Mary says:
“The first tears of my Child trembled in the air eight days after his Birth. It was the first pain of my Jesus.
“He was the Lamb, and like a lamb He was marked with the sign of the Lord so that he would be consecrated to Him - the Firstborn, according to divine and human law, among all the living.
“His consecration to God the Father had already taken place in Heaven when He had offered Himself as the Expiator of sin and Redeemer of man, changing his spiritual nature into that of a Man, The Word made Flesh through a loving desire.
“The Victim already laid upon the stone of the heavenly altar, a holy Victim with no defect, He did not need other consecrations, always imperfect as compared to his sublime one. But such was the Law, and no one, except those to whom God had revealed the nature of my Son, knew that the Child of the Galilean woman was the Holy One, the Lord’s Anointed, the Eternal Pontiff, the Redeemer and King. The Law thus had to be complied with for this firstborn male, born for the Lord and offered to Him according to his Will.
“All of the sons of Abraham were circumcised, but the sign upon the firstborn was truly the ring uniting them to God and consecrating them on the altar. At our altar only those who had first undergone this mystical marriage for the Lord could be offered. The firstborn of the Jews were holy twice over because of both the circumcision and the offering at the Temple. Infinitely holy was the Innocent One who was crying on my breast after having shed the first drops of that Blood which is forgiveness.
“If the spirits of those present at the rite had been alive, they would have understood the Majesty that was hidden behind that Flesh of an infant, and they would have worshipped God, appearing among men to take men to God. But then, as now, men’s hearts were encumbered by what is practice and not religion, self-interest and not detachment from the world, egoism and not charity, pride and not humility. The face of God did not appear, then, to their eyes, shining through from the Flesh of the Innocent One.
“To know God one must make the search for God the purpose of one’s life. He then reveals Himself with no more mystery - that is, with that portion of mystery which He, in his wisdom, deems good to reserve for you so as not to burn you to ashes with his Radiance, for - know this, Maria - the vision of God as He is - and as in Heaven alone it is granted to see, for in Heaven there are spirits whom sanctity has already made capable of contemplating God - is of such power that our nature can bear it only when made into the likeness of God, just as a son can always see the power and beauty of his father without feeling dismayed and prostrated on this account.
“It is in Heaven, beyond human life, that man takes on the true likeness of God; it is then that he can look at Him fixedly and increase his radiance with the Divine Radiance, and his blessedness, contemplating the Love that loves you.
“The Blood of my Son, in dripping forth, asked for a purple cortege of additional innocent blood.
“Christ’s feet would bodily tread upon the rough terrain of Palestine, rendered even more hostile to his passing by evil human will, which joined its spite, deceit, betrayal, and crime to the brambles and stones along the way.
“The King of the Jews and King of the world did not have soft, precious carpets under his foot. Even in the hour of his short-lived human success - so human that, as the result of the exultation of a crowd over the presumed King of the Jews, the one who was to restore glory to the Jewish people, it fell like a puff of wind no longer swelling the sail and turned into a storm - even then He had only poor clothing and olive branches, the homage of the poor, beneath his even poorer mount.
“But the God-Man on earth and God in Heaven saw what men did not see; and when my Christ went back to Heaven, after the martyrdom, to receive the Father’s embrace, his pierced Feet flew swiftly over a precious carpet of living purple, which had remained as a holy wake from earth to Heaven when my Son’s first martyrs - the little innocents - had fallen like sheaves of spikes mowed down by the reaper and like meadows of budding flowers cut down to become hay, reddening the way to Heaven with their blood.
“Every redemption needs forerunners to prepare it. And not so much with words as with sacrifice. The Redemption, now begun, at its dawning received the sacrifice of innocence slain by ferocity and at its noon the sacrifice of penance killed by the lust for which penance is a reproach.
“The Blood of Golgotha fell in the midst of these two heroic kinds of blood to teach you that it is between innocence and penance that the Redeemer rests, and that the Blood of Christ calls your blood to the glory of pain to sanctify it and to sanctify the world by joining itself to the Most Holy Blood of my Son.”