The Sweet Guest says,
«Faith, hope and charity allow the carnal man to follow the spiritual law which is so in contrast with the law of sin living in his members.
"And who shall free you from this body of death? The Grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord."
It does not abolish man, but makes of the old man, a new man. Nor does it limit itself to regenerating you only once by means of the salutary waters of Baptism, sepulchre of original Sin, the womb from which a new, innocent, holy and divinized creature emerges. But it often regenerates and helps you as many times as man repents after a voluntary fall in a serious matter, or cries on his own weakness, the cause of involuntary falls, or even if he becomes perturbed by feeling the wind of incitements agitating within himself and fearing that it may provoke a tempest of the senses in which one loses the closeness to God and fearing that His peaceful voice may be overpowered, ever similar to "a whistling of gentle air". As many other times, it regenerates you, or comforts you, or reassures you, however many times you need it, with its divine aids, through Jesus Christ, and by means of the Sacraments, a means instituted by Him in order to regenerate and strengthen you in Grace.
And who will be able to resist He who conquered the devil, sin and death? No one and nothing if you remain faithful to Him. Faithful to the inner man who is the one who has true value, as Jesus said to Nicodemus and not only to him.
Because it is the spirit that animates the infirm flesh, just as blood maintains life in the body of man. However, if a man loses all of his blood, or if all of his blood deteriorates, it will do no good to him to have healthy members. Death will seize him just the same because the vital liquid is blood, and whether this be lost or deteriorated, the body perishes, whereas a body even if greatly injured but that has not been bled dry or one whose blood has not deteriorated, will most certainly heal.
Remain therefore faithful to the inner man, and do not fear.
The angels who see God and who know His thought have announced this grace to you on the night of the Birth of the Son of God and of Mary: the grace of peace to men of good will.
God knows and sees. God is the Father and Love. God is Justice and Mercy. He knows how to sympathize and reward. However, He desires a "good will". In reality, it does not always remain good and constant; it wavers and even falls. But the divine eye who sees you fall or bend also sees who assaults you in your inner good will and sees your grief for having fallen or for having bent in the impact of an unexpected assault, and He forgives you because He does not see in you compliance "to the evil that you hate, but aspiration to do good" even if you do not always succeed in doing so; He sees that not your intellectual I but the consequences of the underside of the sin of Adam: the foments, are at work in you.
And from this contrast between the two forces which battle within you and the two wills which contrast each other - one moved by the love of God and towards God, the other from the Hate who keeps his poison wide awake, out of his hate for you and for God - the Lord draws riches which will give you access to the Kingdom of Heaven.
This is your wedding garment, the garment which Jesus spoke of in the parable of the banquet for the royal wedding. And woe betide whoever does not spin and weave his wedding garment during his earthly day by drawing materials to spin and instruments to weave from the assiduous inner will to do what the Law of God proposes or what God presents, and from the continual struggle between the will of the inner man and the law of sin that is in his members, or between good will and how much evil surrounds you: the world, and he who tempts you: the devil. Woe betide those who do not weave their wedding garment daily and who do not adorn it with conquered gems by suffering the "great tribulation" which makes them worthy of remaining around the throne of the Lamb with the palm branches of the victorious in their hands!
Have you ever reflected on those palms seen by John in the hands of the elect? In Christian symbolism, it is customary to place the glorious palm between the hands of the martyrs. However, John who was enraptured by the Spirit of God to contemplate, know and write the sublime mysteries and those of the end times, says that the palms are in the hands of the elect, of the 144,000 who remain around the throne of the Lamb.
The multitude of saints and the elect is not only composed of martyrs who have suffered bloody martyrdom. But truly, every saint is worthy of carrying the palm of the martyrs because every saint is a martyr of Love and of Hate, of the spirit and of the flesh, and of all the powers of Heavens, those of the world, those of the carnal I, and those of the abysses of the Darkness that have assailed him on Earth in order to test him, tempt him and martyr him daily.
The martyrdom given by he whom Christ calls "the murderer from the beginning" is truly astute, tenacious and ferocious! Nor is there a murderer who is equal to him. Because no assassin can commit violence other than to the flesh of man. However, Satan kills, or attempts to kill the immortal part of man, by depriving it not of existence - because the soul that has been created can no longer perish in eternity - but of Life, that is, of its God. And this he does, for while God has, as the purpose of His creation, the reward of giving Himself to men, that is, to re-uniting men to Himself after their death - with the spirit immediately after death, and with the spirit re-united to the flesh after the resurrection and final judgement - in order to make them blessed of His Knowledge and Vision and to rejoice amongst the People of His children, so Satan has as the purpose of his rebellion that of depriving the Creator of as many creatures paternally beloved to Him as he can, and of depriving as many creatures as he can in delighting in their Creator.
The ape of God also wants to give his people to himself, and he does this by preying because he is a thief, whereas God, in order to create His people for Himself has endowed man, created in His image and likeness, with all the supernatural gifts apt at guiding him to the eternal Kingdom; and still not content, He gave his Only Begotten and beloved Son so that He could be immolated in order to become the Saviour of men. And this because God is the Origin of Good, Love, Truth and Order, and the divinely munific Giver of every grace, while Satan is the origin of evil, hate, falsehood, disorder, and is a thief.
From the moment that Satan wanted to be equal to God in his every action, freedom, power and will to act, by disordinately desiring, he who is a created creature, to being equal to He who is Uncreated - God as the Father from whom He is generated: the Only Begotten Son - and desiring it so that it could also be said of the created creature that which is said of the Incarnate Word at the beginning of the Gospel of John, dictated to the Evangelist of Love and Light from the Spirit of God who is Love and Light, "All things were made through Him"; from that moment, the fulminated archangel is sacrilege, a murderer and predator.
He was Lucifer. He considered himself: Light. However, to be the "bearer of light" is not the same as being the Light. There is a considerable difference between to "bear" and "being". The Light: the Son of God, the Word of the Father, the Uncreated and Eternal, Immense and most Perfect One, "begotten, not made, consubstantial to the Father" through whom "all things were made" has nothing of the same and in common with the angelical creature created to be the bearer of light and messenger of God who was Lucifer originally, he who then prevaricated by wanting to be the Light because he freely and voluntarily wanted to be unfaithful to the Lord his Creator and to his Grace. It was the delirious pride of wanting to believe himself God, and therefore, not subject to the obedience and adoration of God that fulgurated the rebel.
From that moment, Satan wanted his own people to oppose the People of God. And he pursues this end without rest, out of hatred towards God and the beings whom God loves as a Father. And he uses his intelligence, retained even after the divine fulguration - a most acute intelligence which was suitable to the prince of the angelic nation - and his power for this purpose, spying on every action of man, listening to his every word, drawing from the cognition of every human action and word, from the physical appearance of an individual, from diseases, from misfortunes, from studies, from affections, from occupations, from everything, so many spheres to stir up trouble for you by creating prodigies apt to seduce and draw you into error.
Those prodigies of which Jesus Christ speaks, predicting the end times and putting men on guard against these prodigies and voices of the false prophets and false christs who will rise and appear here and there, and who will be none other than the satanic snares and satanic prophets, servants of the prophesied Anti-christ, aroused in order to seduce men to Falsehood and to false doctrines of lies and to have them be found unprepared during the dreadful moment of the kingdom of the Anti-christ on Earth and of the consecutive last coming of the Son of Man, of Christ the Victor for the Last Judgement of separation of the lambs and sheep from the goats and rams, of election and condemnation, of benediction and malediction. Those prodigies which Paul speaks of in the II Epistle to those of Thessalonia (c. II). And those prodigies which John speaks of in chapter XIII of his Apocalypse.
Yes. The torment that Satan gives to the spirits faithful to the Lord is truly astute, tenacious and ferocious.
Nor is the torment of the power of individual foments in the inner man any less constant, biting, stinging and consuming, together with everything that has established itself in the world from the moment that Satan has become its sinister prince: the triple concupiscence, the terrible discord thrown into the fields of the Lord in order to harm the elect grain, to suffocate it and bend it to the ground, or lead it astray to the point of rendering it capable of despising God and worshipping itself.
Nor is sorrow a lesser cause of martyrdom; it can be of different types, but it is sorrow nonetheless, and sometimes it is very great and never lacking in the life of the elect.
A sorrow endured by God which can come from diseases, from misfortunes, from malice, from envy, or from hatred of creatures. Malice, envy and hate that can go as far as to committing a material crime or a moral one, by taking the life, reputation or freedom of a neighbour, or by infringing on his rights, appropriating other peoples' things, be it material riches or intellectual wealth, by altering the truth of things as far as presenting them as the works of one who is demented, or of a demon, that which, instead is the work and deed of a genius or of a just one elected by God to extraordinary works.
A sorrow endured by God, but condemned by God, given by creatures to their fellow creatures, given in thousands of ways so as to torture the just one with slanders, derisions and trials hateful to God on the psyche of the saint in order to incite him and in order to put doubts about himself into his heart on the divine acceptance of his sacrifice, on that which he hears or sees; trials without prudence, charity and justice, performed with an end which is not upright and that offends and grieves both God and the creature, illicit trials because they overstep that sacred limit which charity for one's neighbour has placed and that with no specious excuse should be overstepped.
A sorrow that can come from the I due to the suffering of still feeling so dissimilar, imperfect, weak, and far from that perfection which every just person aspires to achieve, out of pure love for God and in obedience to the advice of Jesus.
Generous souls, do not torment yourselves. Sustain yourselves just as you sustain others. Have patience with respect to your slight spiritual wretchedness, as you have in the slight illnesses of the body. Have it at all times together with confidence, even in moments comparable to unexpected and dangerous illnesses in which "in order that the greatest of extraordinary gifts does not make you swell up with pride, the stimulus of the flesh is given to you, an angel of Satan who stings you." It is a closeness and a stimulus that repulse you like filth that brushes against you, or a feeling of nausea that agitates within you and spills over in vomit. However, tolerate them with patience, without consenting to them and without losing your faith, or losing heart because of them.
Remain in peace by thinking of the love of God that relieves your weaknesses with the power of His grace, precisely with greater profusion in those hours in which the stimulus of the flesh or Satan's angel come to worm their way into you, that is, the thought that, despite every supernatural or extraordinary gift, a man remains a man, a creature in which the spiritual nature divinized by grace finds itself in contrast with the human nature subject to the disorderly appetites of concupiscence, and that you cannot therefore remain faithful to justice. Remain indifferent to these inferior or satanic voices that speak in order to discourage you. Remain in peace and do not torment yourselves on account of the filth of the turmoils, of the world, and of Satan.
Do not torment yourselves by thinking that God can distance Himself from you because of this re-ebullition of incitements and this unleashing of assaults that has unexpectedly formed in you and around you in order to disturb you and to make you doubt your mission as true children of God. Only if you were to consent would you distance the Lord. Because it is the compliance to temptation that is of significance, as is the compliance to inspiration that is also of significance, be it in good or in evil, in hatred or in love, of rendering true an act worthy of condemnation or reward.
If there is no consent, the lower voices remain a useless noise. If there is no consent, the voices from above remain useless appeals. If there is no consent to evil, remain faithful to God even if you are harshly tempted to the point of being momentarily overwhelmed. If there is no consent to good, only in this case, do you lack in love. Because love is consent. If there is no reciprocal consent between two beings, love is not created. However, if there is no consent, that is, a ready obedience to the voices of the eternal Love, then a reciprocal love does not exist between God who loves and the creature who loves a little or badly, and true love is not created and does not grow.
Even hate is consent. However, hate does not need the reciprocal consent between the hater and the hated. But it always needs the consent of an accomplice in order to arise. I am speaking of spiritual hate. This accomplice cannot be but your I, that is, yourselves, with your will and reason departing from order to enter into disorder. Because even in hate amongst creatures, even if it is motivated by undoubted wrongs of the hated one towards the hater, a disorder is always established in the relationships between men. Because order is in love, order is love, and whoever departs from love, departs from order.
In the hate, then, of the creature towards His Creator - for sin is hate towards the Creator, and by sinning, one arrives at having contempt for the Law, just as justice is the love of the creature for His Creator, and by loving, one arrives at practicing the Law in spirit and in truth, - it is always solely the "I" which is the accomplice or the indispensable element that lets either hate or love breathe.
Just like there is no love if the free will and reason of man do not consent to the commands and inspirations of God and do not comply with the desires arisen in the soul - those desires which the same God arouses in the spirit of man so that his degree of glory can always be greater and after having aroused them by powerfully helping the will and the limited faculties of man, He sees to it that he [man] can realize the holy desires which the Lord has aroused in his spirit - so long as there is no compliance of the will and reason to internal stimuli and external ones of the flesh, of the world and of Satan, if there is no seconding of irascible or concupiscent appetites, that is, if the soul does not offend his Lord with a thorough advertence and will, then there is no hate of the creature towards His Creator.
The martyrdom of sorrow is always in the life of the elect who also show their justice through their love of sorrow, not only endured with resignation, but also requested as an eighth sacrament and as a ninth beatitude in order to be annointed as victims and be true effigies of Jesus-Victim.
They are the uninstituted sacrament and the openly, unproposed beatitude from the divine Master and eternal Priest. However, those who know how to read and understand the Gospel, not in word but in its spirit, find this beatitude always proposed by the same actions of Jesus, the Man of Sacrifice and of Sorrow; this sacrament does not require matter and form, nor a minister in order to become a sensible and efficacious sign of grace, but is itself matter and form of grace, and making of man a resigned victim or gaining a higher degree of identification with the divine Master and most holy Redeemer. They find in this sacrament a voluntary victim, welcomed by God, making of him the minister of his own immolation and a little christ, one who carries on the divine Sacrifice of Jesus Christ.
Because it is through sorrow and death that Jesus was "Jesus", that is, the Saviour. It was through sorrow and death that Jesus arrived at the end for which He made Himself Man and accomplished the plan of God: that of making His Only Begotten, the Word, the Man-God, so that He could be the Redeemer and the Giver of Grace to the sons of Adam, disinherited from this sublime gift through his fault.
And it is still and always through sorrow and the holocaust that man saves, by continuing the saving work begun by Christ. Sorrow that is meditated, understood, and supernaturally contemplated is not a punishment of divine rigour, but is grace from divine love. Grace that God bestows to the best of His children in order to make of them christs through participation.
Yes. Through participation in the bitter chalice, in the sorrowful passion, from Gethsemane to Golgotha, and to the Cross that was the yoke of Christ, a most heavy yoke, crushing, a yoke that could not be carried if the love for God and for His fellowmen had not turned "sweet and light" if not to the flesh, at least to the heart, mind and spirit. It was the perfect love for God and for His fellowmen which made the Word of God run towards His Cross with a holy anxiety of "having accomplished all".
All His Life, that is, of His Eternity as the Word, was a yearning for this accomplishment. All His Life, be it when He was still with the Father in Heaven, be it when He descended to incarnate Himself into Mary's womb, be it when He took His first breath as to when He was growing in age, grace and in wisdom, remaining subject to Mary and Joseph, as then also to the Law and to the supreme Wills of the most holy Father, as far as consuming Himself in order to be able to give up His spirit by saying, "It is finished", He had this yearning. He had taught that if the [small] grain does not die, it cannot bear fruit. And He was dead, He, the Living One, the Eternal, in order to make of Himself, from a virginal spike of grain, into the Bread of Life for men.
Sorrow and the holocaust is the participation of the destiny of the most holy Grain, born of an immaculate and virginal spike, Jesus; it is the participation of the perfect love of the Son for man and for his brothers to the point of giving His life for them; it is the participation of the sanctity of Christ, a sanctity which is achieved through renunciation, sacrifice, and even death.
Jesus was exalted by the Father and received the Name superior to every other name, and such that to the Name of Jesus, everything must prostrate itself, adoring, on Earth and in Heaven, after that He humbled Himself up to His death on the cross.
Therefore, whoever loves his soul and wants to give it an eternal and blessed life must hate his flesh by also regarding persecutions and infirmities which destroy matter, by also desiring elevation, be it material or spiritual, upon the cross of any martyrdom, upon the cross which removes from the Earth and raises towards Heaven in a mystical elevation, in a continual "mass" of the Christian, truly formed, who mutates himself from man to host, into a small host who wants to be consumed with the great Host, Jesus Eucharist, in a latria-like, eucharistic, propitiatory, impetratory sacrifice.
And with the martyrdom of sorrow is the martyrdom of love. Not any less destructive in its ardent sweetness than the one of sorrow.
The martyrdom of love. The needs of love. The absolutism of love which isolates the creature embraced by Love in a holy folly and immerses itself with full and voluntary approval into the flaming ocean of love. The total generosity of love, now reigning with the power of a supreme king in a spirit, a generosity that no longer measures anything, neither renunciations, nor sufferings, nor pardons, nor merciful corporal and spiritual succours, so long as God has glory and that one's neighbour has solace, forgiveness and grace.
The absolute and continual adherence of the creature given itself over to love, to the most holy Will of God, preserves, of his free will of man, one sole branch: that of wanting to do what God wills. To do that which God indicates, commands or proposes doing, God who lives in souls, who inhabits in the souls of those who love. This love that is obedient, active and constant places the divine life in you and completes your identification with God who is Love, besides being a Spirit, as your soul is a spirit; who is Free, as you are free to will; who is the Eternal, as eternal is your spirit from when it was created.
Divine likeness of a spiritual nature, of motions of love, of intellectual lights, places love, the greatest of the commandments, in you; and not through an arbitrary prevarication like Adam's, following the insinuation and the suggestion of the Snake and biting into the forbidden fruit in order to become "like gods", but through participation to that which is the essence of the Supreme Being: love. Love makes of you "gods and children of the most High". For love presupposes Grace in the spirit who loves, and Grace is the participation of the divine life through the capacity to intuit that which is God, to act according to His will, to love as you are loved, the preparation to see that which you believed, to get to know the Mystery of God and all the mysteries of God, and all the mysterious motives of the actions of God, at times incomprehensible so long as you are in the terrestrial exile and in its fogs, to contemplate God face to face, to possess the full knowledge of every Truth, to become one with God, in the perfection of the union that can only be had in Heaven, after judgement and after the elevation to glory, in the perfection of Love that will have at this point reached the perfect measure, rather, the three perfect measures.
Love is truly the gift of gifts, the means to maintain the gift of Grace, the development of virtues and the attainment of the ultimate goal. For this reason, it is given by the Holy Spirit, Spirit of the divine Spirit, essence of the most perfect and reciprocal love of the Father and of the Son, proceeding from their kiss, from their mutual affinity and from their jubilant contemplation.
The will of man can make this gift of the Spirit of Love very active, sufficient in itself to obtaining the end for which men had been created: the predestination to Grace and to Glory Because, in truth, all those who are moved by love become "children of God" (Paul to the Romans c. 8, v.16) since their every action inspires love, that is, to the good towards He whose presence they feel even if they do not exactly know Him, and towards their fellow creatures; therefore, they live according to the natural-moral law placed and preserved by God the Creator in the heart of man.
It is of these people that St. Paul writes, "When the Gentiles, who have not the law, do that which the law imposes, and by not having a law, are a law unto themselves and they show that the fear of the law is written in their hearts and bears witness to their conscience... they will be justified on the day in which God, through Jesus Christ, will judge the secret actions of men."
As a matter of fact, whoever acts with a good conscience by following the dictates of the moral law shows that he has a Christian soul by nature, open to Good and to the Truth, and Jesus, who died so that men could have eternal Life - men of good will - will be their justification. Because all those, who though not knowing of God as He is known by Catholics, firmly believe that a God He is, a just and provident God, He who remunerates each and everyone according to individual merits, belong to the soul of the Church, out of the love which they feel for Him and out of the love and justice which they have for their neighbour and for themselves, out of the desire of God and out of the perfect contrition of the sins which could have been committed.
As having previously stated that sorrow is the eighth sacrament and the ninth beatitude, so I say that love, truly lived and practiced, and the sincere repentance of sins which could have been unintentionally committed, are the baptism of desire, worthy of implicit participation in the Mystical Body, and therefore, participation in Grace. Only God and the men in whom God operates are familiar with the divine actions that lead human beings to the salvation and celestial knowledge of the Truth for which they have been created.
Love is the holy activity which moves all the forces of man by directing them to their ultimate end. Love is wisdom. And wisdom is freedom from things which are transitory and limited. And freedom from that which confines and keeps you attached to the Earth; it opens infinities of space for the spirit so that it can fly and hurl itself towards the eternal Truth who lowers Himself to he who loves Him, and He already concedes Himself by making Himself be savoured and loved, as far as a mortal creature still can, by tearing man away from the fogs of his sad exile in order to elevate him to Himself and reveal Himself in part in order to be loved always more, without pulling him away though and making him indifferent to the needs of his brothers. Rather, a man lost in God adores God and draws graces and benefits from Him not only for himself, but also for his brothers upon whom he spreads holy and continuous deeds of charity.
For these many martyrs given over to sorrow and to love, those who remain faithful to the inner man will, in Heaven, have the garment and the palm described by John. Because it is through their will that they will have made that garment, by cleansing their stoles in the Blood of the Lamb who will have cancelled, underneath His purifying wave, the shadows of the initial lapses and those of the final imperfections; and the endured martyrdoms, that of love more than any other, favouring the action of divine Grace received through Jesus Christ your Lord, with all the forces of man, will make these the victors of the new name, to whom will be given the hidden manna, the crown of life, the power over the nations and the glory of being seated around the high Throne, remaining forever in the presence of the Lamb, the Morning Star who guided them throughout the way from Earth to Heaven, to the Star of their earthly morning whom they solicitiously invoked at the end of every heart throb with the cry of a loving soul, "Come, Lord Jesus", to the Star of their celestial and eternal morning in the day in which they shall forever enter into the heavenly Kingdom.»