Jesus says:
“ ‘The Lord is with you.’
“The Lord is always with the soul in grace. Goal does not draw away even when the Tempter comes near. God draws away only when the creature yields to the Tempter and corrupts its soul. Then God withdraws, for He cannot live together with the Enemy. He withdraws, and, like a Father who is not scornful, but pained, He waits for repentance to come into the creature’s heart and for the creature to refasten the bond of love with the Father.
“God would like to be with you always. If all your angels, as numerous as the stars in the sky, could greet you with the words, ‘The Lord is with you,’ your Lord’s joy would be complete, for We wish to be with you and for this reason We created you.
“Mary was with God, and God was with Mary. The two perfections attracted each other and joined in an incessant movement of affection. The infinite Perfection of God descended, with a joy inconceivable to you mortals, to possess this creature. The human perfection of Mary - the only woman among the children of man who has always been perfect - flung itself to meet divine Perfection so as to find a way to live.
“Yes, being with God was Mary’s life, and in the superatrocious hour of Calvary and the Tomb, when the Heavens closed over the Dying One and the Pierced Woman, the privation of God was the most fiery and stabbing of the seven swords, an unsurpassable touch to the edifice of pain required by the Redemption.
“I touched the summit of complete pain from Gethsemane to the ninth hour; Mary touched the summit of pain, complete in Her as well, in spite of the fact that She was not materially crucified, from Calvary to the moment of the Resurrection. And the reason for such superpain is one alone: our being deprived of union with God.
“It ought to be that way for you, too. But man now finds union with Us onerous and does not feel what his wretchedness is when he is deprived of Us. Wretchedness, blindness, madness, death - that’s what the loss of union with your Lord is. And you never think of this!
“If you lose a few coins, an object, health, a job, or an animal, you get moving to recover them and use all human and supernatural means to reach this goal. Yes, to find something limited and transitory you are able to pray. But when you lose God, you do not seek Him. You do not have recourse to my Saints so that they will help you to rediscover God’s way; you do not use forms of human care to your impulses. It strikes you as a matter of small account to lose union with God. And it is the essential thing.
“Mary never separated from God. The spirits remained fused in a loving embrace which was crowned in Heaven. This union was the main strength of Mary, as a daughter of Adam, for therein She found the armor to render Herself inviolable for the Tempter’s bite.
“Regarding those who are with God, it is not that they don’t see evil, which, like a filthy garment or a repugnant disease, covers so many creatures. They see it - indeed, with greater clarity than many others, but the sight of it corrupts nothing. Evil does not enter through the eyes to arouse the instincts smouldering in the flesh or the wicked movements of the mind. This happens only in those who, separated from God, have the Enemy as a guest in themselves.
“The one united to God is filled with God, and everything else which is not God remains on the surface, a wind which slightly wrinkles the spirit’s surface and does not enter to disturb the interior. And not only this. The one united to God, truly united to God, rather than absorb the exterior into himself, spreads the interior over his neighbors - that is, he spreads Goodness, God.
“Yes, it is exactly that way: whoever is with God has a power to irradiate, much more powerful than that of many bodies in the universe over which man has wearied his mind and raised up a monument of pride. And, above all, he has a supernaturally useful power, for whoever bears the Holy of Holies in himself, and lives by Him, communicates Him to others. It is that which makes people say, ‘He is a saint.’
“Mary possessed union with God to perfection and with all her strength aimed at fusing Herself increasingly with Him. She lived by Him alone to such a point that Mary could be said to have annulled Herself in God.
“I said, ‘Mary found in this the main strength to render Herself inviolable.’ Don’t get things backwards. Mary, the Most Humble, did not dare even remotely to think She was the perfect creature. She did not know her destiny and her immaculateness. She became familiar with the mystery at the words of Gabriel and in the nuptial embrace with the Eternal Spirit. But during her youth, the age full of deceits, I repeat She found strength in union with God. She wanted to find it at any cost because She would have preferred to die a hundred times rather than depart from God’s halo for an instant.
“Rather than so many more or less pious practices, I would like my beloved ones - and then others - to aim at this sovereign practice of union with Me. Easy and really prayerful prayer, with the heart inflamed, the body chaste, and thought honest, everything in you would become holy and good, and the earth would know new days in which the angels could greet men with the words ‘The Lord is with you.’ ”