June 23prev home
next
9:10 a.m.
Jesus says:
“In the other Eucharistic encounter I showed you what the Eucharist is. Today I will show you another Eucharistic truth. If the Eucharist is the heart of God,56 Mary is the ciborium of that Heart.
“Look at my Mother, the eternal living ciborium into whom the Bread coming from Heaven descended. Whoever wants to find Me - find Me, that is, with a fullness of gifts - must seek my Majesty and Power, my Divinity, in the sweetness, purity, and charity of Mary. It is She who makes her heart the ciborium for the heart of her and your God.
“The Body of the Lord became a body in Mary’s womb, and it is my Mother who with a smile offers it to you as if She were offering you her most beloved Baby, placed in the cradle of her most pure, motherly heart. It is Mary’s joy, in Heaven, to give you her Son and her Lord. With the Son She gives you her unstained heart, that heart which has loved and suffered boundlessly.
“There is a widespread opinion that my Mother suffered only morally. No. The Mother of mortals experienced every kind of pain. Not because She deserved to. She was immaculate, and the pain - inducing inheritance of Adam was not in Her. But because, as the Co-Redeemer and Mother of the whole human race, She had to consummate the Sacrifice to the very depth and in all forms. She thus suffered, as a woman, the inevitable sufferings of a woman who conceives a child; She suffered weariness in the flesh burdened with my weight; She suffered in giving birth to Me57; She suffered in the hasty flight; She suffered a lack of food; She suffered heat, cold, thirst, hunger, poverty, and weariness. Why should She not have suffered if I, the Son of God, was subject to the sufferings proper to mankind?
“To be saints does not mean to be exempt from the deprivations of matter. To be redeemers, moreover, means to be particularly subject to the deprivations of the flesh, which is sensitive to pain. Holiness and redemption are carried out and reached by all means, even by way of toothaches, for instance. It suffices for the creature to make fleshly deprivations a weapon for merit and not for sin.
“Mary and I made all the deprivations of human nature into weights for your redemption. Even now my Mother suffers when She sees you so deaf to grace and rebellious towards Me. Holiness, I repeat, does not mean exclusion from pain, but rather the imposition of pain.
“Thank Mary, then, who gives Me with the smile of a mother, for all the pain which being my Mother has brought Her. You never think of thanking Mary, in whose womb I became flesh! This Flesh which I now give you to nourish you for eternal life.
“Enough. Contemplate and adore Me, radiant in the Eucharist, on the living throne which is the breast of Mary, my most pure Mother, and yours.”
Now I am explaining. On Sunday - no, it was instead Friday the 18th - I seemed to be seeing Jesus beside my bed. I mentioned it to you. But He did nothing. On Sunday the 20th, before you58 came, while you were there, and after your coming for Communion, I seemed to see Jesus, no longer alongside the bed, but at the back of it, and He was giving me the Host. But He did not have a ciborium in his hand - he had his Heart and was giving me his Heart as a host, removing it from his chest. He possessed an infinite majesty and sweetness. He then explained to me the meaning of the vision. You have surely found it in the notebook,59 dated June 20.
This morning I am seeing Our Lady. She seems to be seated, smiling with love - but with wistfulness. Her mantle is dark, falling from her head, open over the dress, which is also dark - it looks brown. Around her waist there is a dark belt. They look like three shades of brown. On her head, under the mantle, she must be wearing a white veil, for I make out a slight thread.
In the middle of her chest there shines a very large and beautiful Host. And - this is the wonderful part of the vision - it seems to be through the Species (which here look like a very lovely quartz - it is bread, but resembles brilliant crystal) that there appears a very beautiful child. The God-Child made flesh.
Our Lady, with her arms open to keep her mantle open, looks at me and then inclines her adoring face and gaze towards the Host gleaming within her chest. In her chest, not upon it. It is as if, through mystical X-rays, I could see into Mary’s chest - or, rather, it is as if X-rays made what is inside Mary appear outside Her. As if her body were not opaque. I cannot explain.
In short, I see this, and Jesus explains it to me.60 Our Lady is not speaking. She just smiles. But her smile is as eloquent as a thousand words, and even more so. How I would like to be able to paint so as to make a copy of it and show it to you. And I would especially like to show you the different degrees of brightness. There are three: the first, of a peaceful softness, constituted by the body of Mary, is the external, protective sheath for the second, radiant, living luminosity constituted by the large Host. A victorious light, I would say, to use a human term, which acts as an internal sheath for the divine Jewel shining like liquid fire of indescribable beauty which, in its infinite loveliness, is infinitely sweet, and it is the little Jesus, who is smiling in all his tender, innocent flesh in keeping with his nature as God and his age as an infant.
This third splendor, under the veils of the other two, is beyond all comparison for the purposes of description. One must think of the sun, the moon, and the stars, take the different lights of all the heavenly bodies, make them a single vortex of light which is smelted gold, smelted diamond, and this provides a pale likeness of what my heart is seeing in this blessed hour. What will Paradise be like, enwrapped by that light?
Similarly, there is no comparison fit to express the sweetness of Mary’s smile. Regal, holy, chaste, loving, wistful, inviting, and comforting - these words express a fraction and ought to convey a thousand times more to approach what that virginal, maternal, celestial smile is like.
56 In the dictations of June 4 and June 20.
57 This should be understood in the light of the dictations of September 7, September 15, November 27, December 8, December 18, December 25, and December 29. In addition, in the monumental work on the life of the Lord which Maria Valtorta was to write, we read that Our Lady’s divine maternity did not cause Her any physical pain, which is the result of original sin, from whose stain She was preserved, but that Mary, as the Co-Redeemer, suffered every kind of pain produced by circumstances and men, in regard to the virginal conception and birth as well.
58 Father Migliorini.
59 In the third notebook.
60 In the dictation of June 20.