I had foreseen precisely what was now taking place, seeing that it was really happening also occasioned me much pain. Among other things, without being a genius or a diplomat or a strategist, I understood what we Italians would be encountering and what the consequences would be for this poor Italy of ours.

I had prayed so, for years, to obtain peace. I certainly cannot reproach myself for not having done everything possible, joining my nothingness to the merits of other souls more select than mine, so that Europe, and especially we Italians, would be spared the scourge of a new war. I had prayed, wept, literally saturated myself in this concern. In exchange, I was treated, as usual, as a lunatic. When everything now seemed to have been determined for the war, there was a truce—and I redoubled my prayers that it would be lasting.

That’s how it went until the beginning of August 1939. On August 12—I remember precisely that it was the feast of St. Clare—a premonition notified me that the fierce hour had come.

One of my daughters from Catholic Action was then in Poland; she had gone there to support her mother and herself. I loved her and still love her very much, although a great sorrow came to me from her a year ago. I knew that exuberant heart and excitable mind better than her own mother. I understood she was easy prey to anyone able to deceive her and delude her into thinking he was capable of giving her what her family did not—that is, adequate, intelligent affection. Even when ill and secluded by the malady, I had always watched over her and had managed to save her once.... Oh, for her sake I was capable of putting even the priests on alert who—were dozing when there was a need to pay close attention to the sheep that was going astray...! Afterwards she had gone to Poland. But I did not lose sight of her.

On August 12 the “voice” was most urgent in saying, “Tell her to come back at once.” I wrote a letter. It was the last one to cross the border, as the train on which that daughter of mine came back was the last to leave ill-starred Poland. Then, when the storm over which I had been so distressed really began, I wept no more.

It always happens to me that way. I despair in advance. At the moment when in the face of reality the blindest optimists despair, I despair no longer. I have already lived through that moment beforehand. I thus enter into the reality of the event with much fortitude. I feel all the sadness of the times. But they no longer disturb me because I have already seen them with a foresight which is my torment. My deep sadness in these days, during this week, is also because I am seeing very dismal future events.

1940 had thus begun that way. Already sprinkled with blood and still calling for more—and Italian blood into the bargain.... Many deceived themselves about our “nonbelligerence.” I did not. I redoubled prayers and sacrifices, but I now did so to obtain mercy for us in the terrible contingencies of the war I felt to be inevitable and predetermined....

In January Mrs. Soldarelli’s husband also died. I felt sorry for that soul going to God in such fashion—without reconciliation after so many errors. And I set to work so that it would be possible for the dying man to see a priest. His wife, blinded by affection, did not understand that her husband was condemned. But I knew he was. I thus called a priest. I cannot conceive of a soul’s being lost through our fault. This priest promised me he would go—but did not. I spent the whole final night of that unfortunate’s life praying.... Was it worth anything? Only God knows.

It is painful, though, to observe a certain slowness in assisting poor souls. It is useless to preach if the first to be lukewarm are those preaching. How necessary it is to pray for priests...! Souls are so often criticized because they are not prepared to do their duties as Christians. But, let’s say it outright and do so with sorrow, the parish priests charged with caring for these poor souls are often to blame—they are as leprous as can be, but precisely for this reason should be looked after.

The fact is that man died like this. And let us hope that his soul at the final moment turned to God on its own.

I confess to you, however, that I was left so disgusted that, though opposed to turning to other parishes, I then began to reflect that it was well for me to seek a priest elsewhere so as not to go limping along in that way in the reception of the Sacraments. And I said so openly as well, for I think nothing should make us silence the truth. I take after St. Catherine of Siena greatly in this regard. I think I would have the courage to say, “That should not be done” even to the Supreme Pontiff. I think all of us can err and that it should thus be dear to all of us to be informed of our error. At times a child, an ignorant person, or an inferior can see rightly where we see wrongly and, by his straightforward words, lead us back onto the right path. But my speaking was of no use. I was always left with almost no attention and received it after as many as a hundred days had passed and following numberless calls. Amen!

I was further prompted to seek an active priest by Mother’s illness occurring in the spring of 1940. A kind of intestinal poisoning due to her caprices in nutrition and treating herself by her own methods. But there was a succession of improvements and relapses due to further nutritional whims of my obstinate mother. And so I had scares, worries, torments, grumbling—oh, so much of this! Marta and I have gone through a real hell.

My conscience is at peace because I know I have looked after my mother in the best possible way. I have nothing to regret as regards both medicine and food. As usual, she was not grateful to me for it. Indeed, to hear her, the two of us neglected her. It’s a good thing there are various witnesses who know how we acted. The doctor, seeing me often in tears out of fear I would lose her, would say to me, “Why, thank God! I’ll wager you’ll get better if your mother dies. Think of yourself!” But she was my mother. She is my mother. She has done nothing to be loved. She has, rather, done everything to kill the most resistant love. But I love her still and always shall. No one but me loves her. Before, Father and I did. Now I alone.

Not to have any longer even that minimum of calm I had before, to nourish myself even less and worse than usual to stick within the expense money Mother gave me, while, however, maintaining for her choice meats, full-bodied wines, fruit out of season, and refreshing beverages, to have to remain at all times with my ears cocked to hear whether she moved at night, being reproached even more than usual, and hearing Marta always scolded, and the anxiety of seeing her ill were as many blows to my already damaged organism.

I have gotten worse since then as I had not before in nearly ten years. To the already existing illnesses others were added: neuritis with a spasmodic aching, so intense that I begged the doctor to let me die. I went so far as to brush very strong tincture of iodine over my whole face to numb the trigeminal nerve, which gave me maddening pains. Pains that I could not alleviate with any analgesic because of the state of my heart. To the neuritis there was joined a pachymeningitis which left me benumbed as if I had been mummified. At the least movement I was forced to howl. My kidneys broke down, and the chronic cystitis was complicated by a pyelocystitis culminating in renal and vesical hemorrhages. The peritonitis increased, producing the phenomena of intestinal occlusion. The pleurisy increased on the right side, where painful adhesions formed. In the very cold December of 1940, while Marta was away for a few days and I was left without hot-water bottles and heating, a pulmonary congestion came upon me which has gotten worse and worse in the numberless relapses I have had since then. What a fine list! But it’s my—line of work....

In the spring of 1940, when Mother was sicker, I wrote to different relatives to notify them of her serious condition. They all replied with good, encouraging words. And, among other replies, a male cousin responded to whom I had not written directly, for I had preferred to write the female cousins. We women understand each other better.

He is a sorely tried man. He lost his mother when he was seven and his wife at age forty and had four children, one of whom died in 1935 when he was twenty-one. When I was in Reggio Calabria, I was able to get to know this man with a good and exuberant heart quite well, and I regretted the fact that his goodness was entirely human—without any trace of faith. But I excused him, thinking that it was indeed a great deal that, having grown up surrounded by men, without a mother to teach him to pray, without anyone to speak to him of God, in an environment clearly unpropitious for spiritual elevations, as is a hotel, he had remained humanly good.

I was, then, greatly amazed at his letter, thoroughly pervaded by faith. Observe that—having come to blows with Mother at that time, when we were his guests, he had no longer written. Only at my father’s death had he written to Mother. I don’t know what he said. I know that she was quite astonished by Giuseppe’s religiosity, and her reply was so out of key that he never wrote back.

With his appealing frankness, he also recently declared to me that he was forced to write me against his will, “spurred on by an unknown force,” as he avowed, for on his own he would never have done so, believing that in time I had become “similar to my mother and, therefore, with a cold, selfish heart,” to quote his correspondence further. I replied thanking him. And it is clear that my reply did not disappoint him, for he wrote me back. And he did so on three occasions from April to June.

Then there was silence until April 1941, when I received a long letter from him in which, still describing himself as spurred to write me by a superhuman force, he confessed to me that he was a convinced, professing spiritualist.

I assure you that I jumped in my bed. Spiritism, spiritualism, and so forth are just so many “bugaboos” to me. I believe not even bombs will move me. But if I should hear or see anything spiritistic, I leap like a grasshopper and land in the middle of the street just as I am.

At first, after having made fun of it with Marta, I decided not even to answer him. Then I reflected that this was not charitable. His letter, after all, was pervaded by a respect for God and a submission to his Will which are hard to find among practicing Catholics. Among other things—responding on behalf of his sister, to whom I had written in regard to Padre Pio for a nephew fighting in East Africa—he spoke to me so well about this friar and with such profound respect for the Church that I did not feel like condemning him.

To me everything is preferable to not having faith. Between the idolater and the atheist, I always prefer the idolater. I am afraid of the atheist. I think that anyone seeking God, with a sincere search for Truth and Light, with purity of intention, with a real longing for this God whose existence he senses, but without knowing where or how He exists—when a creature seeks all of this humbly and without ulterior motives, he is, I think, already on the path of God. It may be a parallel route, perhaps even a winding road, but still close to the royal way leading to God. And this creature should thus not be neglected, but helped in his search by one more advanced than he in the knowledge of Truth.

So, shivering a bit, I replied to him. Refuting certain ideas of his, though. And I think I was rather curt in my refutation.

He did not take offense. On the contrary, since then he has continued to write. We have even fiercely insulted one another on occasion—but afterwards we have always made peace, acknowledging that we were fighting on opposite sides, but looking at a single point: God.

I have already commented on this orally and shall dwell upon it no further. I’ll simply state that even this was not useless. I believe that in the long and patient correspondence I sowed good seeds among the many tangled steles growing in that heart seeking God now that life is sloping towards its close.

At times, with my fear over certain things, I was on the verge of breaking off everything, especially when some of his excessively bold enunciations, quite far from my way of thinking and believing, offended and disconcerted me. But I felt that I must not do so. The good Jesus did not want me to. I was even afraid that this might somehow give the devil a chance to come closer. But here, too, a light and a voice from on high gave me a reply and clarity. It was always the words of the Verbum which responded to my perplexities: “I have given you power to tread down serpents and scorpions and the whole strength of the enemy; nothing shall ever hurt you.” And the voice of Jesus, in the depths of my heart, repeated, “Do not fear. Nothing bad can happen to you. Do not neglect this creature. He, too, is mine and believes in Me and has been bought back by my Blood and by his faith. Do not judge him and just be a bearer of my Word to him.” Padre Pio’s blessing also gave me courage to continue—and, finally, the fact that my cousin was nearly 1000 kilometers away did as well! Brave, wasn’t I?

In June 1941 Giuseppe send a “message,” as he calls them, entirely for me. Really quite flattering for yours truly in my humility. But it made me fly into a rage. And I replied with an authentic indictment of spiritism and spiritists. I still have the rough draft. But I later repented. I had at the same time received different letters from people who know me well or whom I firmly believe to be enlightened by God which, in nearly the same words, said identical things about the “message” sent by my cousin.

Out of a spirit of justice, I then told myself, “If you accept these as replies and encouragement which the good Lord sends you by way of these persons you esteem, why do you refuse to accept this one? How can you arrogate to yourself the right to judge them to be possessed or at least mad? The Spirit of God can blow where and as He wills, and if He finds it fitting to have you receive words of comfort by way of persons unknown to you at this moment in which you are so submerged in a sea of prostration and waver about being on the proper path and wonder whether your mind is in the right place or you are, instead, a lunatic, why do you wish to disdain these words? It would not be the first case, in twenty centuries of Christianity, in which creatures whose heads were later adorned with the halo of the saints were judged to be heretics. They, too, suffered scoffing, the rigors of the law, and execution because they said they had heard “voices” instructing them. So.... Judge not. Remain humble in praise and prudent in action. Ask the Lord to enlighten you as to what you should do.”

I prayed a great deal in those days and requested prayer, waiting for a sign. And I received it in the boundless peace which came to me. I then understood that God did not find my correspondence with the cousin to be dangerous. And I continued it.

I do not debate or muse about whether the one speaking is Tom or Dick. I only listened to the repercussion those words might have on my self. If I had felt any disturbance whatsoever, I would have broken off everything. But I did not notice a build-up of pride, a disturbance to faith, or a trembling of unexplainable origin.

As for the praise received, I remained as before; indeed, I sank more than ever into humility and gratitude, saying, “If these words are permitted by You, I have even greater reason to act with the utmost perfection possible so as to deserve to remain always in your arms, all the more reason to be grateful to You and love You more so as to return your love.” And I assure you that from that moment on I was even more attentive so as not to fail the Lord ever.

You once told me that I take all things and see them always from a special standpoint different from the one whereby someone else wrote or did them. And I recall that I replied that it was really that way, as if the light departing from my soul, illuminated by his Sun, by Jesus, and projecting itself over everything, gave everything a supernatural, good light.

But, besides, this falls within the promises of God. Does He not say that those who act in his Name are rendered immune to the snares of serpents, wild beasts, and demons? I believe that a soul, when truly united to Christ, can pass through hell without showing traces of any harm. Not by its own merit, but through the power of the One who inhabits it.

Even this event in my life, then, which might have introduced scruples or distress into other hearts, left me indifferent. That is, since it is a diabolical art, it was twisted around into an instrument for good, for it spurred me on to an ever greater good.

God has always loved me to such a degree that from everything causing trouble around me during my life He has drawn a lesson of perfection, just as all that for any reason has come into contact with my spirit has been cleansed of the evil it may have had in itself and has given me only a stimulus towards good. “But in everlasting love I have taken pity on you.” My Father says these words to me every minute, and I feel their full truth.

Having lived in such a way that I could have grown up without faith and with little morality, He, the Eternal, instructed me and held me up throughout my life. When I think of those words: “You will be suckled, carried on her hip, and fondled in her lap; as a mother comforts a child, so I shall comfort you,” I always say, “Yes, Lord, You have always acted just like that with me. You were and are to me father, mother, husband, brother, friend, master, and priest. You are everything to me, O Lord, and I have had no one but You to form me in your image and likeness. You took my mud, born formless and corrupt from my mother’s womb, just as the mire emerges from the bog covering it, and shaped me according to your thought. Poor mud, I sometimes wanted to model myself in my own way; obscure dust, I wished at times to be guided.... And You, You alone, have guided me, as You alone have persisted in modeling me in spite of my deviations.”

God has availed himself of all I have known and seen and suffered to make me proceed on his way: mourning and sorrow, to make me seek his Heart; education, to make me worship Him; nature, to make me praise Him; my shortcomings, to make me bless Him for his mercy; knowledge of the shortcomings of others, to make me feel gratitude for his Goodness; and other religions or theories, to increase my love, faith, and devotion to Him.

Yes, the other religions have also served to augment my identification with God and spiritual improvement. Since I became familiar with the doctrines of other religions, I have always thought that in all of them there is a fragment of the true one, ours. One could almost say, to provide a human example, that fragments bearing with them bits of truth have become detached from the only true religion, the one given by God to Moses and later confirmed by the Word of God. Like an immense mirror, high up in the sky so that all born of man would see it, was the Religion of the Eternal. Lucifer and his cohort, with mad rage, directed their infernal slings against that wonderful mirror and struck its edges. Not the center, where the splendor of God shines forth, but the edges, where the throngs of demons could still look, though with difficulty. And the slivers fell upon the earth, forming the seed of other religions, which, amidst their errors, always conserve as well a more or less large fragment of Truth.

When, on studying the religions and their moral codes, I note this reflection of divine light shining among the twisted superimpositions of error, I feel increasingly spurred to follow the dictates of my own precisely. Accordingly, Brahminism, which greatly venerates continence, purity, prompts me to be purer than ever; Mohammedanism, with its praise of God, whom it sees flashing from east to west, in the stars and in the grass, wherever his power is witnessed to by created things, prompts me to praise and bless our Creator; Shintoism, which proclaims the presence of God wherever there is a living being: “Where a mosquito is heard, I am,” leads me to live as if God were visibly present at my side; Buddhism, with its doctrine of benevolence, wherein our Gospel resounds so profoundly, in the places where it preaches love for one’s neighbor, maintaining honest thoughts in one’s heart, if we wish to perform works which will give us eternal life, and so forth, leads me to be more and more benevolent to all my fellows: from my parents to the last inhabitant of the globe.

I ask myself, “If the believers in religions that are not true lead pure and holy lives just because their prophet, their Envoy from God, has told them to live that way, what should we be doing, who possess the true religion and have received the Son of God Himself as an Envoy from God? If creatures still dominated by a law of error are able to elevate themselves so high towards Goodness, what should you, my soul, who possess Good Himself, be doing?”

I have always had respect for images, just to mention one aspect. But when I learned that in Japan the photograph of their Emperor, the descendant of the gods, is never published in the newspapers just because a newspaper, once read, can be used for—not very noble purposes, and the king’s image may thus be soiled and offended, I became extremely cautious so as never to use papers where the names of Jesus, Mary, and the saints are written.

I believe that when a soul is truly saturated with God, as a cloth may be impregnated with a liquid, nothing can disturb or seduce it any longer. What’s important is for a soul to let itself be penetrated by God, who asks only to inform his creatures with Himself.

Yesterday morning you told me you did not think I had committed any serious fault against purity. It may well be as you say. But I have arrived at a sensitivity furnished by love, not fear, which alerts me to even an imperceptible nuance of imperfection. They are not scruples. No, the scruple is different. The scruple determines the existence of sin even when there is none. I understand whether a given thing is or is not a sin, but if just the beginning of something that is not good takes place in me, even in thought, my conscience immediately says, “Be careful! That grieves Jesus.” And I suffer to the point of tears over just having had that little flaw, over just having wished for it. Not for my sake. For Jesus’.

I love Him, Father, but with a love which is more intense than that of many. With a love involving flesh and blood, in addition to my soul. To me, God is not an abstract, distant, unreachable idea, as He is for the vast majority of Catholics. To me, He is a reality. And not just an ideal reality. He is here, alive, true. I feel Him, speak to Him, bear Him in me.

As a daughter I never wanted to cause my parents pain because I loved them to the maximum degree. As a wife I would never have caused my husband pain because I would have loved him with my whole self. And should I act differently with my God, who is my supreme love? Who is the one that has never harmed me?

Oh, it is not fear of punishment which makes me weep, thinking of my shortcomings! It is the thought of having grieved Him! My having grieved the one I would like to make smile at the cost of a thousand torments? I would like to dry all of Christ’s tears. And why, then, cause new ones to rise to those loving pupils?

But have you understood with what complete, ardent, and consuming love I love my God? I don’t doubt that there must be someone who loves Him more than I. But I love Him with the maximum I can attain. I could do no more, not even by dying with exertion, with my heart broken and my veins opened by love’s overflowing. The Magdalene poured tears and lavender on the Redeemer’s feet. I pour myself. I pour myself entirely out of the container of my flesh for the sake of love....

This morning Love came—and I am burning....

What a mystery of eternal Goodness this is! Jesus, our Lord, always comes with his immense, infinite comforts even to the soul most immolated by the Father and thus deprived of the beatitude which flows back into others through the smiles of the Eternal. He well knows that under the sternness of Justice, we poor victims would die in desolation. He knows because He has experienced it. And He comes, then, to resuscitate our spent strength; He comes with his treasures of love; He comes with the flames and lights of Love Himself, and our eyes then open with an eagle-sightedness which not even tears are able to bedim and see that Father, the vision of whom was taken from us to increase the trial.

Even if it is only an instant, it suffices to bring joy to the whole day and beyond. And it is well that it is granted just for a few moments. We could not otherwise bear it, weak as we are. Beatitude would destroy us. Bestowed this way, however, for brief instants, it augments our essence, gives us a new infusion of peace—for at the moment in which our spirits are joined to God peace flows back into us completely from the eternal lakes—illuminates us with the splendors of God and makes us capable of seeing, opens our minds and makes us capable of understanding, dilates our hearts and makes us capable of loving, gives us strength and makes us capable of withstanding, and, in short, gives us God Himself.

And now let us get back—on the rails after having digressed in pursuing the voices of love.

So I continued corresponding with my cousin, placing this difficulty as well alongside many others in the “apostolate” department.

Illness has secluded me at home, it is true. But it has not stood in the way of my little apostolate. As long as one wishes, one can carry out apostolic work out of love for God.

Patience in illness is itself an apostolate. To see one who suffers and smiles, one who is without a moment of well-being and does not fret, one who is able to carry out a will of God that, seen with human eyes, is very hard makes the incredulous and also those who are simply lukewarm reflect and meditate on the eternal truths denied by too many or held in little account. How can we deny the existence of God and the soul in the face of certain prodigies of patience over the course of long years that, never losing a bit of their severely intense pain, are able to keep themselves cheerful and trusting? Just looking at us chronically ill—not only resigned to pain, but joyful about living in pain—is a lesson for the revellers of the earth, for the selfish, for malcontents, for rebels....

Then there is the apostolate of the word. The curious, coming only to poke and pry, whom we can so informally work in the name of the Lord. Friends with crosses as tiny as daisy pistils who come to us to cry—and whom we, the greatly crucified, console by showing them that the cross is a gift and not a punishment. Those ill like us, but less abandoned to God than we, who thus suffer morally more than we do and to whom we can provide so much help by speaking or writing.

A victim soul must be the Cyrenean of everyone: of our good Jesus, by continuing to carry the cross He was the first to bear; of our neighbor, by carrying the crosses, though small, which seem so big to him.... It is our shoulders as victim souls which must bend under the dear weight of the cross. In us there is precise knowledge of love, and this is the nourishment and motive force enabling us to carry that weight without decline and weariness.

Let it come, then! May the crosses of our brothers and sisters always find us prepared to lift them up again, if they excessively dishearten those to whom they are sent. Prayer and sacrifice for the weakest and humbly asking God to suffer for whoever is unable to suffer—this must be done by us, who in our worn-out existence as the chronically ill are among the athletes of the spirit, we who have understood the “reason” for pain, tasted its divine flavor, and penetrated its celestial beauty.

“Let us rise to the tree of the Most Holy Cross,” writes St. Catherine. “There we shall see and touch God; there we shall find the fire of his inestimable charity, which made Him run to the ignominy of the cross, raised on high, hungry and thirsty with thirst for the honor of the Father and our salvation. If we wish, we may well fulfill in ourselves the words as stated by the sweet mouth of truth: ‘If I am raised up, I shall draw everything to myself.’ And if you should say to me, ‘I cannot rise up because it is very high,’ I tell you that He has made his body into stairs. Raise your affection to the feet of the Son of God and rise up to the heart which is open and consumed for us, and you will arrive at the peace of his mouth and become tasters and eaters of souls.”

That is the secret to reach identification with Christ and his work. The Cross. This is what gives us God and gives us souls.

In the face of certain requests for suffering I waver an instant—it is the human part of me which trembles.... But it seems to me that Jesus, dressed as a beggar, is reaching out his hand to me.... And then I am no longer able to refuse Him anything and say, “This suffering, too, O Lord, provided another soul loves You!”

Oh, for the soul closely united to God there are no confines or limitations at all. Lost in its Lord like a drop in the ocean or a star in the firmament, it has before it the unlimited, free space in which God moves. It can contain and help all—heaven and earth, the living and the dead.

Union with God, when it is complete to the point of death on the cross, since it is similar to the God-Man, truly gives us the image and likeness of God, one side of whose prism is universality and the infinite. There are no more limits for the soul that has given itself to God as a straw gives itself to the wave bearing it off. It is God Himself who leads us to act and pray, according to his will, and we are nothing but a will assorbed by his Will.

Sweet slavery of love which annuls our human personality and elevates us into the very personality of Christ, who assorbs us—who can describe you in all your splendor, in all your sublimity, in all your blessedness? I understand the gesture of the Seraphim, who collect themselves in adoration of God in the great wings with which they veil their radiant faces as well. My soul, too, before the mystery of God, who bends over his poor slave in all the magnificence of his treasures, collects itself in adoration, locking in itself the blazes and splendors emanating from God, and worships in silence. Before the poem of a God who loves us there is nothing but a worshipful silence which is worthy to remain....

It may seem base to call myself a “slave” since God has made us his children and free. But I think there is nothing more beautiful than this renouncing, out of love, the human freedom of which the sons of Adam are so jealous and saying to the Creator, “You that have made me, in addition to being Father and Creator, be my Master and King, since I am a nonentity unable to stand alone.” If man by his own will can become a slave of the devil, why should he not be able to declare himself a slave of God voluntarily? I, who know my own excessively weak weakness, which negates my standing with no fear of any subjection, entrust myself to the strongest: God, our Lord. And in this way I take cover from the other, the eternal enemy.

Oh, I do not repent of having donated myself! I would not repent even if the Lord had not given me all the graces He has given me for myself and all those I commend to Him. For myself, limitless graces of light, protection, and spiritual progress. For others, graces contingent upon moments and individual needs. But all suitable for causing a grateful thought to be elevated to Him who gives them to us.

I would have a great deal more to say about this last period of my life. But it seems to me that I would be lifting the veils of a sacrarium or engaging in self-praise. And so I shall remain silent. And I’ll conclude.

In writing to you, a Priest, I could also omit what I want to say, more appropriate to be conveyed to little souls who still do not know how good, patient, and loving the Lord is. But I shall say them just the same for the only little soul I have kept close to me during this labor of mine desired by you, Father, whom I raised to the status of official auditor so that she would call me to order if in any respect I altered the facts without wishing to. I am so unconvinced about being “someone” that I am always afraid I shall provide a portrait of myself much better than the original.... Furthermore, I think these final words may do good to this soul, whom God has placed at my side, certainly for some good purpose known to Him alone. I shall speak, then.

Nothing should keep us distant from God with the thought that we are too base to draw near Him, just as nothing should make us hold back from carrying out an inspiration out of fear that we are not capable of working on the path of Goodness. These are devilish covers able to paralyze our good impulses and keep us separated from the Source of every perfection.

I have never stopped to consider those “ifs” and “buts” clipping wings and putting to flight souls that have already turned to God. I well know that I am a mass of defects. But I also know that God knows it better that I do. I know that God, in his justice, does not claim more than we can give Him.

I know that the only thing that offends God is our wanting to do wrong deliberately, in spite of all the calls and aids He gives us to do good. I know that even imperfections are a painful necessity which keeps us humble and convinced that we are nothing but vice if left to ourselves and living only in the flesh, of which men are so proud. I know that imperfections are gentle proof of the breadth and depth of the heart of God, who comprehends and forgives them....

I am content when I act well because this pleases my Father. But I do not become disheartened if I fall once more into new imperfections. These increase my humility and my gratitude when I see how merciful Jesus is to whoever trusts Him. He is the “Savior,” and I present my faults to Him as I commit them so that He will annul them and continue his work as Savior with me.

Nothing would make me go far from God, not even the most serious faults which I would not dare confess to human justice. Since I comprehended exactly how great the infinite goodness of the Lord is, I have not trembled at anything, even going so far as to think that He loves me so much precisely because I am so imperfect, in spite of my desire to be perfect. And the more I realize that I have been just that—imperfect—the more I go to Him, crying, “Jesus, have mercy on me!”

If souls knew with what love Jesus loves them, not a single soul would be lost, for at every one of their errors they would run to take refuge in his merciful Heart. The mistake is that people are instead not confident, but afraid of God and his punishment.

Love vitiated in both form and substance makes souls look at God as they would look at an earthly sovereign marked by autocratic, intransigent despotism, or they do not even look at Him: they hide, flee Him. And they are thus lost. There is still too much Jansenism among Catholics. Why remain far from Jesus out of excessive respect? Respect is a good thing, but it is always injurious to love when pushed to an overly lofty degree. The loving abandon of children to the Father is much better than the attitude of subjects towards the untouchable monarch on his throne.

No, let us go to Jesus. Let us go always. If we feel innocent of the shadows of sin, let us go, for He surrounds Himself with the innocent. If sinners, let us go to Him, for He left the Heavens precisely to redeem sinners. Let us go to Him to have a curb on our weaknesses and help in our betterment. The thought “Tomorrow I shall receive Jesus” is the best bit applied to our passions, always ready to rear up like wild horses. And the idea “Today I have pleased Jesus” is the best viaticum for our day, the balm for every affliction, the nepenthe for repose truly watched over by the angels. The sweet dreams of a creature abandoning himself to sleep with his soul at peace with himself and with God, sweet dreams which refresh the flesh and give wings to the soul to rise up, even in sleep, to God!

Our lives must not be woven of hypocrisy which sins and then confesses to sin again, but of love spurring us to good and checking evil so as to be worthy of Christ’s kiss. If we were good, let us go to Jesus with our smiles; if we were bad, let us go to Him with our tears of repentance. He wants to dry them. If relieved by Him, our disheartenment will become strength; if borne by us, it will become only weakness which will clip our wings. Confidence in God makes up for all our human failings. Failings not only in the sense of sin, but also in mental and spiritual gifts, which are always imperfect in us. When we place our trust in God, everything in us improves.

I have realized for years that it is God who is acting in me. For years—that is, since I effaced my human self and let myself be formed anew by God, forgetting myself and having Him as my only aim. Even my very intense perceptions of what is stirring in another heart are not at all my own. I would be deafer than an adder to all the waves of sounds issuing from my sister souls. But a force far above my own makes me capable of intuiting the needs of creatures. At times I am left agape on discovering that in speaking this way, virtually at the suggestion of a third party, I place my finger squarely on the place that hurts. And I admit to myself, “It’s really God who acts through us when we have abandoned ourselves to Him completely.”

I likewise say to my little sister souls whose greatest fault is to measure God by a human standard that if we must confide boundlessly in Him, we must not, however, expect that He will be the one to do everything. That would be foolishness. It is we who must aid God’s work by applying all our good will, and tenacious good will, to respond to the inspirations and the action of God. If we offer resistance, if we want to act exclusively on our own, or do nothing at all, nothing good is achieved.

We must help God with our good will; God, in turn, helps us, and from this exchange of help there issues forth spiritual improvement. Wanting to act on our own would be pride, and pride destroys. Our work would thus leave no fruit, but a distressing void, if not a tree with poisoned fruit.

We must not lose heart if we take a tumble. Such loss of heart would likewise be pride. We are eternal children in the school of the spirit, and children often fall. But they do not hurt themselves too badly. Adults do, for their bones are hard and they are not supple. And, moreover, if, unfortunately, we have also hurt ourselves quite badly, it is an additional reason to take refuge in the bosom of God, who will heal all our aches. If we lock them in ourselves out of pride and foolish, useless shame, the end result is that we cause tetanus or gangrene to emerge from an initial graze.

I would like to say to all the little souls, “Trust in God, brothers and sisters, for He is the only one who feels loathing for no one. Man withdraws, criticizing and disdaining those at fault. God clasps them to his heart. Christians do not proceed in perfection because they still do not know who God is, what his gifts and tastes are. They judge God by their own standard: petty, narrow-minded, vengeful, intransigent, tenacious in his standoffishness. But God is love! God wants us at any cost; God died to save us, whose sins He saw before we ever existed. The sweetest words of the Verbum were addressed to the adulteress, the woman sinner, the Samaritan woman, the thief, and the publican. Jesus, who branded as infamous the hypocritical goodness of the Pharisees, managed to find words of boundless mercy for the blameworthy who acknowledged themselves to be such, and as He cleansed the lepers of their repugnant disease, so He rendered immaculate the sullied souls that came to Him to be washed clean.”

These Gospel truths should always be reflected upon, too often omitted and forgotten by many, truths from which there issues the whole doctrine of mercy and confidence Jesus came to proclaim to take us to heaven. “I want mercy, not sacrifice,” says God. We should always remind ourselves of this so as to confide in Him and be merciful to our brothers and sisters.

And here what I said elsewhere reappears. If, instead of stuffing their heads with large and small tomes, Christians made the Gospel the daily bread of their spirits, they would not find it difficult to proceed on the royal road of love and abandonment to God. If they were really nourished with the word of the Verbum, the Word of words, there would no longer be acts of tormenting selfishness, withering harshness, and benumbing distrust. But people would only walk in the Light, live in Charity, and repose in Peace, and we would be ennobled by the sacrifice which is not a burden when it is loved....

How much holy boldness for everyday life and the exceptional hours of our existence there would be if we were permeated with the Gospel spirit! How everything would take on a different voice, light, and appearance!

How, how can someone hearing the words of Christ resounding in himself at every moment distrust, despair? How, how can one who knows that pain was borne by the Son of God out of love for us feel loathing for pain? How, how can God be feared by one who knows that God so loved us that He gave his own Son for our redemption and that to this Son, who loved us to the point of dying on the cross, He has entrusted all power to judge? How, how can we still waver when, with our souls melting with tenderness, we read the words of Jesus’ final prayer after the Supper?

Father, I have finished.

A French writer says that every life that breaks away from the routine of the mass “is a dream of youth coming true at a mature age.” I can state that in my maturity I have in fact fulfilled the mystical dream of my early youth.

This fulfillment was long and painful; I went through slowdowns and eclipses. But the plants which grow most healthily in height and age are those that, before expanding triumphantly towards the sky, labor deeply in the strata of the earth. Only when the roots have slowly and profoundly anchored themselves many meters deep in the soil—only then does the plant’s opulence become manifest. The same holds true for the work of souls. The more the internal labor has taken place not on the surface, but in depth, the more lasting and fruitful it will be. I can state that during the external standstills in my flourishing in God I was truly transfixed by internal labor. This reality of my mature age is, therefore, rooted in stone and is not afraid of being uprooted by the slightest wind.

Those reading what I have written may make different, more or less benign, judgments. But I am not concerned about human judgments—as regards style, what I may appear to be, or any other motive. In this account I am present, with my whole self: there is my flesh, with its human passions; my soul, with its spiritual hopes; and my spirit, with its worshiping love. I have not sought to write a literary work. I have set down my thoughts just as they have come to me, unraveling them from my very heart, with no concern for polishing them and rendering them literarily perfect.

These are words of my heart, not my brain.

If a profane critic were to poke into it, he might note that I am more vehement at the beginning than at the end and infer that I grew weary of keeping things on a lofty note.... He would be making a serious mistake. What seems weariness is instead a higher elevation of the spirit in God. Once all human memories had been surmounted and we had entered upon the wide sea where two alone live, the soul and God, a superhuman peace and a heavenly majesty invaded my heart and gave a new tone to my song.

The nightingale has three songs in its song-filled throat: the first, harmonious, but impatient, when he is in search of a mate and goes looking for her in the depths of the wood; the second, more amorous and louder, when, having found her, he speaks to her of love; the third, which is the perfect one, with a solemn, peaceful, I would almost say “ecclesiastical” melody, when, standing near the nest where his mate is intent on their offspring, he watches over his dreams come true and blesses the life which has granted them to him.

My soul acts like the nightingale. After having sung the troubles of the early times and the ardors of the second ones, it solemnly rises, filled with a celestial peace, giving God every praise and blessing. Every human reflex has fallen, and words and thought soar to the divine. And the divine knows no exaltation, nervousness, or agitation. It is peace. A peace which nothing can disturb. And my soul is immersed in it.

I have reached this shore after so much pain. But if pain was the oar and sail to make me arrive at You sooner, O God, who are Peace, Mercy, and Love, blessed be Pain once again. If through pain I, a “nobody,” became “someone” in your eyes, O God, may You be blessed once more for the Pain which You have given me as your most beautiful gift.

My soul praises you, O Lord, and exults in You, that have wanted to look benignly at my “nothingness” and make it an instrument for good with respect to other nothings like myself. Blessed be You, Lord, my Savior, who have freed me from all my enemies and covered me with your mercy, fed me with your love, held me up, forgiven, instructed, and consoled me; You have become my Friend and Kinsman, my Master and my Physician.

You have allowed me to know You as You really are, the only true God, and to know the One You have sent, Jesus Christ, and I would like to say “Thank You” for this grace with every beat of my heart and throughout eternity, and even that would not suffice, for to know You and to love You, O God, is such a good that nothing can pay for it.

You have permitted me to speak of You to so many creatures You have entrusted to me, and I thank You for this, too, my God. For these creatures, for all those I have loved, known, and guided, and for those who have ties of blood with me or only human brotherhood, I have prayed and suffered, O God, that all might be where, hoping in your mercy, I believe I shall enter: into your eternal Kingdom. Even now, as I die, I pray for them and once more offer You my life. Preserve them, Father, from the danger of losing You, that are the only true Good. I pray for them, Lord, and for all the poor souls who no longer know where the sure Way, the true Life, and the undying Light is to be found.

Oh, Lord, I would like to have thousands and thousands of lives so as to offer You all of them, holy Father, like a sheaf of holocausts for the good of the world!

You see, O Father, that this is the cry that rises from the depths of my spirit and ascends like incense or an arrow to the foot of your Throne, O my God. Do not look, O Lord, at the lowliness of your servant, but see her longing to love You, her generosity in suffering to be a seed of goodness in hearts rendered barren. Multiply my heartbeats and to every beat add a pain and, with the pain, the strength to suffer. I ask You this, Holy Father, who alone can grant it to us poor creatures.

And for my secret sacrifice of every minute, O Father, grant me multitudes of souls to offer to You. Make them and me walk in the light, in your light, and when our time is finished, open to us, O God, the doors to your Kingdom and the doors to your Heart so that we may eternally rejoice in You, supreme, eternal, triune God.