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Zechariah 7:4-14 (at 2 a.m.)
Jesus says:
“I did not come to deny the Law and the Prophets, but to confirm it and perfect it by modifying those inexact points and superstructures which man had introduced into it, partly out of his own imperfection and partly because of a humanity superior to the soul.
“Man is inclined to understand poorly. He is not perfect in his mystical senses or in his natural senses. Only by living in Me does he perfect the former, for it is then I who live in him. Man is also given to complicating things because, in his tenacious and indestructible pride, he is always attracted by the seduction of retouching even God’s work.
“You are gods as children of God. But God is always the Greater One, the Perfect One, He who generates Himself from Himself. You are the lesser ones, those who become perfect if you live in God and who are begotten by God. Now, then, why do you always want to modify with your complications what God, in his Simplicity, which is one of the signs of his nature, gives as perfect in its simplicity?
“When I became the Teacher, I found that the Law, so clear and straightforward in its origin, had turned into a tangle of impositions and a weight of formulas which made it impracticable for the faithful. Of course, the weights and formulas were for the humble. The powerful had created those formulas and those weights, but they did not carry them.
“The priesthood, the scribes, and the Pharisees caused Me disgust and disdain. And if I saw among them some loyal souls, whom I divinely loved, I also saw the throng; of the others, more numerous than a herd of wild billy goats that, reeking, corrupted the House of the Lord with their markets and their acts of falsity, impiety, and harshness and made the Lord something terrible for the poor of the Earth.
“Did those stinking tombs fast and sacrifice for Me? No. To receive human gain and praise therefrom. It was comfortable to be Doctors of the Law and comfortable to be part of the chosen people in Israel. But there was no truth in desire and in offering to attract the Messiah and his blessings.
“And the Messiah went elsewhere, into the scorned region, where, however, an All-holy Woman and a Just Man deserved to receive and protect the Seed of God.
“And now, O children, do you fast and pray for God’s sake? No. Your natural privations could hold the place of fasting, but you don’t bear them with resignation, but make them the source of hatred and continual, foolish, sacrilegious imprecation. Your prayers are filthy and deformed by your inner feelings and are seen by God to be unclean things placed on the stone of the altar. God burns them up, dashing their smoke to the ground.
“Once more I come to repeat the manner you must use to present sacrifices and prayers to God whose pure fragrance will rise from the altar to God’s throne as the holocaust of a perfect victim.
“ ‘Judge according to truth, be merciful and compassionate towards your brothers and sisters, whoever they are; do not oppress widows and orphans, poor foreigners, the humble and weak of the Earth; do not harbor in your hearts thoughts of acrimony, vengeance, and evil works towards your neighbors. In short, love, for love is the compendium of the Law, and whoever loves does all, and love is the incense which perfumes the hosts of propitiation and the lustral water which cleanses the stones of your altar.’
“Do not make your hearts and your hearing harder than they already are. Do not close your hearts and hearing to the Voice of God, which speaks through his ‘spokesmen,’ as the people of old once hardened them to the Voice of God speaking through the Prophets.
“If you do not listen to Me, out of justice I will not listen to you, and you shall cease to have Me as God, Father, and Savior. You will then know the full and inexorable wrath of the Lord, and, having refused the Bread of God’s Word, you shall bite the dust and, like beasts without food, tear each other to pieces, dying in horror to experience an even more tremendous eternal horror.”
Later, at 8 a.m. on the same day, December 5,270 Jesus says:
“Be patient, soul of mine. I cannot remain without speaking to you, for to speak to those who love Me constitutes my delight, my desire, and the need of my Heart, which loves you.
“Have you ever observed how a husband and wife who really love each other act? The wife, while at home, keeps looking at the clock and running to the window - to see the passing of time and to see if her husband is coming back from his office. The husband, as soon as he can, gets away to say a word of love to his wife. He has just left her and remembers that he could have told her this, too, to make her happy, and as soon as possible he dashes off to tell her. It is love that spurs them on.
“I, too, as soon as I remain silent, feel that I have something else to tell you. I would like to speak to you day and night, have you entirely for Myself; I would like you to be able to devote yourself entirely to Me. If only you knew how I love you!
“Now listen. Years ago, while reading the writings of my servant Contardo Ferrini, you wondered several times - for in the mystical life you were illiterate - what ‘conversation in the Heavens’ consisted of.
“It is this: when you listen to Me and I speak to you, when instead of the superficial murmuring of prayers, I carry you off into the fire of revelations and occupy you with Myself, when you say to Me, ‘Come, Jesus, to speak to your servant,’ when you taste the savor of my Word, which I deposit in you, as in a coffer, a hydria, so that you may give it to the poor and thirsty of the Earth, we then carry on a conversation in the Heavens.
“You were too bound to formulas, like almost all the fervent Catholics. I have unbound you. I have launched your soul - outside the heap of formulaic circumscriptions, the pettiness of practices - onto the boundless spaces of the mystical sea of prayer. I have enveloped, inspired, enraptured, and deified you in the fire of prayer.
“You were a little fettered sparrow. Now you are a soaring, reigning eagle rising towards the Sun and gazing at it fixedly and fortified by it. Rise higher and higher, like the eagle in concentric flights. Up above am I, the Eternal Eagle, who await you to carry you, beyond the senses, into the knowledge of love.
“Always obey the call, with promptness and trust. Abandon yourself to the wind of love. It sustains you and does not obstruct you. It breathes to bear you to Me, from whom it comes. Lose yourself, as a drop of water, in my infinite ocean; lose yourself, as a spark of light, in my boundless shining. Enter to become part of your God and Lord, of your Spouse. I open to you all the doors to my treasures so that you may possess them.
“I love you!”
10 a.m.
Mary says:
“When speaking of the Presentation in the Temple, Luke says that ‘the father and the mother remained in amazement over the things which were being said about the Child.’
“The two spouses felt this wonder in different ways. I, to whom the Spouse Spirit had revealed the whole future, felt supernatural wonder, adoring the Will of the Lord, who was robing Himself in flesh because He wanted to redeem man and was revealing Himself to the spiritually alive. I felt wonder once more at the fact that God had chosen me, his humble handmaid, to be the Mother of the Incarnate Will. Joseph felt wonder in a human manner, too, for he did not know anything except what the Scriptures had told him and the angel had revealed. I kept silence.
“The secrets of the Most High were as if deposited in a closed ark in the Holy of Holies, and only I, the supreme Priestess, knew them, and the Glory of the Lord concealed them from the eyes of men with his unbearable splendor. They were abysses of splendor, and only the virginal eye kissed by the Spirit of God could look fixedly at them. That is why both Joseph and I felt wonder. In different ways, but equally in awe.
“The other passage in Luke should also be interpreted in this way: ‘But they did not understand what he had said to them’ (2:50).
“I understood. I knew even before, and if the Father permitted my anguish as a mother, He did not conceal from me the sublime meaning of the words of my Son. But I remained silent so as not to mortify Joseph, to whom the fullness of grace was not granted.
“I was the Mother of God, but that did not exempt me from being a respectful wife towards the Good Man who was my loving companion and vigilant brother. Our family did not experience defects, for any reason or under any aspect. We loved one another in holy fashion, concerned about one thing alone: our Son.
“Oh, Jesus, as only He could do, restored to my Joseph every comfort in the hour of death, in remembrance of all that He had received from that Just Man. Jesus is the model for children, as Joseph is for husbands. I have received much pain from the world and on account of the world. But my holy Son and my just Husband made no other tears come to my eyes except those of their pain.
“When Joseph was no longer at my side and I was the first earthly authority for my Son, I no longer acted as if I did not understand by remaining silent. No one would feel mortified any longer by seeing himself surpassed in understanding, and at Cana I spoke. ‘Do what He tells you,’ I said, for I knew that Jesus refused me nothing and that behind his standoffish words there was already the first miracle prompted by me and offered to me by my Son, like a white rose that was the first to appear on a rosebush in the spring.
“It is necessary to know how to read the Gospel, Maria. Men do not know how to read to it. I will guide your hand and explain it to you wherever my Jesus does not explain it to you. I am the Mother of both of you. I want my girl to know her most sweet Jesus, our Jesus, as few know Him.
“The more you know Him, the more you will love Him. The more you love Him, the happier you will make me.”
270 The specification of the hour and day, which we have introduced with commas, is seen to have been added later by the writer.