Jesus says:
“If all women who are not depraved experience the ecstasy of female bliss when thinking of the joy of approaching motherhood, what ecstasy must my holy Mother have reached when She was now close to her sublime motherhood?
“Motherhood, when rightly understood, is a peak of love. Warmer than the love uniting the children of a single cradle, chaster than the love joining the flesh of two, maternal love, when just, is the complete, perfect, and highest love among the loves of the Earth.
“But Mary was not just the creature loving the child being formed in her, who is the fruit of the twofold love of creatures. Mary in her child loved God, who had come to Her with his Will, with his Love, and with his Obedience, to become flesh of her flesh.
“She gazed at her inviolate womb and saw it as the ciborium of the living God. She felt another heart beating and knew it was the Heart of a God made flesh. By desire She anticipated the moment She would make her arms my altar for the first offering of the Host of forgiveness. And She swore to Herself that She would love Me as only She, without the weight of sin, could love Me to make amends in advance for what already brought tears to her eyes and made her heart bleed: the tortures of my mission as Redeemer.
“If it is the custom of the devout to make a spiritual retreat on the eve of an event which is important to them, so as to know the Lord’s Will and be worthy of his blessing upon the work which is about to be begun, you can well understand how this Creature, already perfect in prayer, enclosed Herself in mystical veils to isolate Herself in a spiritual retreat which, the closer the event came to taking place, grew more and more.
“The journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem was made by Mary as if She were surrounded by a mystical enclosure open only towards Heaven, which came closer and closer to Her so as to be over Her with all its splendors, its angelic processions, its celestial harmonies, like the veil of a royal canopy embroidered with jewels.
“She was already in ecstasy. And the crowd that saw a silent man passing, leading by the bridle a donkey that a woman hardly more than a girl, totally absorbed in her inner thought, was mounted upon, stood aside, for it seemed that a light was emanating from that group and a heavenly perfume remained in its wake. And the crowd was unable to explain why the poorest in its midst looked like kings, before whom the throngs divided with great respect, like waves of the sea furrowed by a majestic ship.
“It was the Star of the Sea that was passing; it was the ship bearing the Peace passing in the midst of the war of the world; it was the Victorious Woman passing where Satan had crawled, to cleanse the way for the Word, who was coming to reunite Heaven and Earth.
“Pale and meek, She was going to meet Love, no longer only an embrace of spiritual fire, but the warmth of real flesh that was a woman’s, but that was God, and when Joseph would interrupt that ecstasy, respectfully penetrating it as if stepping across God’s threshold, to give his Wife the comfort of food and rest, they were not drawn-out words, but just a single gaze, one word – ‘Joseph!’ - a handclasp, and the wave of ecstasy poured into Joseph as if from a cup filled to the brim.
“Words disturb the atmosphere where God lives. Nor, for the just, are words needed for them to be convinced of the presence of God and of the wonderful effects of that presence in a heart.
“Either one believes, or one does not. If you have God in you, you believe, for you feel God, beyond the veils of the flesh, living in a creature. If you do not have God, no word can make you convinced of the fusion of God with a human heart. It is faith that gives the capacity to believe, and it is the possession of God that gives the possibility of seeing God living in one of your fellows. God’s mystery, God’s reasons cannot be explained with a human method. Only by living humbly in the supernatural can you see - through the fissure opened by Goodness, for you - the spiritual relations and the enrapturing contacts between a soul and God.
“Like sparks dancing in a fire, the creatures chosen by God for ecstasy live in a feast of splendors, in a roar of divine flames, of a fusing of the spark with the flame to live, be inflamed, and inflame more and more. Nourishment which is nourished at the Center of Love, they bear their love to Love and increase its glory, and from that Love they draw their own life and glory.
“Mary had the most holy Fire in Herself and was fire. And the laws of life were almost annulled by this living with burning passion. And the more the fire approached to turn into the newborn Flesh, the more they were annulled, so that in the blessed moment of my appearing in the world She sank into ecstasy, into the splendor of the Center of Fire, from which She emerged bearing in her arms the Flower of Love, passing from the voices of the divine Flame to the angelic melodies, from the blazing of the Trinity, contemplated to the point of fusion, to the vision of the angelic choirs descending to make the announcement to the Earth and the promise of Peace and to form a ring around the Queen Mother, the Mother of the King of kings, and after having embraced God with her enraptured spirit, She embraced the Son of God, her Son, with her arms, which did not know the embrace of man.”