This “Little Catechism on the Divine Volition” is an aid for those who wish to know the spiritual message of the Servant of God Luisa Piccarreta, “the Little Daughter of the Divine Will” in her life and in her writings, their basic formation in the Faith and as a guide in their lives. “Pro manuscripto privato” Fr. Pablo Martín Sanguiao Civitavecchia, March 25 2015, Solemnity of the Annunciation and of the Feast of the Divine “Fiat” of Jesus and Mary 3 THE FIRST QUESTIONS REGARDING THE GIFT OF GOD WHO ARE WE? “What great love the Father has given us, to be called children of God; and that’s what we truly are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know Him. Beloved, we are already God's children, but what we will become has not yet been revealed. However, we know that when He will manifest Himself, we shall be similar onto Him, since we will see Him as He is”. (1 Jn 3,1-3). WHAT WAS JOHN ANNOUNCING BY SAYING THIS? He was announcing that the Divine Volition had yet to be revealed as Jesus’ interior life, and that living within the Divine Will will become our way of life, following the example and spiritual guide of the Servant of God Luisa Piccarreta, through whom the Lord has desired to manifest it in our own time. WHAT IS THEN “LIVING IN THE DIVINE WILL”? It is having as one’s own life the very Will of God, as we learn from the writings of Luisa Piccarreta. This is the life lived by Our Lord Jesus and by Mary, His and our Mother. WHO IS LUISA PICCARRETA? The Servant of God Luisa Piccarreta, “the little Daughter of the Divine Will”, is the creature chosen by Jesus to initiate the fulfillment of His idyllic, of His eternal decree, and to make known to the Church and throughout the world, that His Divine Will would be in us the same as it is in God. We will enjoy His life, His happiness and the Source of all His works. Luisa was born in Corato (Bari, Italy) on the 23rd of April, 1865, where she lived her entire life, and where she died on March 4th, 1947. To this day people remember her as “Luisa, the Saint”. The cause for her beatification was opened in 1994. Many have been the witnesses to her cause, amongst which are priests, bishops, one cardinal and even one canonized Saint, St. Hannibal Maria Di Francia, who frequented her for 17 years. She was always subject to the authority of various confessors, holy priests charged by the Church’s authority for her guidance. However, the principal witness to this cause is Luisa herself, who through her writings narrates her life and her mission. WHAT DID LUISA WRITE? WHAT ARE THESE WRITINGS? Luisa was not an educated person, she had completed only the first, and perhaps, the second grade of grammar school. Yet, in obedience to her 4 confessors, she wrote 36 long volumes, in a diary format. These volumes, as Jesus Himself says, were written by Him first, with His own finger of light, at the bottom of His own soul and then transcribed by Luisa onto paper. These marvelous writings are entitled by Jesus Himself “The Kingdom of my Divine Volition within the creature – Book of Heaven – The recall of the creature within the order, at its place and within the reason for which the creature was created by God.” St. Hannibal, as a censor in charge of the writings of Luisa, was the first to examine them (he examined the first 19 volumes) and granted them the "Nihil obstat", to which then the Archbishop immediately gave his "imprimatur". Luisa also wrote "The Hours of the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ", the “Pio Pilgrimage of the Soul in the Divine Will” and "The Virgin Mary in the Kingdom of the Divine Will". Furthermore, in order to complete the first volume, she wrote a notebook on “Memories of childhood”. She also left many prayers, novenas and even many letters. BUT WHAT, IN SIMPLE TERMS, IS LUISA’S MESSAGE ? Luisa can say Jesus’ words: «My doctrine is not mine, it belongs to the one who sent me forth. Those who wish to do His will, will get to know if this doctrine is from God or if I am speaking on my own» (Jn. 7,16-17). Also these other words that Jesus spoke to the Samaritan woman: «If you were to know the gift of God and who is the One telling you ‘Give me some water to drink’, you would have asked Him to give you water to drink and He would have given you living waters». (Jn 4,10). And what is God’s Gift? It certainly is not a simple gift, nor a virtue or a charisma, and not even a spiritual thing; it is instead, the very, omnipotent, eternal, most holy Divine Will. To observe the commandments, to do all that God wants us to do, to accept with serenity whatever God permits or disposes are all things necessary to our salvation, but it is too little to satisfy His love. A popular chant says: “God became like us so that He could make us like Himself”. God desires us to become like Him, in His own image. God desires us to live in perfect union with Him, He desires us to be able to say the very same words that Jesus said to Him, our Father: “All that is yours, is mine; and all that is mine is yours” (Jn. 17,10). God wants us to love, and to love Him with His own love, so that our reciprocal love will not be unjust. He knows that our heart, our will, is not capable to love in a divine way, a way worthy of God, this is why He is now offering to us the gift of His own Heart, of His adorable Will, the Heart of the Three Divine Persons, so that we may live with God, live His life, participate in His works, and love as the Divine Persons love. The Lord is telling us: “It is too little that you would be my servant, I wish to make you light of nations” (Is. 49,6). 5 The Lord is telling us: “My son, give me your heart, because I want to give you mine”. Now the Lord saying: “I wish to give you My Will, so that it might become for you what it is for Me”. He is further saying: “I could not give you anything greater than My Will, which is My entirety, the very essence of my Divine Being, the Source of all my attributes, my love, my life, my works, of all goodness and happiness”. And He further says: “If you give me your will, I will give you mine; this is the reason why I created your will, so that you would have a small will to offer me, in exchange for Mine, to be able to fuse it with my own”. The Lord is also saying: “If I disclosed this, my desire, to you, which is my greatest desire, it is not simply to give you news, but to give you a gift, the Gift of all gifts. If I manifested it to you, it is to communicate it to you”. Now the Lord is telling you: “If you tell me so, I will take seriously. Your little human will is valuable for Me, I want to combine it with mine, identify so much with mine, you can not distinguish one from the other”. He is also saying: “If you would never more give life to your will for your own account, but instead always call upon mine, the moment will come when you will only hear the life of my Will, acting in the Divine way, as God acts, as a true child of God, which you are. You will have at your disposal my omnipotence, my knowledge, my eternal Love. Then I will look at Jesus and I will see you, I will look at you and I will see Jesus, and that is how, looking from all eternity at His adorable humanity, I saw you and the whole of humanity, (first of all I saw His Mother in Him). Thereby it is, that by looking at you, I will be able to see in you everything and everyone, even my own Self”. “If you will allow me” –Jesus says to Luisa more than once– “I will be at the same time, actor and spectator in you”. It is precisely what Pope Benedict XVI said in his first encyclical, “Deus Caritas est” (God is Love) (n. 17): “The yes that our will says to His, unites the intellect, the will and the sentiment in the totalizing act of love. (…) To desire the same thing and to refuse the same thing is exactly what the ancients recognized as authentic substance of love: becoming one similar to the other, which conducts to the unity of the will and of the thought. The love story of God and man. In fact, it consists of the very essence of which this unison of wills grows in unity of thought and sentiment to the point that my will and the Will of God coincide more and more: the Will of God is for me no longer an alien will imposed upon me, from without, by the Commandments, but it is my own will, based on the experience that, as a matter of fact, God is closer to me than I am to myself. That’s when the abandonment in God grows, becoming my joy and happiness”. 6 THE SPIRITUALITY OF LUISA PICCARRETA 01 – Not few are the mystics known for a particular doctrine that characterizes their own spiritual life. For instance, - the spirituality of Saint Faustina Kowalska is that of the Divine Mercy; - that of Saint Theresa of Lisieux, is the littleness of abandoning oneself completely to the mercy of God; - that of Saint Margaret or of Sister Josefa Menéndez is the devotion to the Sacred Heart; - the spirituality of the Servant of God Conception Cabrera is the mystical Incarnation; - that of Mother Eugenia Ravasio is the Revelation of the Divine Father, etc. All these people, (almost all women) have given their own treasures to the Church, a spiritual life as fruit of “revelations” or mystical experiences confirmed by the Church.. In a few words then, what is the spiritual doctrine that characterizes the Servant of God, Luisa Piccarreta? It is “living within the Divine Will”. It is the very Will of God, by Him given and by man received, as its own heredity, its own life.. 02 – Could it be a charismatic message as many others (true or presumed true), that circulate in our days? Could it be an ascetic-mystical doctrine, since it speaks of the various virtues or perhaps of certain extraordinary experiences? Has she uncovered some theological vision? Did she simply leave us an account of her life and of her thoughts? Is she, perhaps, giving us a particular devotion? They are definitely not messages, since this was simply inexistent in Luisa’s mind. She emerges as a mystic soul who has authored writings, as so many other ancient and modern authors in the Church have done, of whom their intimate spiritual experiences are known, since they left testimony of their life in their rich ascetic-mystic doctrine. Think of the great classics: Saint Theresa of Avila, Saint John of the Cross, or, in more recent times, Saint Theresa de Lisieux or Saint Faustina Kowalska, just to name a few. Luisa can be considered like these only in part, since her writings do not just describe a spiritual itinerary of life, but they are the proclamation of God’s eternal Project or Decree, announcing the completion of His Kingdom: The Reign of the Divine Will. 03 – Has Luisa Piccarreta written something? Is she a writer? Why did she write, and to whom and for whom did she write? Luisa has written much, even though she only attended first or second grade at grammar school. Because her education is so poor, her writings are full of grammatical, syntax and spelling errors (this fact serves as a perfect deterrent 7 and discouragement to the reader who might undertake this task with prejudices and wrong intentions). It is not, therefore, superficial mystic literature of one who wishes to make public its own presumed visions or supernatural revelations. Instead, it is a painful testimony of a life crucified by love and bedridden for many long years, lived by Luisa, in prayer and in silence; concealed in obscurity and steeped in obedience. It is, in fact, obedience alone that succeeds, after a great struggle with herself, to write her books. She wrote them solely in obedience to her various Confessors who were instructed by the Archbishop. Therefore, it was done in obedience to the Church, an obedience that cost Luisa a real and continuous martyrdom. What she writes is not the fruit of culture nor of artistic writing; it is not a desire to manifest its own visions or revelations, it does not come from a mysticism false and dangerous, but from “Lady Obedience” herself, as she calls it! It took many years before Luisa surrendered to the idea that her writings would be published by the Priests assigned, first of all by Saint Hannibal Maria Di Francia, the appointed ecclesiastic Censor on her writings, for which he gave his “Nihil Obstat” while obtaining the “Imprimatur” from the Archbishop. 04 – What is the essence of her message? Does Luisa make some particular announcement? In Jesus’ own words, “Greater grace I could not give you in these tempestuous times, when humanity is frantically running towards evil, than that of revealing to you the great gift I want to give humanity, which is the Gift of the Kingdom of the Supreme Fiat”. It is exactly with the completion of that Reign which we invoke in the Lord’s prayer, the Our Father; His Will, starting with Luisa, must be completed in a way new to earth, in the same way as it is accomplished in Heaven, where is found the fount of all goodness and happiness, where the life of God and of His children resides, and therefore the starting point of this great message is expressed by the Lord in the following words: “I am coming to remain with you, to live with you in one single Will, in one single Love”. 05 – What exactly then is the novelty found in Luisa’s writings? How far do the writings regarding the Divine Will of all the other spiritual authors take us, and where does the new Gift given to Luisa begin? Listen to the Lord’s answers: “My daughter, one does not want to understand that to live in my Volition is to reign, whereas to do my Will is merely to attend to my orders. The first is possession, ownership; the second is receipt of orders which must be executed. The first is to possess, to own, the second is to receive my orders and to execute them. Living in my Will is making my Will one’s own will, one’s own possession; it is being able to dispose of it at will; whereas to do my will is simply to regard it as the Will of God and not as one’s own will, hence one is not at liberty to dispose of it as one might desire. Living 8 in my Will is living with one will only, the will of God. Living in my Volition is living as my child, whereas by simply doing my will is living as a servant. In the first case that which belongs to the Father belongs to the child; it is precisely this Gift that I desire to give to my creatures in these very sad times, that they should not simply do my Will, but actually possess it. Am I not master to give whatever I want, whenever I want and to whomever I want? Do not be surprised if you see that this Gift is not understood, for to understand it, humanity must be disposed to undertake the greatest sacrifice of all, which is that of denying life, even in holy matters, to its own will...” (September 18,1924) 06 – Luisa often uses the terms Divine Volition - Divine Volitions. Are they the same? Is it the same saying the Divine Will and the Divine Volition? Where is Love placed in the midst of all this? In the Gospel Jesus calls THE DIVINE WILL, the Will of the Father, is the most intimate, vital, essential reality of God: “Ah, everything is contained in my Will, and if the soul will take my Will she will take all the substance of my Being and enclose everything into herself” (March 2nd ,1916). It is not an ability or something from God, such as is the human will in humanity, no! The Divine Will is what God is. Just as a primary wheel moves all other wheels in a mechanism, so the will is that which gives life to everything in God and in us. Usually, we mean by Divine Will things that God wants, things willed by God (that is, we see it as a direct object), instead for God is the subject, it is God Himself who desires, God Himself who wishes). It could be said: the Will is the noun, (the term expressing the substance) while all the other Divine attributes –Love, Omnipotence, Goodness, Eternity, Immutability, Immensity, Sanctity, Justice, Mercy, Omniscient, Knowledge, etc.– are all its adjectives, describing the noun. “The Divine Will is omnipotent, good, holy, infinite, eternal, most knowledgeable, merciful, immutable…” “THE DIVINE VOLITION” is the Will of God in action; it indicates what it does, it is, therefore, a verb. The volitions, instead, indicate the things wanted or established by God. The distinction between “Will” and “Volition”, (even if in fact they coincide) is the same as the one between heart and palpitation, or between the motor and the movement of the motor, or even between the spring and the river. Analogically speaking, the effect of palpitation is life; the functioning of a motor could be traveling. In the case of Volition, the effect is Love, and if in God the spring is His Will and the river is the Divine Volition, the water of this river is Love, hence, Jesus may well say that: “Love is the child of the Divine Will”, for it is both its manifestation and its communication. The Divine Will is, therefore, beyond and above all that it does, the things that God wants or does not want or permits. It is the fount and supreme cause of what God is, of the ineffable Life of the Most Holy Trinity and of their works of eternal Love. It is like the intimate “motor” of God, like the “first wheel” moving and giving life to all that He is and to all His works. It is like “the Heart” of the three Divine Persons. 9 07 – Luisa always speaks about Jesus; she is more than fascinated by Him! At times she mentions (as a matter of fact it is Jesus who mentions) the Divine Person of the Father, but seldom speaks of the Holy Spirit. Why is that? Certainly she speaks of the Holy Spirit, even though she mentions Him only sparingly. For instance, in volume 18 (May 11, 1925) she dedicates a long and very beautiful chapter to the Sighs that the Holy Spirit suffers in the Sacraments. In any event, the fact that she rarely mentions Him could probably be explained by saying that, just as the Person of the Father represents the Divine Will of the Most Holy Trinity, so does the Person of the Holy Spirit represent the Divine Volition, and under this form, she speaks about continuously. Furthermore, being the Holy Spirit the Person who constitutes the bond of reciprocal love and unity between Father and Son, He also constitutes the same bond between the Groom and the Bride, and regarding our case, between Jesus and Luisa. In conclusion, while she scarcely mentions Him, she continuously speaks of Him, and that is precisely because the Holy Spirit is the dialogue of love, it is He who forms it; He Himself is the very speech of Jesus. 08 – Let us get to the essential point: What constitutes “living in the Divine Will”? Is it not doing the Will of God, which all the Saints know and do? It is clear that one finds oneself before something new. For instance, Jesus says to Luisa: “The very Saints come together with Me to celebrate, while anxiously waiting for a soul who would substitute their own acts, holy in the human order, yet not so in the Divine order; they beg Me to allow the creature to immediately enter in this divine ambiance…” (February 13, 1919) In another instance, Luisa says: “Is it possible that Jesus let so many centuries pass without making known these wonders of the Divine Will, and that He did not choose among so many saints, one who would give rise to this sanctity, fully divine? Yet, there were the Apostles and so many other greater saints who stunned the entire world.” (December 3rd, 1921) ‘My Love and my Life, I still cannot convince myself how is it possible that no saint has ever done your Most Holy Will , nor has lived in the way. You are now saying - in your Volition?’ And Jesus: “Ah! my daughter, you still do not want to convince yourself that one can take as much light, grace, variety, value, for as much as one knows? Surely there have been saints who have always done my Will, but they took of my Will as much as they knew. They knew that doing my Will was the greatest act, the one that honored Me the most and which brought sanctification, and with this intention they did it, and this is what they took, because there is no sanctity without my Will; and no good, nor sanctity, whether small or great, can come out without It”. (November 6,1922). “My daughter, in my Eternal Will you will find all my acts, as well as those of my Mama, which enveloped all the acts of creatures, from the first to the last that will exist, as though within a mantle. This mantle is as though it were two: one rose up to Heaven, to give back to my Father, with a Divine Will, all that 10 creatures owed Him: love, glory, reparation and satisfaction; while the other remained here as defense and help of creatures. No one else has entered into my Divine Will to do all that my Humanity did. My saints have done my Will, but have not entered into it, to do all that my Will does, taking all acts as though in a twinkling of an eye, from the first to the last man, and making themselves actors, spectators and divinizers. By doing my Will, one does not arrive at doing all that my Eternal Volition contains; rather, it descends into the creature limited, as much as the creature can contain of it. Only one who enters inside expands and diffuses himself like a solar light in the eternal flights of my Volition, and finding my acts and those of my Mama, he places his own. Look inside my Will: are there perhaps other acts of creatures multiplied within mine, reaching up to the last act that is to be performed on this earth? Look well, you will find none. This means that no one has entered. It had been reserved so that the doors of my Eternal Volition would only be opened to my little daughter, so as to unify her acts with mine and with those of my Mama, and render all our acts triple before the Supreme Majesty and for the good of creatures. Now, I have opened the doors so others may enter provided they dispose themselves to such a great good.” (November 6, 1922). 09 – Luisa often speaks of the Kingdom of God that it must be accomplished; that it is about to arrive; she prays, requesting that “the Divine Will come to reign”. What does she mean by all this? Standing by what Jesus says to Luisa, it is quite obvious: 1) That the Reign of God is the achievement of His Will, and 2) That the Will of the Father, complete with all His Divine attributes and His Divine rights, has established His Reign within the Most Holy Humanity of Jesus. 3) That all that Jesus owns in His Adorable Humanity, He desires to give to His Mystical Body. The words “On earth as it is in Heaven” are a perfect reality in Jesus and Mary: “as it is in the Father so it is in the Son”. Therefore, as long as Jesus and Mary were on the earth, the Kingdom of God was on earth, whereas in ourselves it must still be an ardent desire, one incessant invocation, since it is a Divine Promise. Saint Augustine says: “May His will be done in the Church as it is in Our Lord Jesus Christ. May His Will be done in the bride, Christ’s fiancé, as it is in the Bride who accomplished the Will of the Father.” 4) This Divine promise of the Kingdom on earth as it is in Heaven has yet to be accomplished. This implies two things: – not only do we have to go to the Kingdom of God after our death, but that the Kingdom of God on earth has yet to come, and that the world cannot end until this will occur. (Here is the restoration of the order of Creation before the fall into sin). – The reason why the Kingdom of God has not yet come on earth, is because it cannot be confused with Redemption or with the institution of the Church. 11 5) This Kingdom, which the Church incessantly requests in the Lord’s Prayer (‘Your Will be done on earth as it is in Heaven’) in rapport to Redemption and to the Church, is like the rapport of the fruit to the tree. In essence, the fruit is already present in the tree from the very beginning, from the moment in which it was sown, it was planted. The tree is rooted, cultivated and it grows; it fills up with leaves and flowers, but its fruit is produced only at the time of fruition. So too, Redemption, the Sacraments, the Church and the entire works of the Holy Spirit, will be concluded at the glorious time of the Kingdom of the Divine Will. 10 – Another typical Latin word of Luisa’s is «Fiat». With this word upon her chest she was triumphantly carried to the cemetery. What does this word mean to her? Luisa begins all of her writing with the Latin word Fiat, and it is not per chance. It is with this word, Fiat (let there be) that God began all of His works: 1) The Creation (Fiat lux! = Let there be light, Gen.1,3). 2) The Incarnation of the Verb (Fiat mihi secundun verbum tuum = let it be done unto me according to your word, Lk.1,38.) 3) The Redemption (…non mea voluntas, sed Tua fiat = Not mine, but your will be done, Lk. 22,42). 4) The invocation of the advent of the Kingdom (Fiat voluntas tua, sicut in Caelum et in terra = Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven, Mt. 6,10). This word comprises all that Luisa has ever said and done, in the same way that it expresses all that God does, in fact, it expresses the very life of God, His eternal and absolute Act, expression of His infinitely Holy Volition. When Jesus speaks to Luisa of the third Fiat, He is talking about the conclusion of the Lord’s Prayer, of the Our Father. 11 – Luisa insists on the fact that the petition in the Our Father: “Your Will be done on earth as it is in Heaven” must be achieved. She writes partly in Latin, almost like a technical phrase: “Let the Fiat Voluntas Tua, (your Will be done on earth as it is in Heaven) be accomplished”. What does it mean? To do God’s Will is not news, no; the news is that God is inviting us to live within His Volition, just as the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit have been living within this Eternal Will. The news is: the Divine Will is active in the creature and the creature is active in a Divine way in the Divine Will. The news is this Grace of graces, this Gift of gifts which is that not only does humanity do the Will of God, but that His Will be ours, must become life of our life, we must live and reign with It and in It. The news is a continuous interchange of the Divine and human will, because the soul, fearing his own corrupted will, requests that it be substituted in everything and at every instant, by the very same Divine Will, since it is precisely this Divine Will that constantly fills her (the soul) with joy, love and every infinite goodness, thus restoring to the creature the divine likeness lost through sin and the purpose for which humanity was created by God: to live as children of God, participating in all of His goods. 12 The news is that Jesus, by donating His will to the creature, forms in her His own life and His own Real Presence, so that the creature will furnish Him with its humanity. This union is obviously not an hypostatic union (two natures in one person) but the union of two wills, the Divine and the human, united in only one will, which naturally cannot be other than the Divine Will. This creature, therefore, becomes the triumph of Jesus, it becomes another Jesus, not by nature, but by the gift of Grace, according to St. John’s words: “because as He is, so too are we in this world”. (1 Jn. 4,17). 12 – Luisa lived her entire adult life confined to her bed; plagued by the most strange and mysterious sufferings (which she describes in a very minute and moving way). It seems, therefore, logical that her thoughts very often go to the Passion of her beloved Lord, with an extraordinary depth of understanding and an intensity of touching participation... What then is the rapport between all this indescribable suffering of Jesus and Luisa and the vision of “living in the Divine Will”, of “the Kingdom of the Divine Will”? One would expect simply an attitude of resignation, of “obedience till death, a death on the Cross”, an abandonment before the Will of God, a Fiat –so be it– of submission, of unconditional giving in, a passive Fiat before God… Instead, this spirituality that rises like the dawn, eclipsing everything else, at a given point makes the soul realize that it is not only for one person but that it must be offered to all. It is “entering” or “fusing oneself” in the Divine Will. It is to substitute in everything one’s own will with the Divine Will, and make it one’s own. In so doing, this Fiat is no longer the creature’s will, but it becomes the very same Omnipotent and Eternal Fiat of God Himself. This Fiat has become the creature’s, and this is not at all a passive answer, it is an active and acknowledged participation, becoming more knowledgeable in everything done in this Fiat or Divine Will, in all its works, in all the eternal act of its very life. Luisa is invited to operate as Jesus operates, within His Volition: “Come within my Will, so that you will do what I am doing” (July 25, 1917). “Now, by wanting you with me, within my Will, I want your continuous action” (December 28, 1917). Thus it is that everything done and felt by Luisa is the very Life of Jesus, re-lived in her (December 25, 1918). However, all this is not only reserved for Luisa. Jesus expects that humanity will come to live in His Will and repeat within His Will all that He Himself has done (January 29th, 1919). 13 – It would seem that there were two persons in Luisa, like two diverse spiritualities, two dimensions, two worlds, two realities so great that it escape us. One seems to be clearer to understand, at least to give us an idea: it is the one that speaks of obedience, of the cross…, but then there is the other one, the one of living within the Divine Will. They are the two vocations or missions of Luisa. The first as Victim with Jesus in the Opera of Redemption; the other given to her by Jesus at a later date, as the depository of the truth about the 13 Divine Will, as the head of the new generation, yearned by Jesus, who will have everything in common with Him, His Divine Will as its very life. At the end of the 12th volume, Jesus tells Luisa that up to that point she has received the same office of His most Holy Humanity while He was on earth, but from that point on she will receive the one of His Divine Will contained in His humanity (March 17, 1921). Therefore, as her spirituality is explained only by her doctrine (the Divine Will, Life of God and life destined for God’s children), so it is explained by its double office: the one of victim and the one of initiating living in the Divine Will as well as being the depository of its truths, which are manifested through her. “Until now I have kept you with me to placate my Justice and to impede that my harshest punishments would rain upon the earth; but now (…) I desire that united with Me, within my Will, you should occupy yourself with preparing the era of my Volition. As you will enter the life of my Volition, the rainbow of peace will appear, thus forming the ring of connection between the Divine Will and humanity, from where life will come for my Volition on earth, and the beginning of the fulfillment of my prayer, and that of the entire Church: “Thy kingdom come, Thy Will be done on earth as it is in Heaven” (March 2nd, 1921) 14 – So this means that Luisa’s spirituality is immersed on the one side within the opera of Redemption; and on the other, in the completion of the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of the Divine Will? As a matter of fact, there are two of Luisa’s writings which represent these two divine Works and which also correspond with two goals of her life: the first, how she was formed by Jesus as another humanity, that of Christ; and the second, to operate like Jesus within the Will of the Father. These two writings are respectively: “The Hours of the Passion” and “The Rounds of the soul within the Divine Will”. “The Hours of the Passion” are not a narration nor are they a simple meditation of the Passion of Jesus, as many spiritual writers have done in the past; no, they are a prayer, as a gymnasium or a school about life, where we unite ourselves to Jesus so that we can learn how to accomplish with Him and like Him that which He interiorly accomplished for our Redemption. Luisa says: “The rounds of the soul” is the “practical and most efficacious way to make the rounds within the Most Holy Will of God, in order to impenetrate the Kingdom of the Divine Fiat upon the earth”. It is the never ending prayer with which the soul unites itself to the Divine Will in all of His works (Creation, Redemption, and Sanctification) in order to adore It, to bless It, to thank It and to love It in the name of everybody, and to ask, in the name of all and of everything that the Kingdom come. 15 – But does Luisa personally perform a task or does she have a special mission in all this? The answer does not pretend to be the one that the Holy Church might give one day, but only that which results from the reading of her writings. Jesus explained that, as another humanity of Christ, she took part in His own 14 works, as Redeemer and as King: “My beloved, up until now you have shared with me the office of My Humanity on earth. Now I want to change your task by giving you another one; nobler, greater. I desire to give you the office held by My Will within My Humanity. Can you see how it is more elevated, more sublime? My Humanity had a beginning, My Volition is eternal; My Humanity is circumscribed, limited; My Will has neither limits nor confines, it is immense. A nobler and more distinct office I could not have given you.” (March 17, 1921). “My daughter, do not fear: do you not remember that you occupy double offices, one of victim and the other, the greater one, to live in my Volition, in order to give back to Me My complete glory of all Creation?” (September 20, 1922). This is why Jesus said to her: “Your mission is great, since it is not pertaining simply to the personal sanctification, but it deals with involving everything and everyone in the preparation of the Kingdom of My Volition, for human generations.” (August 22, 1926). Saint Annibale M. di Francia wrote about Luisa: “Our Lord, who from century to century, always increases the marvels of His love, seems that with this virgin, whom He calls the smallest he could find on earth, destitute of any learning, wished to form an instrument that will be proper for a mission so sublime, that no other creature could be compared to her; that is the triumph of the Divine Will on the bereaved universe, in conformity with what is said in the Our Father, ‘Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven’”. 16 – The profound reading of Luisa’s writings soon makes one’s soul feel almost “lost”, as if in a wooded area without boundaries. Could one obtain some counseling, advice or precaution to gain a sense of orientation? First of all one must realize that in Luisa’s case it’s not possible to separate her spirituality from her doctrine, both of which are not hers after all, since they belong to Jesus. They do become hers but only at a later date. She has written only what she has lived, what she has experienced. Her interior life is exactly the life of the Divine Will, hence, to ponder the consideration of her single, multiple or resplendent virtues, is to lose sight of the fact that they are the leaves or the flowers belonging to the very tree of the Divine Will, the fruit of which is the Kingdom. What should interest us the most is: How was this tree planted and how must it be cultivated? How did it develop in Luisa? Should we be interested in knowing it, so that, as we read her writings, the same development will take place in us. Reading his writings, it would be wrong to consider each topic independently of the whole and its context. To do so, to take it apart, one would more or less falsify every argument, since it is the harmonious interdependence and the unity of the whole that makes it such a unique message. The message presented by these writings is not a theme amongst many others. This message is the most universal theme there can possibly be. It is the theme of the revelation and promulgation of the Divine Will; it is the Theme of themes which in these writings reaches the peak of the manifestation and 15 communication of God to humanity. This theme contains any other theme that can possibly exist in the entire universe; it contains the triumph of the Kingdom of God on earth, even though this triumph resides in the human acceptance of such manifestation and communication. In reading Luisa’s writings, the first point of reference is the revelation of what is the Divine Will within the three Persons of the Most Holy Trinity. The center of the design is the Word Incarnate; and the final point is the Kingdom of God through the gift of the Divine Volition. Nothing else exists. 17 – What should our attitude be in approaching Luisa’s writings, Luisa’s spirituality? First of all, if for a just interpretation of what Luisa has written, as said by the Lord, it is necessary to know its context and the determined situation in which it has been written, etc., in the same manner that the good eyesight of the reader is just as indispensable, for: “the eye is the lamp of the body…” (Mt. 6,22-23). With regard to a previous and fundamental matter of Luisa’s writings, the question is: with what attitude do we approach these writings? With that of the rationalist who believes that everything is explained psychologically? I sustain that after a first encounter with the writings, it becomes necessary to listen with the heart - “If today you hear His voice, harden not your heart…” We should ask ourselves: Who says these things? Luisa or Our Lord? Do they come from her or from whom? Is there anything which could demonstrate the impossibility that they come from the Lord? In order to have a sure key for discernment, Jesus passes on to us this key that burns; “My doctrine is not mine, it belongs to the One who sent Me. He who wishes to do His Will, will know if this doctrine comes from God or if I am speaking on My own” (Jn. 7,16-17). In other words, before entering the reading of such writings, in order not to hinder the correct understanding of their content, we must clarify this: Is Luisa’s affirmation that it is Jesus who speaks to her, (to us) something subjective of hers or is it an objective reality? Can we accept the latter as possible? Are we ready to recognize it with all its consequences? Jesus tells her: “I reveal myself to humble and simple people, because they immediately give credit to my graces and they keep them in great esteem, even though they are ignorant and poor; whereas with these others that you see, I am very reluctant, because the first step for a soul to get closer to Me is faith, and so it happens that these people, with all their science and their doctrine, and at times even holiness, never taste a ray of celestial light. They instead walk in their natural way without ever touching –not even in the smallest part– of that which is supernatural” (May 19, 1899). 18 – Could a useful method or itinerary be outlined in order to follow the reading of Luisa’s writing? It is like climbing a mountain: it cannot be done by jumping from here to there. The indispensable basis of departure must be a sufficient knowledge of 16 the Gospel and of Sacred Scriptures in general. Hence following this order: beginning where Luisa began writing, her very first volume, taking for Himself all the teachings, and leaving for Luisa her own personal things (mystical experiences, sufferings, vocation as a Victim…). Nevertheless, it is very useful to simultaneously read the 11th volume, chapter per chapter, since it sheds a great light on the writings, and it kindles the enthusiasm and love for the Divine Volition. Together with these two volumes, the first and the 11th, also begin the reading of “The Hours of the Passion” as an instruction of the love and knowledge of our Lord. As for the rest of the reading, it should be done little by little, so that the fire, properly nurtured, burst forth and not be a fire of straw. “If you find honey, eat as much as needed, not to become nauseated by it and be forced to vomit it” (Prov. 25,16). 19 – For now let us leave the subject of Luisa. How can we make ours her spirituality? It is obvious that the vocation of “victim” solely belongs to Luisa and to certain other souls called to this by the Lord (but before we scare us, we realized that basically means to be a “victim”?). It is also evident that her mission to initiate the accomplishment of the Kingdom of the Divine Will here on earth, is a unique mission, unrepeatable; yet, how can we put into practice what we are reading? The first Apostles followed Jesus who asked: “What are you seeking?” They replied: “Master, where do you live?” and Jesus: “Come and you shall see”. In other words: let us begin reading with the knowledge that Jesus has said: “Therefore, listen to me; and I pray you, my children, to read with attention these words that I am placing before you, so that you will feel the need to live within my Divine Will. While you are reading I will place myself next to you, touching your mind and your heart, so that you will comprehend and resolve to desire the gift of my ‘Divine Fiat’.” Knowledge is indispensable, since one loves according to the extent of one’s knowledge. When this knowledge starts to impregnate not only the mind, but the heart as well, you can notice that one begins to see everything in a different light, to have other tastes and desires, to pray in a different “way”, to enter into a different type of relationship with the Three Divine Persons, with the Celestial Mother... It changes your life without any awareness of how you can change it…, because your interest is now only Jesus and His interests… 20 – It is easy to say: “I am living in the Divine Will” while in practice it is simply reduced to: “I am living according to God’s Will”. Yet, in reality, in what does it truly consist? Only to the extent that it becomes a life that is lived, do we understand its reality and its infinite measure and we experience the immense distance between living in the Divine Will and just doing the Will of God. Jesus says: “I wish so much that my creatures would take my Will. It is what is most important to me, it is my greatest desire. Everything else does not 17 interest me as much, even the most sacred and whenever I achieve a soul who chooses to live in my Will, I become triumphant, because that contains the greatest good that there could be both in heaven and upon the earth” (March 23, 1910) “I always want you in my Volition… I want to feel your heart beating in mine, with my same love and sorrow. I want to feel your will in mine, so that by multiplying itself into everyone’s, it may give me in one single act the reparations of everyone and the love of everyone; and my Volition in yours so that making mine your poor humanity, I elevate it before the Majesty of the Father as a continuous victim” (April 7, 1917). “This is why I often speak to you about living in My Volition, which so far, I have not manifested to anyone. At best only the shadow of My Will, with the grace and sweetness that comes with doing it; but to penetrate it, to embrace its immensity, multiplying oneself with Me and penetrate in everything –even while still remaining on earth– in Heaven and in hearts, this is not yet known, so much so that it will seem very strange to a great many people and those who do not have the light of truth in their minds will understand nothing” (January 29, 1919) “I want the creature to enter into my Will and in a divine way, kiss my actions, substituting itself to all, the way I did. Therefore, let it come, let it come. I yearn for it, I long for it so much that I celebrate when I see the creature entering this divine ambiance, and by multiplying itself in Me, it multiplies itself in all, and it loves, it repairs, it substitutes everybody and for everyone in a divine way. Human things are no longer recognizable in the creature, only mine are. My love arises and it multiplies, my reparations are infinitely multiplied, my substitutions are divine…” (February 13, 1919). Luisa teaches us which is the proper task of living in the Divine Will: “…While praying, my intention was to enter into the Divine Volition; and in it, making everything mine which existed in Him and from which nothing can escape, (past, present and future), and making myself crown of all; in name of all presented it before the Divine Majesty: my homage, my love, my satisfaction, etc.” (January 5, 1921) “Do you deem it little that my Will, holy, immense, eternal, descend into a person, and uniting my Will to theirs I make it lose itself in Me, and thus make Me life of everything the creature does, even of the smallest ones? Therefore, its heartbeat, its words, thought, movement, its breath, are God’s living in the creature; the creature hides Heaven and earth within itself, while seemingly appearing as only a creature. I could not give you a greater grace, a more powerful prodigy, a more heroic sanctity than my Fiat.” (June 6, 1921). “It is a voice that echoes in everything saying: Love, glory, adoration to my Creator! Therefore, who lives in my Will is the echo of my voice, repeater of my life, the perfect glory of my creation” (March 28, 1922). Jesus has said in His prayer to the Father at the Last Supper what it must mean to live in the Divine Will: “All that is Mine is Yours and all that is Yours is Mine” (Jn. 17,10). 18 In effect, to live in the Divine Will Jesus must first take effective possession of all that is ours, (of what we are, what we have, what we do); He must be not only the spectator, but the protagonist of our lives as well, (“Come, Divine Volition, to think in my mind, etc.”), so that then one can truly say: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal. 2,20); yet afterward it is necessary that the creature take true possession of all that Jesus is, of all that belongs to Him and of His Life, doing all that He does, with Him and as Him. If not, one cannot say that “it is living in the Divine Will”. In conclusion, to live in the Divine Will is to achieve being (by grace) one only thing with Jesus, making ours all that is His in order to give it to creatures, to substitute what each creature does with Jesus’ Divine Volition and thereby to give back to Jesus, in a divine way, the correspondence for everything in the name of each creature. Or also, together with Jesus to give to creatures all the Love of the Father and give to the Father all the homages that are owed to Him by all creatures (adoration, glory, praise, thanksgiving, reparation and universal love). * * * And now, a question which everyone can answer within the privacy of his own conscience: If somebody comes across the writings of Luisa, but not read because they do not want, does he do so because he suspects that they may be error or because he fears that there are no errors? 19 EYES OF THE SOUL: FAITH The necessity of faith “Without faith it is impossible to please him, for anyone who approaches God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him” (Heb. 11,6). The greater part of the knowledge we have of ourselves and of the world that surrounds us has not been obtained because we have personally discovered them, but because they have been transmitted to us by others whom we have believed: parents, teachers, books, television, newspapers… while God, who could have personally instructed us in the truths that regard Him and us, has chosen to do so through the Revelation which he has made to others throughout history and which has reached us guaranteed by means of the Church: faithful human witnesses worthy of all belief and fidelity, and at the reach of all honest and rational investigation. “Faith is the realization of what is hoped for and evidence of things not seen. Because of it the ancients were well attested. By faith we understand that the universe was ordered by the word of God, so that what is visible came into being through the invisible” (Heb. 11,1-3). Contents of the Faith If a child were not to receive any believable testimony regarding him/herself by others (usually from its parents), that child would know nothing about himself: it would not know his name, his family, or his origins. And so it is that without Divine Revelation we too would not be able to know our identity, to whom we owe our being and our life; what is our true origin and the origin of all the people we see; which part of the world is our Country, what is our destiny or our duty… None of the most essential questions of mankind would have an answer. “Increase our Faith” That is what the apostles asked of the Lord. Who amongst us has the courage to affirmatively answer the Lord’s question: “I tell you, he will see to it that justice is done for them speedily. But when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” (Lk. 18,8). That St. Peter may say to us: “Therefore, its value is for you who have faith, but for those without faith: ‘The stone which the builders rejected has become the cornerstone’, and ‘a stone that will make people stumble, and a rock that will make them fall. They stumble by disobeying the Word, as is their destiny” (1 Pt. 2,7-8). Dearest, “for it is time for the judgment to begin with the household of God; if it begins with us, how will it end for those who fail to obey the gospel of God?” (1 Pt. 4,17). The time of proof, of temptation for all is approaching: “Be sober and vigilant. Your opponent the devil is prowling around like a roaring lion looking for [someone] to devour. Resist him, steadfast in faith, knowing that your fellow believers throughout the world undergo the same sufferings” (1 Pt. 5,8-9). 20 What is Faith? Surely the words faith and belief are amongst the most abundant in Scriptures. Just as a matter of curiosity, in the New Testament they appear respectively 242 and 243 times. Simply speaking, true Faith is allowing oneself to be taken, as a child, by the hand of God and allowing ourselves to be led by Him. This means that we trust Him, that we trust His Goodness, His Omnipotence, His Knowledge, and His Love. This is to honor God, it is to recognize Him, to worship Him, to glorify Him. This means being and wanting to be completely His and to know and feel Him totally ours. This is communion with Him. This way we have access to His infinite Knowledge; it is to take part in His Omnipotence, it is to experience His Love. It is as St. Peter says: “Although you have not seen him you love him; even though you do not see him now yet believe in him, you rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy” (1 Pt. 1,8). “…But without faith it is impossible to please him for anyone who approaches God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him” (Heb. 11,6).This is the first and last of the beatitudes of the Gospel that contains in itself all the others, which are explained only through Faith: “And you will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth,” says Elisabeth to Mary (Lk. 1,14) Jesus said to him, “Have you come to believe because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed” (Jn. 20,29) said Jesus to the Apostle Thomas. Condition requested by Faith Why do we say “the true” faith? Because there is no one who does not believe in something, and when one does not believe in God, he believes in foolish things. The light is God's gift, even the eyes there he gives them, but open or close the eyes depends on us: that is, the faith is a gift of grace, an initiative of His Love, but to embrace it depends on the good will of man. It must be in good faith in order to accept the grace of Faith. Therefore, “for one believes with the heart and so is justified (to be justified by God), and one confesses with the mouth and so is saved” (Rom. 10,10). Faith and Trust Faith initiates us in the true knowledge of God, and causes it to grow in us, becoming each time a greater living experience. Therefore, besides being declared with words, (the Creed) it must also be translated into works, (into life) works of faith. It is like a person who, upon entering a room, turns on the light by pressing a switch or pushing a button. This is a habitual action, simple, which we do in a natural way, without doubts or fears. This is how true faith must become to us: natural. Only then will all doubts disappear, every fear, all impossibilities, all limits and measures. These words which do not exist for God should neither exist in His children’s language. Therefore, only a true, living faith, which casts out all doubt, gives us true security; removing all fear will give us true peace; removing all impossibility will give us everything: “Whatever you ask for in prayer with faith, you will receive”. (Mt. 21,22). 21 But it is necessary to say that, as the faith grows in us, it will become less infantile and more mature, it no longer requests just anything, but it becomes more and more in tune with the Volition of God, according to the word of Jesus: “But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given you besides” (Mt. 6,33). Therefore, if you ask God for something, having "faith" which will give it, it is already faith, instead be sure that it will give us not with what we want, but the best according to his Will, this is a much greater faith and more beautiful, since becoming like a child, allowing God with trust to take us by the hand to lead us, believing in His Wisdom and in His mysterious Providence, is indeed the true maturity. Faith, when it’s alive, grows and transforms us As for the person who believes (the subject), Faith is like opening the mind’s door to God (to believe) so that His light may penetrate in us; and our will is the hand that opens the door from within. As far as the object believed, the Faith is given to us from the Baptism in the bud, as a precious seed which must be cultivated in order for it to grow to its fullness and produce its blessed fruits. Faith, therefore, is «God possessed as Truth». But our belief and the gift of Faith grow through a series of actual graces granted to us by God and through our correspondence to these graces which are received through prayer, spiritual readings (particularly the Word of God), the Sacraments received, as well as by means of the many daily situations… At times they are mysteriously disposed by God –extraordinary– even extreme situations so that we might make great progresses in the Faith. As an example, let us imagine an acrobat who, on Fifth Avenue in New York City, walks on a tightrope stretched over two skyscrapers at six hundred feet above the ground. The street becomes full of people, there are newspaper men, T.V. reporters, firemen, an ambulance, policemen… Great applauses, enthusiasm, betting. At a given moment, the acrobat descends, (supposing that he had not been already arrested by the police) and begins signing autographs and shaking hands. Somebody then bets that he will be able to do it all over again on a bicycle. To this most enthusiastic fan he asks: “Do you believe that I will be capable of walking up there pushing a wheelbarrow”? The fan answers: “Certainly, I am sure of it, since you are excellent!” “How much are you willing to bet?” “One thousand dollars!” “All right: then you get on top of the wheelbarrow!” Let us imagine that this would happen to us: During a Mass on Sunday, 300 people in a church were surprised at seeing some men walk in with their heads covered, dressed in black from head to toe, armed with machine guns. One of them, who seemed to be the boss, taking a microphone into his hand said: “Those who are willing to receive a bullet for their Christ, stay seated where you are and do not move, the rest leave here immediately!” In an instant, those in the choir escaped, the deacon and the altar boys disappeared, and the greater part of the laity left running into each other at the doors because of the hurry of 22 their escape. Out of the 300 about a dozen remained seated, trembling and seated close to each other here and there. The man who had spoken lifted his mask, looked at the priest, who seemed more dead than alive, and said: “Alright, I have gotten now rid of all the hypocrites. You can now start the Mass. I wish you a good day!” The armed men turned around and left. Did this really happen? I do not know, but you can be sure that it could very well happen here, amongst us, soon. This He did with Peter, when He invited Peter to walk on the waters towards Him, but all of a sudden Peter was filled with terror and began to sink. Jesus saved him, but he also rebuked him: “Oh you of little faith, why did you doubt?” (Mt. 14,28-31). This He also did with Paul who says: “We do not want you to be unaware, brothers, of the affliction that came to us in the province of Asia; we were utterly weighed down beyond our strength, so that we despaired even of life. Indeed, we had accepted within ourselves the sentence of death that we might trust not in ourselves but in God who raises the dead. He rescued us from such great danger of death, and he will continue to rescue us; in him we have put our hope [that] he will also rescue us again…” (2 Cor. 1,8-10). This he did with Lazarus’s sisters when they sent word to Him that their brother was ill and to come to heal their brother. He rewards their faith by allowing the situation to deteriorate to the point of death. Here too, Martha, although she had declared her intellectual faith saying: (She said to him, “Yes, Lord. I have come to believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one who is coming into the world”); she nevertheless is about to doubt, and Jesus immediately tells her: “Did I not tell you that if you believe you will see the glory of God?” (Jn. 11). Why does the Lord demand so much faith from us? For example, when Jesus went with the synagogue’s chief, Jairus, to his house to heal his daughter who was extremely ill. While he was still speaking, people from the synagogue official’s house arrived and said, “Your daughter has died; why trouble the teacher any longer?” Disregarding the message that was reported, Jesus said to the synagogue official, “Do not be afraid; just have faith” (Mk. 5, 35-36). It was like saying: “If you now doubt, if you now should deny me the support of your faith, you will impede me from intervening!” So instead of a healing, they obtained a resurrection! It seems as if the Lord enjoys these games. “Double or nothing?” Yes, He demands faith, simple and sure, to justify His divine intervention. The greater the favor He is about to grant, the greater the faith is required from the creature. But in order to live by faith, considering faith as the most precious treasure there is, God sometimes allows our life to be surrounded by very normal things (while to His eyes, the person’s faith converts them to extraordinary and important things). At times He even leaves the soul with some miseries, involuntary defects and some sins, to keep the soul humble and thus protecting the soul against self-importance and from the thieves who are self-love, while promoting the will to do more for the Lord. This is why the Lord said to St. Paul: 23 “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12,9). Theological faith and human faith Faith is supporting our consent on the testimony of Jesus, on the Word of God, who can not be deceived nor deceive us, rather than on what our senses perceive and our mind is capable of thinking. Faith is that living connection with God, that true communion with God, which, at the outset of the news or the knowledge of it, converts into the certainty that it is mine (that sure hope) and in the experience of love (the possession of charity). We are speaking of theological, or supernatural, faith; which gives us a communion of life with God; but there is also another faith, human, like the one we give to men and their news, and often times we are invited to place our faith in things which could possibly have to do with our religious attitude and our relationship with God. For example, the faith we can place in private revelation, Marian apparitions, etc. It is true that they are not part of the Creed, but they serve, among other things, to test the kind of supernatural faith we possess, since “charity... does not rejoice over wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things” (1 Cor. 13,6-7). And thus Saint Paul says: “Do not quench the Spirit. Do not despise prophetic utterances. Test everything; retain what is good” (1 Thes. 5,19-21). This teaches us to discern. Faith, according to Our Lord’s teachings, in the writings of Luisa Piccarreta «… Jesus spoke these specific words to me: ‘Faith is God’. These two words contained an immense light that is impossible to explain; but I will try to relate them as I can. In the word Faith I understood that Faith is God Himself. Just as material food gives life to the body so that it does not die, so Faith gives life to the soul. Without Faith the soul is dead. Faith vivifies, faith sanctifies, faith spiritualizes man, and causes his eyes to be focused on a Supreme Being, and knows nothing about the things here below and should he know them, he knows them as they relate to God» (February 28, 1899). « Jesus, all goodness, has turned to the Confessor and said to him: “I want faith to inundate you everywhere, like a ship all surrounded by the waters of the seas, and being Myself Faith, being inundated by Myself, who possesses all, and can give, and do freely give, all to whomever has faith in Me, without you worrying about what will happen in the future, when and how and what you will do, I Myself will protect and succor you according to your needs”. Later He added: “If you will train yourself in this faith, as if you were swimming in it, in order to compensate you, I will infuse in your heart, three spiritual joys: the first is that you will understand the things of God, with clarity and when you perform holy deeds you will feel yourself inundated with so much happiness and so much joy that you will feel soaked, and that is the unction of My grace. The second is that you will feel boredom for earthly things and a 24 great joy for heavenly things. The third is a total detachment from everything and, where once you felt an attraction, you will now feel it as a nuisance, as for some time now I have been infusing this in your heart and you are already experiencing it, and thus also your heart experiences this, and for this reason your heart is flooded by the joy which detached souls enjoy whose hearts are so inundated with My Love that they are not at all affected by whatever surrounds them” (June 26, 1899). “My daughter, whoever nourishes himself by faith acquires divine life, and by acquiring divine life he destroys the human life, because he destroys in himself the germs produced by original sin, thus re-acquiring his perfect nature as it came out of my own hands, in My likeness, and even surpassing in value the angelic nature” (March 2nd, 1902). “My daughter, all things have their origin in faith. He who is strong in faith is strong in suffering. Faith makes one find God everywhere, it sees Him in every action, it touches Him in every move, and any new occasion is a new divine revelation which the creature receives. Therefore, be strong in your faith, for if you will be strong in it, in every state and situation, faith will give you fortitude and it will always keep you united with God” (March 3rd, 1904). “Daughter, faith makes you know God, whereas trust makes you find God, hence, faith without trust is a sterile faith. The shame of it is that, even though faith possesses immense riches to make the soul very rich, without trust it remains always poor and depleted of everything” (July 29, 1904). Faith is the sure way to unite oneself to God and to His Will and resting in His Word, accepting His Gift to make it our life. This Gift is so great and so precious that any extraordinary, sensible and prodigious experience compared to it in order to confirm that one has it and that it is what it seems to be, would instead throw a shadow instead of light upon it, thereby removing its credibility. Luisa writes: “After this, I was thinking about this Holy Will and how one does not see it in miracles, prodigious things of which humanity is so avid to see that they tour half the world to see one; here everything passes between the soul and God, and if the creatures receive it they are not aware from where this good has come… Truly they are like the sun that while it gives life to everything, no one notices it”. And while I was thinking this, Jesus returned and added, but with imposing aspect: “What miracles, what miracles? Is it not the greatest miracle to do My Will? My Will is eternal, and it is an eternal miracle, it never ends. It is the miracle of every instant in which the human will has a continuous connection with the Divine Will. Resuscitating the dead, giving vision to the blind and more, are not eternal things. They are things that end; therefore, when compared to the great and permanent miracle of living in my Will, they can be called shadows of miracles, fugitive miracles. Do not pay attention to these miracles: I know when they are convenient to do and when they are necessary” (November 12, 1921). Therefore, Divine Will is lived in pure FAITH. It shall be seen by its fruits, at a distance, that it has not been an illusion. 25 ENTRUSTING AND CONSECRATION ENTRUSTING is the act of delivery someone or something to a person, placing them in their hands so that they may freely do with them whatever they desire. It is the same as an offering, but it includes the addition of trust, as the very word indicates. It is as John Paul II’s motto, (and before him, it is also Jesus’): ‘Totus tuus’, all yours, o Maria. It is the testament of love that from the heights of the Cross agonizing Jesus made, giving us as children to His Mother. CONSECRATION means ‘making something sacred’, something or someone pertaining to or belonging to God, and, therefore, no longer destined for profane use or foreign to God. In this sense, to consecrate is equivalent to sacrifice, and to sanctify. Consecration also means also ‘transformation’. The supreme example of Consecration takes place in the Mass: the bread and the wine offered first to God, are consecrated by Him, in other words, substantially transformed (the Church calls it transubstantiation) into the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Jesus Christ. It is no longer bread and wine, even though it still retains its accidental elements (form, color, physical and chemical aspect), but it becomes Christ, present with the plenitude of His Being and of His entire life, to give Himself to us, and thus transform us, to the measure that we allow Him, into Himself. OF WHAT? Of ourselves: “I urge you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God, your spiritual worship” (Rom. 12,1). All that we are, all that we have, and all that we do and above all, the only thing that depends on us and that we can deny to God (which would be our greatest fatality), that being our will, which we usually call our heart. Jesus points it out by saying: “From within people, from their hearts, come evil thoughts, unchastity, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, licentiousness, envy, blasphemy, arrogance, folly. All these evils come from within and they defile” (Mk. 7,21). TO WHOM? Obviously, to God, just as Jesus Himself did, and as Mary. From the very first moment of her life, Mary consecrated herself wholly to the Will of God in order to obtain the coming of the Messiah. She consecrated herself to God, dedicated her entire person and her life to the love of God, to God’s Project; therefore, when the time was right, God ‘consecrated Himself’ to Her. Indeed, Jesus consecrated Himself to Mary from the moment of His Incarnation, and at the end of His life He renewed this consecration to the Father’s Will when, praying for His disciples He said: “Consecrate them in the truth. Your word is truth. As you sent me into the world, so I sent them into the world. And I consecrate myself for them, so that they also may be consecrated in truth” (Jn. 17,17-19). 26 Thus, it pleased God to come on earth and give Himself to us through Mary. God has desired that His Incarnation and His very Redemption come about through the free acceptance and loving collaboration of Mary, His Mother. In the same manner, God wants that we come to Him and we give ourselves to Him through Mary, because She has the task of uniting God and man: making it possible for God to become man and that each man, through grace, come to be as Her Son Jesus, as God. Therefore, this is a consecration to God as Mary did, through Mary, with Mary and in the Immaculate Heart of Mary. FOR WHAT PURPOSE? The purpose of consecration is to be presented and offered by her and like her to God, to God's Will, in order that through Mary, with her and in her Immaculate Heart, we may be transformed and converted into other ‘Jesuses’, in "image and likeness" of Jesus. In this way the Love of the Father shall be fully satisfied, perfectly glorified and this shall be the fulfillment of His Will and so it will finally realize his Kingdom. IN WHAT WAY? With many words and beautiful expressions? With a powerful prayer replete with theological content? With a few sincere words? All of these might be useful and precious, but the important thing is that this be done with the mind (to the measure that it is understood) and with the heart (to the measure that it is longed for and desired), ‘for Christian prayer never rises to Heaven if its flight is not accompanied by the mind and the heart’. How often should these offerings be made? Once in a lifetime? Once a year? Once a month? Once a day? Every hour? Every minute? Every second? Yes! In each breath? In each heartbeat? In each look, thought, word, act, circumstance, etc... ? Yes, yes, yes! It is not a simple gesture of devotion or a formality. It is a life to be lived, it is an allegiance with God through Mary, it is the goal to achieve. The Consecration will be completed and fully realized only at the moment of our entrance into Heaven. It is basically the same answer we should give, as St. John, to the testament of love of Jesus Crucified: Then he said to the disciple, “Son, behold, your mother”. “And from that hour the disciple took her into his home” –that is to say– into his life (Jn. 19,27). “It has always been quite clear that Catholicity cannot exist without a Marian attitude; that to be Catholic is to be Marian, that this signifies having a love for the Mother, and that in the Mother and through the Mother we find our Lord”. (Benedict XVI to a delegation of the ‘Marian Association’ of Regensburg, May 29, 2011) 27 O Mary, Mother of Jesus and my Mother, I entrust and consecrate my life to you, as your son Jesus did. I give myself to your right as Mother and to your power as Queen, to the wisdom and love which God has afforded you, totally renouncing sin and to him that inspires it. I entrust to you my being, my person and my life, and especially my will, so that You will guard it in your maternal Heart and will offer it to the Lord together with the sacrifice that you have made of yourself and of your will. In return, teach me to do the Divine Will like You and to live in it. Immaculate Queen, my Celestial Mother, I come to your maternal knees abandoning myself in your arms as your dear child, to ask of you, with the most ardent sighs, the greatest of graces: that You admit me to live in the Kingdom of the Divine Will. Holy Mother, You who are the Queen of this Kingdom, admit me to live in it as your child, that it may no longer be deserted, but populated by your children. Therefore, Sovereign Queen, I entrust myself to You, so that You lead my steps in the Kingdom of the Divine Will; and close to your maternal hand, You will lead all my being to live perennially in the Divine Will. You will be my Mother, and as my Mother, I give you my will, that You may exchange it with the Divine Will, and so I may be sure I will not go out of its Kingdom. Therefore, I pray you to illuminate me in order to make me comprehend what ‘Will of God’ means”. (From “The Virgin Mary in the Kingdom of the Divine Will” by Luisa Piccarreta) THE CONSECRATION TO THE DIVINE WILL There are people who think they “are living in the Divine Will” simply because they have consecrated themselves to It, that is, they have read or recited a prayer. Is this sufficient? We should clarify this. All creatures are in the Divine Will, since outside of It nothing can exist nor can anything be thought by God, but the important thing is to want to be, to have Jesus in us. It is want to stay, not only because we exist, but with our very lives, and therefore, calling it always to be our lives in everything that It presents to us or asks us to do. “I was in my usual state of adoration of my Crucified Good, saying to Him: ‘I enter into your Will, or better yet, give me your hand and place me yourself in the immensity of your Will, so that I do nothing that is not an effect of your most holy Will’. Now well, while I said this, I thought: the Divine Will is everywhere, I now find myself in It… and I say: am I entering in your Volition? But as I was thinking this, my sweet Jesus, moving in my interior, said to me: “My daughter, there is a great difference between those who pray or do something because my Will surrounds them and by its nature finds itself everywhere, and those who voluntarily, being conscientious of what they do, enter into the Divine environment in My Will to pray and to act in It...” (June 21,1923).
In Voluntate Dei! Deo gratias! (In the Divine Will, Thanks be to God) Oh adorable and Divine Will, behold me here before the immensity of your light, that your eternal goodness may open to me the doors and make me enter into It to form my life all in you, Divine Will. Therefore, prostrate before your light, oh adorable Will, I, the least of all creatures, put myself into the little group of the sons of your supreme Fiat. Prostrate in my nothingness, I beseech, implore your light who wants to invest and to eclipse everything that does not belong to you, so that did nothing but watch, understand and live in you, Divine Will. It will be my life, the center of my intelligence, the enrapturer of my heart and of my whole being. I do not want the human will to have life in this heart any longer. I will cast it away from me and thus form the new Eden of peace, of happiness and of love. With It I shall be always happy. I shall have a singular strength and a holiness that sanctifies all things and conducts them to God. Here, prostrate, I invoke the help of the most Holy Trinity, that they permit me to live in the cloister of the Divine Will and thus return in me the first order of creation, just as the creature was created. Heavenly Mother, Sovereign and Queen of the Divine Fiat, take my hand and introduce me into the light of the Divine Will. You will be my guide, my most tender Mother, and will teach me to live in and to maintain myself in the order and the bounds of the Divine Will. Heavenly Sovereign, I consecrate my whole being to your Immaculate Heart. You will teach me the doctrine of the Divine Will and I will listen most attentively to your lessons. You will cover me with your mantle so that the infernal serpent dare not penetrate into this sacred Eden to entice me and make me fall into the maze of the human will. Heart of my greatest Good, Jesus, you will give me your flames that they may burn me, consume me and feed me to form in me the life of the Divine Will. St. Joseph, you will be my protector, the guardian of my heart, and will keep the keys of my will in your hands. You will keep my heart jealously and shall never give it to me again, that I may be sure of never leaving the Will of God. My Guardian Angel, guard me, defend me, help me in everything so that my Eden may flourish and be the call to all the world in the Will of God. Court of heaven, give me your aid, and I shall live forever in the Divine Will. 29 “Who am I and Who are You?” Are truth and humility the same thing? “My daughter, only the small allow themselves to be moved as I desire, not the small as far as human reason but those who are small yet full of Divine reason. Only I can say that I am humble; what mankind calls humility should rather be called self-knowledge and those who do not have knowledge of self are already walking in falsehood. (...) Only my humanity was brimming with insults and humiliations spilling over. That is why Heaven and earth tremble before my virtues and the souls that love me use my Humanity as a stair with which to climb up in order to lick at least one drop of my virtues. Tell me, before my humility, where is yours? Only I can glory about possessing true humility. My Divinity united to my Humanity could do prodigies at each step, word and act, and nevertheless, I voluntarily stretched myself to the limits of my humanity, I showed myself as the poorest, so as to even be confused with sinners. I could realize the act of Redemption in very little time, inclusively with only one word, but I desired for so many years to make mine the miseries of man, I desired to take part in so many different acts so that mankind could be renewed in all things, divinized, inclusively in minimal things, being done by me, God and Man, received new splendor and then remained with the characteristics of Divine acts. My Divinity, occult within my humanity, desired to descend to such baseness, submit itself to the course of human actions, while I could have with only one act of my Will, created other infinite worlds… My humanity desired to feel the miseries, the weaknesses, as if it were possessed by them, it desired to be covered by all the sins of mankind before the Divine Justice and that it owed the payment of a bond at the cost of unbelievable sorrows and that by pouring out its blood it made continuous acts of profound and heroic humility. There you have it, daughter, the great difference between my humility and the humility of creatures, which before mine is hardly a shadow. Also that of all my saints, because the creature is always the creature and does not know the weight of the sin as I know it, despite the fact of being heroic souls, who by my example may offer to suffer the sorrows of others. Because they are not different from other creatures, it is not something new for them because they are made by the same clay. And later, to only think that these sorrows serve for new conquests and to glorify God, this is a great honor for them. Moreover, the creature is within the limit in which God has placed it and cannot go beyond that limit. Oh, if it were within its power to do and to undo, how many things would it do! Each one would reach the stars! But my divinized humanity had no limits, but voluntarily stretched itself within itself, and that was a knitting of all my acts with heroic humility. The lack of humility had been the cause of all evils that inundate the world and I by exercising that virtue would obtain from Divine Justice all goods…” (January 12,1900). 30 Which is the starting point in the dialogue with God? It is the Light of the Truth. In order to be in relationship with God it is necessary to speak His same language: the truth. “My daughter, all things have their beginning from nothing. Take this same machine of the universe, with so much order, that you so admire, if before it had been created it had been full of other things, I would not have been able to place my creative hand accomplishing so much mastery, splendor and adornment; the most I would then have been able to do would have been to undo all that I would have done, in order to do it as I would have liked. But it is always the same thing, all my acts must have their beginning from nothing and when other things are mixed in, it is not decorous for My majesty to descend and act in that soul. Now, when the soul reduces itself to nothing, comes up to Me and takes its being in Mine, I then act as the God that I am and the soul finds its true rest. Therefore, all the virtues receive their beginning in humility and of one becoming as nothing” (May 20,1900). The foundation of the spiritual life is self-knowledge, of its own nothingness, and the knowledge of God: “What do you possess that you have not received? But if you have received it, why are you boasting as if you did not receive it?” (1 Cor. 4,7) This is why Jesus tells Luisa: “The greatest gift I can give a soul is selfknowledge. The knowledge of the self and that of God go together. To the same measure that you will come to know yourself shall you come to know God. The soul that knows itself, seeing that by itself it can achieve nothing good, transforms that shadow of its being into God’s own, and performs all actions in God. It happens that the soul is in God and walks beside Him, without looking, without desiring to know, without talking, in one word, as dead, because knowing very well its nothingness, it does not dare to do anything by itself, but blindly follows the impulse of the Verb” (June 2 nd ,1899). When Jesus manifests Himself to a soul, He gives that soul self-knowledge of its nothingness and then He fills it with Himself: “When I present Myself to a soul all of its interior potencies are annihilated and they receive knowledge of their nothingness and I, seeing the soul humiliated, make my love overabundant as so many overwhelming goods inundate it and fortify it in good. All the opposite occurs when it is the demon acting in a soul” (August 27,1899). And to Saint Catherine of Siena Jesus said: “I am He who is, you are one who is not”. For this He has said: “I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit, because without me you can do nothing” (Jn. 15,5). That self-knowledge and disregard for oneself is both admirable and positive if it is united to the knowledge of Jesus and to faith in Him, because then it becomes trust and hope (May 26,1899; February 5,1900): “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me” (Phil. 4,13). But as to see our face we need a mirror, in the same manner in order to know the truth about ourselves we need to look in “the mirror” that is Christ: 31 “My daughter, what I desire from you is that you do not recognize yourself in yourself, but that you only recognize yourself in Me; so that you no longer remember yourself, nor even have any knowledge of yourself, but only remember Me, and not knowing your own self you would acquire only My knowledge. And to the measure that you forget yourself and you cancel yourself out, to the same measure you will advance in My knowledge and you will only recognize yourself in Me. When you have achieved this, you will no longer think with your mind, but with mine; you will no longer see with your eyes, but with mine; nor speak with your mouth, nor shall your heart beat with your heart, nor act with your hands, nor walk with your feet, instead you shall do everything with mine, for in order to recognize yourself in God, a soul needs to go to its origin and return to its beginning –God– from whom the soul came, and become uniform with everything of its Creator. And all that it conserves of itself and is not conformed to its beginning, it must undo and reduce to nothing. Only in this way, naked, undone, can it return to its origin and recognize itself only in God and act according to the end for which it was created. Therefore, in order to become entirely conformed to Me, the soul has to make itself indivisible from Me” (June 27,1900). Thinking of oneself is always a vice; the thoughts of oneself should immediately be united with Jesus: “The more a soul humiliates itself and has self-knowledge, all the more it comes closer to truth and, being in truth, tries to advance in the way of virtues, from which it finds itself very far. And it will be seen that it is in the way of virtues, it shall immediately become aware of how much it still has to do, because the virtues have no end, they are infinite, as I am. Thus the soul, finding itself in truth, always tries to perfect itself, but will never see itself as perfect; and this serves to be continually working, making efforts to perfect itself even more, wasting no time in vain matters and I, content with that effort, little by little I put in My finishing touches to paint My likeness in it” (January 1 st ,1900). “My daughter, the support of true sanctity is found in the knowledge of oneself (…) because with self-knowledge the soul undoes oneself and supports itself totally in the knowledge that it acquires from God, so that its acts are the same divine acts, for there is nothing left of itself. When the interior is soaked and solely occupies itself with God and all that belongs to God, God communicates to it all that He is to the soul, but when the interior is concerned sometimes God and sometimes of other things, God then only partly communicates with that soul” (March 23,1902). When a heart has knowledge of self, it is not affected by the praises or the disdain of others (April 23, 1899) and seeing the things of the world as God sees them, it guards very well its soul as not to allow them to enter: “My daughter, self-knowledge empties the soul of itself and fills it with God. Not only that, but in the soul there are many closets, and all the things that there are in the world, according to the concept that forms, so they take place, one more, another less, in these closets. However, the soul that knows 32 itself and is full of God, knowing as nothing, even as a fragile vase, rotten, smelly, well looking from the inside to get into another rotting stinking, what are the things that there are in the world. It would be very foolish person who, having a putrefied sore, gathered more rot to put it on his wound. However the self-knowledge leads to so much knowledge of the things of the world, that all is fleeting, appearances, goods with false appearances, betrayals, inconstancy of creatures, for which knowing what things truly are, guards itself of allowing them in and all of its interior space is filled with the virtues of God” (October 12, 1905). Knowledge of God becomes knowledge of His love “…Jesus has come in a light and looking at me, as if penetrating me on all sides –so much so that I felt myself dumbfounded– He has said to me: “Who am I and who are you?” These words penetrated themselves in me to the marrow of my bones and I could see the infinite distance that there is between the Infinite and the limited, between the All and nothing; not only that, but I also saw the malice of the nothing and the way in which it had muddied itself. I seemed to be like a fish that is swimming in these waters; like this my soul was swimming in this mud, between worms and so many other things capable of horrifying my sight. O God! What an abominable spectacle! My soul would have desired to flee before such a sight of God thrice holy, but with two other words He binds me, saying: “Which is my Love for you? And which is your correspondence to Me?” However, while hearing the first words, I would have liked to have fled, scared in His presence, with the second question, “Which is my love for you”, I have found myself overtaken, tied on all sides by His love, because my existence is the product of His love and if that love would have ceased I would have ceased to exist. So it seemed to me that the palpitation of my heart, the intelligence and even my respiration are a product of His Love. I was swimming in Him and even though I desired to flee it seemed impossible because His Love was all around me…” (October 28, 1899). 33 HOW DOES ONE ACCEPT THIS GIFT? If we desire for the Divine Volition to be the fount of our life, - 1°, We must truly know enough about what we desire, what it is; - 2°, We must remove the obstacle that is our own human will. It is as John the Baptist said: “It is necessary that He increase and I decrease”. Only to the measure that we “die” to our own human will can we call the Divine Will at any time to “live”, to “be resurrected” in us. To embrace this gift is not a magical formula, a simple prayer to be recited, but that –we repeat– it is necessary to know what it is, it is necessary to want it and it is necessary to remove the only obstacle: giving life to our own will (to do what we desire) when it is not according with God’s Will. Everything God gives us (the air, the sun, our breath, our sight, etc.) is free, the only thing that has a price is the Gift of His Will: the price is our own will. If we live in God’s grace and desire this supreme Gift, which God desires us to have even more than we desire it –the sure sign, even before we receive the news–, is that it is certain that He will give it to us. Yet it is not sufficient that God give this gift to us, it is necessary that we receive it. It is not possible to be dead and alive at the same time; to be in sin and united to the Divine Will. Our shortcomings, limitations, miseries, are not in themselves obstacles; if God had to wait for us to be without defects to give us this Gift as life, He would never give it to us. Sin is a different matter, especially if it is grave sin. To sin it is necessary to have sufficient awareness and intention. It is not the same to feel as to consent: feeling does not depend on us, to want instead yes. The Lord says: “My child, as far as my Law, (which you already know) is concerned, you can do anything, but call Me so that I do it with you, for if carried out by you, what is it worth? However, if done by Me through you, its worth will be infinite”. Once one understands that the gift our Lord wishes to give us is His Will (let us say “His heartbeat”) so it be life, and we want and accept it, then there is no act or instant of life which would not be vivified by the very Will of the Most Holy Trinity! Within this small human act, the eternal Divine Act becomes present and alive. And since it is life, it must grow: “So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Mt. 5,48). The Divine Volition grows in us according to the measure with which we get to know (this is not possible without reading Luisa’s books) and these truths become blood of our blood, life of our lives. It grows as we want to, to the extent that we want, in everything and at every instant. The indispensable basis of all this is the ever present and greater conviction of Who He is, versus who we are. He is “the One Who Is” whereas we are an absolute zero, a pure nothing who, before God, can only possess two things: 34 desire and availability; we must desire a total abandonment into the Lord’s hands so that He can turn us into everything. This is why Jesus more than once said to Luisa: “If you permit Me, I wish to be in you as both: an Actor and a Spectator at the same time”. To live in the Divine Will means allowing Jesus to live His interior Life in us. It means that His life should become our life. The Lord in Luisa’s writings teaches that, in order for the Divine Will to become easy, joyful and increasingly more amiable, it is absolutely necessary to get to know It more and more. This can be done by placing ourselves within the circle of the Divine Will; by pausing to contemplate its interminable values and attributes: “and during these pauses you will acquire more and more new and unheard of news of My Holy Will, and you will remain so bounded and enamored, that you will never again exit” (December 23, 1900). The soul must strongly look and fix itself in Jesus in order to be able to completely attract Him onto itself (February 06,1901). Nevertheless, to encounter Jesus we must go to His Mother so that She will teach us the secret of happiness: “My daughter, come follow Me so that you will find the way and encounter Jesus; better yet, I will teach you the secret of how you can always be with Jesus and how you can always be happy, even on this earth. Place yourself into my interior, where only you and Jesus are there in the world, this way you don’t have to be liked, loved or pleased by anyone else. You must expect to be loved and satisfied in everything only by Jesus. Being in this state, both you and Jesus, you will no longer be hurt by either the loathing or the praises of: relatives, strangers, friends or enemies. Only Jesus will be your total happiness, and only Jesus will suffice in all. My daughter, as long as all that exists down here on earth will not completely disappear from the soul, it cannot find true and lasting happiness” (August 21,1901). Desire, fidelity, and the greatest attention are needed to follow what God operates within the soul (June 06,1904). This continuous attention is a true martyrdom, because when the soul gives its will to the Lord, it must always give Him the liberty to do with it whatever the Lord desires: “My daughter, when a soul has given me its will, that soul is no longer master of its own will and therefore cannot do whatever it pleases, otherwise it would not be a true donation. To truly surrender is to keep continuously sacrificed one’s own will to the one to whom that will has been given. This represents a martyrdom of never ending attention that the soul makes to God” (September 13,1904). One must act with the intention of taking from Jesus the life of these acts and to perform everything in His Humanity, which for Him is like a veil enveloping Him: “My precious daughter, behold what an intimate union I have with you; this is how I wish you to be united with Me; and don’t think that I wish this union only when you are suffering or when you are praying, no. I want this union always: if you move, if you breathe, if you work, if you eat, sleep, everything, everything you do, as if you were acting within My Humanity and 35 your actions would come from Me, to the point that your own acts should be reduced to nothing but crust, and once the crust of your works is cracked there should appear only the fruits of the Divine labor. This must be done for the good of humanity, so that My Humanity will be found living in all peoples. By doing everything, even your most insignificant act, with the intention of receiving life from Me, your actions will acquire the merits of all of My Humanity, and since I am Man and God, I contain the breaths of all within My breath, as well as every movement, action, thought, everything I contain in Me, and so it is that I sanctify, divinize and repair all. When you act within my actions, you too will embrace and contain all creatures in you, and your labors will be diffused for the good of all, so that, even if no one else will give Me anything, I will still get everything from you” (November 28,1906). To receive the Gift, one must give oneself to Jesus and perform everything in His Will (March 20, 1912). Within the Divine Will the soul must die to all, as if in a tomb, enclosed by Love, in order to rise to the Divine Life: “My daughter, what is it? Do you wish to waste time or do you want to exit from your nothingness? Put yourself in your place, in your emptiness, so that the Everything can take its place in you. Know though, that you must completely die within My Will. You must die to sufferings and virtues, to everything. My Will must be the tomb of your soul; and as in the tomb nature is consumed to the point of completely disappearing only to rise again to a more beautiful and new life, so the soul, buried in My Will, must die to its sufferings, its virtues, its spiritual gains, and then resuscitate to Divine Life” (July 4,1912). Jesus shows the true and practical way of how to die to oneself and to then resurrect one’s own human being into the Divine Being: “My daughter, I want the true consummation in you; I don’t want a fantastic one, but a real one, done in a simple and feasible way. Suppose a thought comes to your mind which is not about Me; you must destroy such a thought and substitute it with a divine one, in this way you would have completed the destruction of a human thought and acquired the life of a Divine thought. In the same way, if your eyes wish to see something displeasing to Me, something not referring to Me, and your soul overcomes it, you would have destroyed the human eye and replaced it with the eye of Divine Life. And so it is with the rest of your being. Oh! how I feel these new lives running through Me, which are participating in all of my actions!” (May 21,1913). Those who truly love Jesus and act in His Will, establish a single heart-beat with Him. Yet, to achieve this, a perfect divesting is necessary: “Life must be more heavenly than earthly; more divine than human” (April 1 st ,1916). The divesting of the soul and the awareness of its nothingness allows Jesus to work in it: “My daughter, the more a soul divests itself, the more I cover it with Me; the more it is sure of its incapacity to achieve anything, the more I act in it, performing everything. I feel all my Love, my prayers, my reparations etc. being activated by the creature, and to honor My own self, I pay attention to what it wants to do so that I can do it with it. Does the soul want to love? I go 36 and love with it. Does it want to pray? I pray with it. In other words, the soul’s divestment and love, which are mine in the first place, tie Me and force Me to work together with the soul and to do whatever it wants to do, while giving the soul all the merits of my Love, of my prayers and of my reparations. With my greatest joy I hear My own life being recounted to Me, and I let it flow down for the benefit of all My properties, because this life is not the creature’s, who remains hidden in Me, but Mine” (June 14,1917). In short, to live in the Divine Will, Jesus says, "I want the 'yes' of the creature, which lends itself as a soft wax to what I want to do with her" (March 6,1919). “... But few are the souls disposed at this, since within sanctity itself the souls want something of their own; the sanctity of living in my Divine Will, instead, has nothing of its own, because everything belongs to God. To disrobe oneself of its own property is very difficult, that is why there will not be many living in My Divine Will” (April 15, 1919). “Were they to read these truths and remain undisposed, they will understand nothing; they will simply remain confused and blinded by the light of my truth” (October 23,1921). All that is needed to enter into the Divine Will is to remove the obstacle, the human will, it is sufficient to will it and all is done: “My daughter, the entrance into My Volition has no roads no doors and no keys, because My Will is found everywhere, It runs underfoot, to your right and to your left, over your head and everywhere. All the creature has to do to gain access, is to remove the little stone of its own human will, because were this human will to shamefully enter into My Will, it will make Me a stranger in My own Volition, while the human will could not participate nor enjoy its Divine effects. The moment the soul removes the little stone of its will, it will run towards me and I towards it; finding all my possessions at its disposal: strength, light, help; all that it wishes. This is why there are no roads, nor doors, nor keys. It is sufficient to want it, and all is accomplished. My Will assumes responsibility for everything, moreover, it will supply what is needed, allowing the soul to soar in the interminable spaces of My Divine Will” (February 16,1921). “Since our Will has infinite modes, and as long as there exists one soul that is willing to dispose itself to allow our Will to act in it, the failure of all other human wills will immediately be compensated” (December 27,1921). Once the news has been received, the soul must open up and dispose itself to get to know the truth about the Divine Will: “That is why all my attentions with you are so that between you and I, our wills run together and would always be in the greatest accord, so that the soul may open the doors and be prepared to know the truths that My Will contains. The first is to desire to live in My Will, the second is to desire to know it, and the third is to appreciate it” (January 25, 1922). “Lift up your heads, o gates; rise up, you ancient portals that the King of Glory may enter” (Psalm 23). 37 The truth of the Divine Will is more luminous than the sun, but the one who is not completely empty of its human will does not understand it, nor does it appreciate it. Luisa says: “I was thinking to myself: Jesus says many things about His Most Holy Will, but it seems that He is not understood. Even the confessors seem doubtful and placed before such an immense light, they remain neither illuminated nor attracted by such an adoring Will. As I was thinking this, my always loving Jesus, while placing His arm around me, said: “My daughter, do not be surprised by this, the soul that is not completely empty of its will, cannot have a certain knowledge of My Volition, because the human will forms a cloud between its own and Mine, and thus impedes the value and effects of mine. But despite this, they cannot say that it is not light” (June 23, 1922). “The sanctity of living in my Divine Will has no ways, no doors, no keys, no rooms. It invades everything, it is like the air you breathe, which all can and must breathe it. It is enough to desire it and that they leave to the side the human volition, then the Divine Volition will make them breathe from their soul, giving it life with the effects and values of the life within my Will. But if My Will is not known, how can anyone desire and love such a holy life?” (July 16, 1922). God gives the Gift without limits from the very first moment, but the creature receives it little by little. First the creature ought to prepare, should know Him sufficiently, love and desire Him; it should give sufficient proofs of fidelity, be disposed to any sacrifice so that the Divine Will may live in her. Only then it will complete the donation: “I want the ‘yes’ of the creature and as pliable as soft wax, so that I can mold it as I wish. Even more, it should know that before I called her to live in My Volition completely, I call them from time to time, I divest it of everything, I subject it to a special sort of judgement (…) How many times have I not done this for you? All these are dispositions to prepare the soul to live in my Will” (March 6,1919). “The why of so many graces, of so many manifestations of my Will is that the holiness of My Volition demands that before it is deposited in the creature’s soul it ought to be known loved and honored; that it has the ability to grow in the creature with all its virtue and potency and be courted by our own graces” (July 14,1922). “Thereby the necessity for the dispositions, the knowledge of the Gift, the esteem and appreciation, and the love for the same Gift. Therefore, as a harbinger of the gift of my Will I want to give to the creature, the knowledge of It. Knowledge prepares the way, is like the contract that I desire to make of the gift that I desire to give, and the more knowledge that I send to the soul, all the more it shall be stimulated to desire the gift and to insist that the Divine Scribe place his last signature that theirs is the gift and that it possess it. That is why the signal that I desire to give this gift in these times is the knowledge of the same” (December 25, 1925). 38 THE NECESSITY OF KNOWLEDGE What is not known, cannot be loved. We love with the same measure by which we know “The Sanctity of my Volition wants to be known… But if it is unknown, how can the creature love and wish to have so saintly a life?” (July 16, 1922). “Knowledge is the soul’s eye. The soul that does not know is blind to such a benefit, to such truth. Within my Will –Jesus says– there are no blind souls; on the contrary, every piece of knowledge grants them a greater vision” (April 2 nd , 1923). What purpose does every new knowledge of the Divine Will serve? “Each time I speak of my Volition to you and you receive new understandings and news, all the more value has one act in My Volition and more immense riches do you acquire. It is like a person who owns a precious gem and knows that it has the value of one cent; he is rich of one penny. One day he has his gem appraised by an expert who informs him that it has a value of five thousand dollars. This person now does not possess one penny, but five thousand dollars. After some time, he has occasion to submit the same gem to another expert, better qualified than the first. The new appraiser tells him that the gem is worth one hundred thousand dollars, and that he is willing to buy it from him, should he wish to sell. Now this person is rich and possesses one hundred thousand dollars. His wealth grew hand in hand with his knowledge of his gem, as did his love and esteem for the same jewel. Now he guards it with greater care and jealousy, knowing that it represents his entire fortune while before he did not consider it anything special. And yet the gem has not changed one bit; it is still what it was before, the change in him has been brought about by the new knowledge acquired. It is the same with my Volition and with the virtues; the more the soul gets to know and to understand its value, the more its acts will acquire new value and new riches. Therefore, the more you get to know my Will, the more your works will increase in value. Oh, if you knew the oceans of graces I open between you and me whenever I speak to you of the effects of my Volition, you would die for joy and would celebrate as if you had acquired new kingdoms over your dominion” (August 25,1921). As Jesus gives knowledge of His Virtues to the soul, He enlarges it, granting it a greater capacity for understanding the riches of His Will (September 2 nd, 1921). Doing God’s Will i.e., faithfully accomplishing what it desires, or accepting what it permits is not news. All the Saints of all times have done so, since there cannot be virtue or sanctity without my Will. Nevertheless, everyone takes from my Will, and has a relationship with It, according to the measure that it is conceded to him to know It: “…Without doubt there have been Saints who have always done what I desired, but they took from my Will according to the measure that they 39 knew about it. They knew that doing My Will was the greatest act, what glorifies me the most, and that leads to sanctity; and with that intention they did it and that is what they took because there is no sanctity without my Will and no good, small, or great sanctity can result without My Will” (November 6, 1922). Truth is infinite, Revelation is complete, but it will never end “I have yet many things to say to you –Jesus said at the Last Supper–, but you cannot bear them now” (Jn. 16,12). “But when he comes, the Spirit of truth, he will guide you to all truth. He will not speak on his own, but he will speak what he hears, and will declare to you the things that are coming” (Jn. 16,13). Revelation –the Church teaches– is only one: The Father is the Revealed, Jesus Christ is the Father’s Revelation, and the Holy Spirit is the Divine Revelator. Hence, the Revelation is infinite and eternal; it is not finished nor will it ever end. It is true that “the Father spoke His definitive Word” when He sent His Son into the world, but the Son has risen and He will never stop revealing His Father to us. Revelation has been given to us in Holy Scripture (complete and perfect), and in Sacred Tradition, which explains and illuminates them in an increasing manner. Now, if “the Book” is complete, so that not even a single page can be added to it, “the light” with which to read it must always increase. One thing is to read it by the light of the stars and the moon, and another is reading it by the light of “the Sun”… of the Divine Volition. And this is precisely what the writings of Luisa, “the little Daughter of the Divine Will”, bring. This is the reason why the Apostles looked to the future with such vivid desire. St. Paul says: “The night is advanced, the day is at hand. Let us then throw off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light” (Rom. 13,12). St. Peter says: “...Therefore, gird up the loins of your mind, live soberly, and set your hopes completely on the grace to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ” (1 Peter, 1,13); And St. John: “Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed. We do know that when it is revealed we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is” (1 Jn. 3,2), Or: “In this is love brought to perfection among us, that we have confidence on the Day of Judgment because as he is, so are we in this world” (1 Jn. 4,17). And to Luisa Jesus says: “…I have reserved even greater graces to those who write about Me, because they are the continuation of my evangelical life, the mouthpiece of my word, and what was not said in my Gospel, was reserved for those who later would have written on my account. I did not stop My preaching then since I must always preach, even to the end of all generations”. (February 14, 1922). To let His truth be known is initiative, gift and right of God Our Lord, while making many eloquent references to the Will of His Father, making quite clear that it was the most important thing, the only explanation and reason for His life, still, at that time He could not extend Himself in further explanations. “If I tell you about earthly things and you do not believe, how will 40 you believe if I tell you about heavenly things?” (Jn. 3,12). If man did not know the less, how could he have known the more? If he still did not know how to walk, how could he have learned how to fly? The Lord had to first re-educate him, redeem him, give him Grace, make him once again a child of God, assure his salvation, leaving for a later date, (the time established by the Father), manifest his Heredity to him, give back to him the gift of his Adorable Will and with it the divine resemblance which Adam had lost, making him one united thing with Himself, giving him not only their salvation but His own Divine Sanctity, and teach him how to live in the Divine Volition… This is the reason that when Jesus came on earth, He spoke very little about the Divine Will. He reserved it in order to manifest it through Luisa: “That which I had to do then, that is, the knowledges of my Volition that I had to give to all on earth, I have given to you; so to make them known is nothing more than to compensate for what I would have done on earth to complete My Coming” (June 2nd ,1921). Thus has God decided. And Luisa says: “My beloved Jesus, is it possible that after so many centuries of life within the Church, from whence so many saints have emerged (and many of them have stupefied Heaven and earth with their marvelous virtues), have they not done everything in the Divine Volition in order that this divine plan of which You speak would be realized? You were waiting precisely for me, the most incapable, the worst and ignorant person, to do that? It truly seems incredible!” Jesus answered: –“Listen, my daughter, my wisdom has means and avenues which humanity ignores, thus it is obliged to bow its head and, in mute silence, adore it. It is not up to man to tell Me what to do, whom to choose or the opportune time in which to reveal my goodness” (October 6, 1922). Jesus only makes His Volition known in Luisa’s writings Jesus says: “To no one, up to now, have I manifested. Examine all the books you wish and you will see that in none will you find what I have said to you about my Will” (September 12, 1913). Living in the Divine Will “is the Sanctity not yet known to humanity, and the one I intend to make known. This will be the last touch, the most beautiful, the most dazzling of all other sanctities” (April 8, 1918). “I often speak to you, not only about my Will, but also of living in My Volition, because, after having made it your own, you must get to know its qualities and how to live in It so that together with Me we may make a life in common and inseparable, and thereby reveal to you the secrets of My Volition.” (April 25, 1918). “…This is the reason why I often speak to you of living in My Volition, which up until now, I have manifested to no one. At best, only the shadow of My Will has been known; the grace and sweetness it brings when it is executed; but as far as entering into it, embracing its immensity, multiplying oneself with Me, and to penetrate in everything, in Heaven and in hearts, even while remaining on earth, to leave behind human ways and act with divine ways…, 41 this is not yet known. Indeed, to many it will seem strange, and those who will not keep their mind open to the light of the Truth, will understand nothing. But little by little I will open a path, manifesting one truth, then another about living in My Volition, so that they will finally understand it…” –“My beloved, if there is so much good in living in the Divine Volition, why then have you not manifested it before now?” (January 29, 1919). “How grateful you should be to Me for having admitted you into the secrets of My Divine Will!” (September 29, 1912). “…This speaking constantly to you about my Volition, of making you understand its admirable effects, something that I have not done for anyone until now…” (March 17,1921) Jesus exhorts Luisa not to omit any of His truths, even the smallest speck of it, because this might be useful to a brother, and she must open those channels. (October 23, 1921) This revelation contains in itself the proof of its authenticity As Jesus says: “The doctrine about my Divine Will is the most pure and the most beautiful of all doctrines without a shadow of matter, nor of interest, neither in the supernatural, nor in the natural order. That is why it shall be to the likeness of the sun the most penetrating, the must fecund and the most welcoming and embraced; and being light, by itself it shall make itself understood and open the way. It shall not be subject to any doubts or suspicions of errors, and, if any word cannot be understood, it will be because the splendor of the truth will eclipse the human intellect, thus rendering it incapable of grasping the fullness of the truth. Nevertheless not a single untruth will ever be found in it, in the worst case, not everything will be understood”. (February 10, 1924). The only Man who could say before his adversaries, without any fear of ever being proven wrong, “Can any of you charge me with sin? If I am telling the truth, why do you not believe me?” (Jn. 8,46), similarly with this doctrine He could say: “they will not find a single word that is not the truth”. Were it not so, we would be staring at a most temerarious, ridiculous and presumptuous, at “the most arrogant soul on earth”, as Luisa says. Exactly the opposite of what is his person and his life. From knowledge derives esteem, love and possession “My Will is the prodigy of prodigies, it is the secret with which to find light, sanctity, riches; it is the secret of all good, not intimately known; thus not fully appreciated nor loved as it should be” (March 8, 1914). Jesus cannot keep Himself from manifesting, even if only little by little, His love, the graces and benefits that He gives to those who live in His Will. He does not exaggerate. (March 21, 1914) “Oh! If everyone understood what a tremendous advantage it is to live within my Volition, they would compete for it, but oh! How very few understand it and live more in themselves than in Me!” (May 4, 1919) 42 “When My Volition becomes known, loving and disinterested souls will enter to live in My Fiat...” (March 2, 1921) Jesus exults in making His Will known. Every manifested truth is a new link of unity that He forms with Luisa and with all humanity. He has manifested all that He has done in order to establish mankind as heir to the wealth of His Humanity; now He wants to manifest what His Divine Will did in His Humanity in order to make all new generations heirs to of all the goods of His Volition (September 6, 1921). “How much avarice they have with Me! How many restrictions, how many things they do not manifest of what I say and understand of Me! Each new piece of knowledge about Me that they acquire is a glory, an additional love, that I receive from creatures” (October 29, 1921). “Sanctity in My Volition is not yet known; that is why they are so surprised because when something is known, it no longer surprises… What a grace it is for you to know it!” (November 12, 1921). “I still have so many more things to tell you, so many more truths still unknown to you and they all bring the happiness that each possesses… As many truths as the soul knows, so are the different joys acquired” (January 5, 1922). “All that interests me is that your will should live in Mine, and that you understand well what it signifies to live in It, to the measure that it is possible for a creature to understand” (June 15, 1922). The more one knows about living in the Divine Will, so much more one receives from It: “Of the interior acts performed by My humanity in my Divine Will for the love of all, little or nothing is known… Knowledge itself brings its own values, effects, the very life of its benefits… When I make known, it is because I want to give” (October 19, 1922). “Do you then see how necessary and important it is that My Will should be known in all of its relations, its prodigies, its effects, its value, what I did in this Will for creatures, and now what they have to do? This knowledge will be a potent magnet which will attract creatures and will make them receive the inheritance of My Will so that the generation of the sons of Light arrive: the children of My Will” (October 27, 1922) The Divine Will is possessed to the measure that it is known and that It manifests itself (November 6, 1922). “...It is My Will that I desire everyone to know and to address as a new Heaven and as a means to a new regeneration” (January 5, 1923) “When I speak of my Will so that the creature knows it; it is because I want to infuse My Divinity into the creature hence, My other Self… While I speak about My Will, my Love seems to overflow from its confines to form the seat of My Volition in the heart of the creature” (February 16, 1923). “When I manifest one of My truths not yet known, it is actually a new Creation” (July 1 st, 1923). 43 “LORD, TEACH US TO PRAY” (School of prayer in the Divine Will) Prayer is for the soul what breathing is to the body. Therefore the Lord has said “pray without ceasing”. True prayer is an encounter of love with God, it is an encounter of our will with the Divine Will. This encounter, prayer, demonstrates the attitudes and feelings of man towards God: the rejection or aversion to prayer is a lack of piety; the lack of prayer is a form of practical atheism; inconsistency in praying is a sign of a very weak superficial love; the easy distractions say that the soul is dominated by other interests or tastes or that his thoughts are still spinning around himself. A prayer that knows only how to pray learned, recited prayers does not touch the very heart nor his own life, let alone the heart and the life of God. Praying for the sole purpose of obtaining a particular grace makes it clear that the soul is not a believer, but a “customer” of God. To pray so that you can say to your conscience: “I said my prayers”, is like trying to talk to someone over the phone by dialing one’s own number. It is a missed opportunity... Prayer can show to God an attitude of respect or an attitude of distance, of fear of vain formality (which is not the true sense of respect), or indicate interest, repentance, need for help, or even admiration, complacency, joy, gratitude, compassion, reparation, intercession on behalf of another, love! And this is the true union of wills, with infinite degrees, and as a result, adoration. Prayer, in one word says to what degree man is a stranger or is familiar with God, how far or near, to what degree he feels himself a servant or a son. It is an encounter which transcends into life that nourishes life and in turn feeds itself on knowledge of the Lord, because prayer needs content. Prayer in the Divine Will requires nourishment with the reading of the writings on the Divine Will: “Examine all the lives of Saints that you wish, or books of doctrine: and in none will you find the prodigies of My Will operating in the creature and the creature operating in Mine. At most, you will find resignation, union of wills, but the Divine Will operating in her and she in Mine, will not be found. This means that the time had come in which my Goodness had to call the creature to live in this sublime state. In the same manner the way in which I make you pray is not found in any other” (October 6, 1922). This is not about speaking or reading certain prayers or expressions of Luisa, perhaps knowing them by heart, even if they are for us a model of the content; and it is not even a question regarding methodology. It is regarding a new spirit (Ez. 36,26-27), a new attitude of the soul which enacts the same manner of acting and holds the same divine sentiments of Jesus Christ. Now, more than praying, the Lord desires for us to become prayer in Him. Prayer that will be love, that adores, love that repairs, love that shares all with the Beloved, that gives honor and glory, that intercedes, that gives thanks, a love that loves for all and in all His works... It is especially significant this passage of the 12th volume: 44 «I was saying to my beloved Jesus: “Do not disregard my prayers; they are your own words that I repeat, your same intentions, the souls that I love as you love them and with your own Will”. And blessed Jesus told me: “My daughter, when I hear you repeat my words, my prayers, loving as I love, I feel attracted towards you as by many magnets; and as I hear you repeat my words, so many varied joys my Heart feels. And I can say that it is a feast for Me. And while I enjoy, I feel debilitated by the love of your soul and I have no strength to strike the creatures. I feel in you the same chains that I put on the Father to reconcile mankind. Ah, yes, repeat what I did, always repeat it if you desire your Jesus in so much bitterness to find a joy from creatures”» (June 4,1918). It must be said that Luisa’s whole life, exuded in her writings, is a continuous prayer, because it is an unceasing desire of love for Jesus. It seems that in our time some have discovered the Holy Spirit, the ‘so-called’ spontaneous prayer, praising the Lord. Well good, all the Saints have practiced this in their lives; but amongst all, in a very singular and original way, Luisa. It is sufficient to see the heartbeat of her soul in the continuous meditation of the “Hours of the Passion” which she was continuously started from the “Novena of Christmas” which she did when she was seventeen. Those hours are precisely her school of prayer. They are her school of life. To speak of prayer in Luisa it would actually be necessary to quote all her writings. Her two books particularly regarding prayer should be examined: “The Hours of the Passion” and “The Virgin Mary in the Kingdom of the Divine Will”. Let us study some of Jesus’ teachings: 1- The first condition for prayer is interior silence: “This constant murmuring in your mind impedes your hearing my voice more clearly, impedes that you feel my graces in you, and that you completely fall in love with me”. (Volume 1) 2- The second is peace, even when it is hard to collect oneself: “You have acted wrongly in allowing yourself to become so perturbed. Do you not know that I am the Spirit of peace and that the first thing I have recommended to you was to not ever confuse this peace in your heart? And regarding prayer, when you do not feel peaceful and collected, you must not dwell on why you are in that state, just remain quietly in it. As you yourself say, you create your own distractions…” (Volume 1) 3- Constancy is necessary in prayer: “Therefore, I recommend to you, first of all, continuous prayer, even if it causes mortal sufferings, not putting apart those prayers that you usually do; even more, the closer you find yourself to the precipice, all the more you will invoke me in trusting prayer with the full assurance that I will help you”. (Volume 1) 4- Spirit of continuous prayer: “What I recommend to you is the spirit of continuous prayer. This continuous seeking of the soul to converse with Me, be it from the heart, be it with the mind, be it with the mouth or even with the mere 45 intention, it makes it so ever beautiful in my presence that the notes of her heart harmonize with the notes of my Heart (…) and not only this, but it is so much beauty that the spirit of constant prayer creates, that the devil is struck as if by lightning, frustrated in his insidious plans to ruin that soul” (July 28,1902) 5- Encouragement, fidelity and attention at doing or following the work of the Divine Will: “Jesus allowed Himself to be seen within my interior, first only Him, and then all three Divine Persons, but all this in a profound silence, and I continued in my habitual interior work in their presence; and it seemed that the son united with me and I did nothing else but follow Him. But all occurred in silence. The only thing I did was to identify myself with God and all my interior, affections, palpitations, desires, breathing, were converted into a profound adoration of the Supreme Majesty. And thus, after having spent some moments in that state, it seemed as if all Three were speaking, but with only one voice, and they said to me: “Beloved daughter of ours, courage, fidelity and extreme attention in following what the Divinity does in you, because everything you do it is not you who does it: you do nothing more than to give your soul as a dwelling place to the Divinity. It happens to you as to a poor person that having a shack, the King asks for use of it and she gives it to him doing all that the King asks. Subsequently, with the King dwelling in that small shack, in it dwells wealth, nobility, glory and all goods; but to whom do these belong? To the King”. (June 6,1904). 6- Our prayer must be done together with Jesus (April 26, 1904), rather in “uniformity” with Him, with his own intentions, with his own Love: “My daughter, this morning I want to have you in uniformity all to Me: I desire you to think with my mind, that you look with my eyes, that you listen with my ears, that you speak with my tongue, that you act with my hands, that you walk with my feet and that you love me with my same Heart”. After this, Jesus united his senses, all named above, to mine, and I saw that He gave me the same form as His; not only this, but He gave me the grace to use them as He Himself used them. (August 12,1899) 7- Of what use is praying fusing ourselves with Jesus, becoming one in Him? Luisa writes: «As I prayed I was joining my mind to that of Jesus’, my eyes to those of Jesus’, and thus all the rest, with the intention of doing what Jesus did with his mind, with his eyes, his mouth, in his heart, and so with all. And since it seemed that the mind of Jesus, His eyes, etc., were all spreading goodness to all, it seemed to me that I also was spreading goodness to all, uniting and making myself one with Jesus. But a thought came to my mind: What meditation is this? What prayer is this? Ah, I am good for nothing! I do not even know how to reflect on something! But while I thought this, my always amiable Jesus said to me: “My daughter, how could you become afflicted over this? Rather than becoming afflicted, you should rejoice, because when you meditated at other times, in your mind there surged forth so many beautiful reflections, you did nothing more than take part of Me, of my qualities and my virtues. Now, having remained only being able to unite with Me and become 46 one with Me, you take me completely, and you, being capable of nothing, with Me you are capable of everything, because desiring, desiring the good, produces a fortress in the soul that makes it grow and sets in the Divine life. Later, as it unites to Me and becomes one with Me, it unites with my mind and thus produces so many lives of holy thoughts in the minds of the creatures; as it unites with my eyes, it produces in the creatures so many lives of holy looks; in the same manner, if it unites with My mouth, its words shall have life; if it unites to my Heart, to my desires, to my hands, to my steps, thus it shall give a life to each heartbeat, it will give life to desires, to the actions, to the steps ... But holy lives, because since I have the Potency of Creation, together with Me the soul creates and does what I do”» (June 12,1913). 8- To pray as Jesus prays, with universal prayer, in his Will: “My daughter, pray, but pray as I pray, that is, pour yourself completely in my Will and in it you will find God and all creatures; you shall give them to God as if they were one creature, because the Divine Love is the owner and you shall lay at the feet of the Divinity all the good acts, to give it honor, and the bad acts to be repaired with the Sanctity, the Potency and the Immensity of the Divine Will, from which nothing escapes. This was the life of my Humanity on earth. (...) Well now, why cannot you also do it? For those who love me, everything is possible united with Me. In my Will pray and present the thoughts of all in your thoughts before the Divine Majesty; in your eyes the looks of everyone; in your words, in your movements, affections, desires, those of your brothers, in order to repair them, to obtain light for them, grace, love. In my Will you will find yourself in me and in everyone, you will live my Life, you will pray with Me; and the Divine Father shall be pleased with all of heaven will say: «Who calls us from earth? Who desires to embrace in themselves this Holy Will that contains us all together?» And how much good can earth obtain making Heaven descend down to it!” (May 3 rd ,1916). 9- The prayer in the Divine Will is divine, immense, universal: «Having received Communion, I was saying to Jesus: “I love you”, and he said to me: “My daughter, do you truly wish to love me? Say: “Jesus, I love you with your Will”; and since My Will fills Heaven and earth, your love shall surround me everywhere, and your “I love you” shall resound above in the Heavens and even in the depths of the abysses. And in the same manner if you wish to say: “I adore you, I bless you, I praise you, I thank you”, you shall say these united to My Will and you shall fill the Heavens and the earth with adorations, with blessings, with praises, with thankfulness in my Will. These are simple things, easy and immense”» (October 2 nd , 1913). 10- Those who pray in the Divine Will do not need to place their intentions: “My daughter, those who are in my Will and do their things because I desire them, it is not necessary for them to speak their intentions. Being in my Will, when they act, pray, suffer, I myself dispose of all those as I desire... Do I like reparation? Do I like love? So I take it as love. I being the owner, I do 47 as I desire. Not so for those who are not in my Will: they are the ones who decide and I depend on their will”. (September 29,1912) 11- Effects of prayer in the Divine Will: «I spent the morning praying together with Jesus in His Will; but –oh, surprise!– as we prayed, one only was the word, but the Divine Volition diffused it in all created things, and the mark of it remained on them. It brought it to Heaven, and not only did all the Blessed receive the mark of it, but it was cause of new joy for them. It descended to the profound depths of the earth, and even into Purgatory, and all received the effects of it. But who can say how one prays with Jesus, and all the effects that it produces? Thus, after we had prayed together, He said to me: “My daughter, have you seen what it means to pray in the Volition of My Will? How there is nothing that exists outside of My Volition, it circulates in everything and in all it is life –actor as well as spectator– of everything, in the same way, the acts done in my Volition become life, actors and spectators of everything, even of the very joy, blessing and joy of the Saints. Everywhere they bring light, the balsam and celestial air that joys and happiness produce. Therefore, never depart from my Will; Heaven and earth await you to receive new joy and new splendor” (April 21,1922). 12- Complete reparations in the Divine Will, thanksgiving and love in the name of everyone and in everything: “My daughter, pour yourself out in my Will to give me complete reparations. My Love feels an irresistible need; before so many offenses of creatures, it desires at least one that interposes herself between them and me and who will give me complete reparations and love for all and that she will obtain from me graces for all. And you can only accomplish this in my Will, in which you will find me and all creatures. Oh, with what desire I am awaiting for you to enter into my Will, in order to find in you the pleasures and the reparations of all! Only in my Will, will you find all things in action, because I am motor, actor and spectator of everything”. Now, while saying this, I poured myself in His Will, but who can say what I saw? I was dwelling in contact with each thought of creature, whose life was from God; and I in His Will, multiplied myself in each one and with the Holiness of His Will I repaired everything, I had a "thank you" for all and a love for all; and so I multiplied myself in the gazes, in the words and in everything else…But who can say how this occurred? I was at a loss for words, and perhaps babbling the same tongues of the angels; that is why I stop here. So, I spent the entire night with Jesus in His Will (June 15,1916). 13- In the Divine Will the soul does to Jesus what all should do: “My daughter, in one who prays, loves, repairs, kisses Me, adores Me in my Will, I feel as if all were praying Me, loving Me, etc. In fact, since my Will envelops everything and everyone, in My Volition the soul gives Me the kiss, the love, the adoration of all; and I, looking at everyone in her, give to her as many kisses, as much love, as I should give to all. The soul in my Will is not content if she does not see Me fulfilled by the love of all, if she does not see Me kissed, adored, prayed by all. In My Will one cannot do things by halves, but complete; 48 and to the soul who acts in My Volition I cannot give small things, but immense, which can be sufficient for all. I behave with the soul who acts in My Volition like a person who would want to have a work done by ten people. Now, of these ten, only one offers himself to do the work, all the others refuse. Is it not right that he give to one alone everything that he should give to all ten of them? Otherwise, where would be the difference between one who acts in My Will and one who acts in his own will?” (April 2 nd ,1921). 14- What is the purpose to pray like this in the Divine Will? Luisa writes: «I was fusing myself in the Holy Divine Volition in order to go around through each intelligence of creature, and give to my Jesus the correspondence of love of each thought of creatures. But while I was doing this, a thought has said to me: What is the good of praying in this way? On the contrary, it seems to me that this is nonsense, rather than prayer! And my always lovable Jesus, moving in my interior, told me: “My daughter, do you want to know what the good is, and the effect of it? When the creature comes to throw the little pebble of her will into the immense sea of My Divinity, as she throws it, if her will wants to love, the infinite sea of the waters of my love ripple, are stirred, and I feel the waves of My love giving off their celestial fragrance, and I feel the pleasure, the joys of My love being stirred by the little pebble of the will of the creature. If she adores my sanctity, the little pebble of the human will stir the sea of My sanctity, and I feel delighted by the purest auras of My sanctity. In sum, whatever the human will wants to do in Mine, it flings itself like a little pebble into each sea of My attributes, and as it stirs them and ripples them, I feel I am given My own things, and the honors, the glory, the love which the creature, in a divine manner, can give Me. (...) Here is what it means to enter into My Will: to stir, to move My Being and say to Me: ‘Do You see how good, lovable, loving, holy, immense, powerful You are? You are the All, and I want to move the whole of You in order to love You and to give You pleasure’… And do you think this is trivial?” (July 1 st , 1923). 15- The prayer that seeks only the Divine Will: “My daughter, how My Heart is wounded by the prayer of one who seeks only My Will! I hear the echo of My prayer, which I did when I was on earth. All My prayers reduced themselves to one single point, that the Will of My Father be fulfilled, both upon Me and upon all creatures. This was the greatest honor for Me and for the Celestial Father: that I did His Most Holy Will in everything...” (February 22,1925). 16- This way of praying is a right of God and a duty for the creature: Luisa says: «While I was fusing myself in the Holy Divine Volition in order to correspond to God in love for everything He had done in Creation for love of creatures, a thought was telling me that it was not necessary to do that; that this way of praying was not pleasing to my Jesus; that these are inventions of my mind. And my always lovable Jesus, moving in my interior, told me: “My daughter, you must know that this way of praying –that is, to correspond to God in love for all the things created by Him– is a divine right, 49 and is the first duty of the creature. Creation was made for love of man; even more, Our love was so great that had it been necessary, We would have created as many heavens, as many suns, stars, seas, earths, plants and all the rest, for as many creatures as were to come to the light of this world, so that each one of them might have a Creation for herself, a universe of her own. And, in fact, when everything was created, Adam was the only spectator of all Creation, he could enjoy all the good he wanted. And if We did not do so, it was because man could enjoy everything anyway, as if it were his own, even if others also might enjoy it. (…) So, given all this –that in all created things God bound His love toward each creature– hers was the duty to correspond to God with her little love, with her gratitude, with her ‘thank You’ to the One who had done so much for her. Not corresponding God in love for everything He has done for man in Creation, is the first fraud that the creature makes against God; it is to usurp His gifts without even recognizing where they come from, and the One who has loved her so much. Therefore, this is the first duty of the creature, and this duty is so indispensable and important, that She who took to heart all Our glory, Our defense, Our interest, did nothing but go around through all the spheres, from the smallest to the greatest thing created by God, in order to impress Her correspondence of love, of glory, of thanksgiving, for all and in the name of all human generations. Ah! Yes, it was precisely My Celestial Mama who filled Heaven and earth with the correspondence for everything that God had done in Creation. After Her came My Humanity, which fulfilled this duty so sacrosanct, in which the creature had so very much failed, and rendered My Celestial Father benevolent toward guilty man. So, these were my prayers, and those of My inseparable Mama. Do you not desire, then, to repeat My very prayers? Even more, this is why I have called you into My Will – that you may associate yourself with Us, and follow and repeat Our acts”. So I tried, as much as I could, to go around through all created things, to give to my God the correspondence of love, of glory, of gratitude, for everything He had done in Creation...» (August 9, 1925). 17- Different ways of fusing oneself in the Divine Will. The prayer of Luisa: «Many times in my writings I say: ‘I was fusing myself in the Holy Divine Volition’, and I do not explain further… Now, forced by obedience, I will say what happens to me in fusing myself. As I fuse myself, an immense void, all of light, becomes present before my mind, such that one can find neither the extent of its height, nor of its depth, nor the boundaries on the right or on the left, nor those on the front or on the back. In the midst of this immensity, at a point extremely high, I seem to see the Divinity, or the Three Divine Persons, waiting for me; but this is always mentally. And, I do not know how, a little girl comes out of me; but it is my own self; perhaps it is my little soul. But it is moving to see this little girl placing herself on the way within this immense empty space - all alone, shy, walking on tiptoe, with her eyes always fixed on the place where she sees the Three Divine Persons, because she fears that if she lowers her gaze in that immense 50 void, she would not know at which point she would end up. All her strength is in that gaze fixed on high; in fact, as her gaze is corresponded by the gaze of the Supreme Height, she draws strength along the way... Now, as she arrives before them, she plunges herself with her face into that void, to adore the Divine Majesty. But one hand from the Divine Persons raises the little girl; and they say to her: “Our daughter, the little daughter of Our Will, come into Our arms”... In hearing this, she becomes festive, and makes the Three Divine Persons festive, as they await the carrying out of her office, entrusted to her by them. And with grace typical of a little girl, she says: “I come to adore You, to bless You, to thank You for all. I come to bind to your throne all human wills of all generations, from the first to the last man, so that all may recognize your Supreme Will, adore It, love It, and give It life within their souls”. Then she added: “Supreme Majesty, in this immense void there are found all creatures, and I want to take them all in order to place them in your Holy Will, so that all may return to the origin from which they came, that is, your Will. This is why I have come into your paternal arms to bring You all your children and brothers of mine, and bind them all to your Will. And in the name of all, and for all, I want to repair You and give You the homage and the glory as if all had done your Most Holy Will. But, O please! I pray You, let there be no more separation between Divine Will and human will. It is a little girl who asks this of You, and I know that You can deny nothing to the little ones”... But who can say everything? I would be too long. In addition to the fact that I lack the words to express what I say before the Supreme Height, it seems to me that, here in the low world, we do not use the same language as in that immense void. Other times, while I fuse myself in the Divine Volition and that immense void comes before my mind, I go around through all created things and I impress on them an ‘I love You’ for the Supreme Majesty, as though wanting to fill the whole atmosphere with many ‘I love You’s’, in order to requite the Supreme Love for so much love toward the creatures. Even more, I go around through each thought of creatures, and I impress in them my ‘I love You’; through each gaze, and I leave my ‘I love You’ within them; through each mouth and each word, and I seal in them my ‘I love You’; through each heartbeat, work and step, and I cover them with my ‘I love You’ to my God. I go down deep, into the sea, into the depths of the ocean, and I want to fill each darting fish, each drop of water, with my ‘I love You’. Then, after she has as though sowed my ‘I love You’ everywhere, the little girl brings herself before the Divine Majesty, and as though wanting to give Him a surprise, she says: “My Creator and my Father, my Jesus and my Eternal Love, look all things, on the part of all creatures, tell You that they love You. Everywhere there is an ‘I love You’ for You; Heaven and earth are filled with them. And You will You not concede to your tiny little one that your Will descend into the midst of creatures, make Itself known, make peace with the human will; and as It takes 51 Its just dominion, Its place of honor, no creature may ever do his/her will again, but always Yours?” Other times, while I fuse myself in the Divine Volition, I want to feel sorrow for all the offenses given to my God and I resume my rounds within that immense void, in order to find all the sorrow that Jesus felt for all sins. I make it my own, and I go around everywhere, in the most hidden and secret places, in public places, over all evil human acts, to feel sorrow for all the offenses and for each sin. I feel I would want to cry out, at each motion of creature: ‘Sorrow! Forgiveness!’ And so that all may hear it, I impress it on the rumbling of the thunder, so that sorrow for having offended my God may thunder in all hearts; forgiveness, in the striking of lightening; sorrow, in the whistling of the wind; sorrow, forgiveness, in the tinkling of the bells. In sum, sorrow and forgiveness in everything. Then I bring to my God the sorrow of all, I implore forgiveness for all, and I say: “Great God, let your Will descend upon earth, so that sin may take place no more. It is the human will alone that produces so many offenses as to seem to be flooding the earth with sins. Your Will will be the destroyer of all evils. Therefore, I pray You, make the little daughter of your Will content, who wants nothing else but that your Will be known and loved, and that It reign in all hearts”» (May 10, 1925). «... Now, I add that as that immense void becomes present before my mind when I fuse myself in the Supreme Volition, the little girl continues her rounds, and rising up high, she wants to correspond to her God for all the love He had for all creatures ‘I love You’. She desires to honor Him as the Creator of all things, and so she goes around through the stars, and in each twinkling of light she impresses my ‘I love You’ and ‘glory to my Creator’; in each atom of the light of the sun that descends down below, ‘I love You’ and ‘glory’; in the whole expanse of the heavens, within the distance between one step and another, my ‘I love You’ and ‘glory’; in the warbling of the bird, in the beating of its wings, ‘love’ and ‘glory to my Creator’; in the blade of grass which sprouts from the earth, in the flower that blooms, in the fragrance that ascends, ‘love’ and ‘glory’; on the height of the mountains and in the depth of the valleys, ‘love’ and ‘glory’. I go around through each heart of each creature, as though wanting to enclose myself within it, and cry out, inside each heart, my ‘I love You’ and ‘glory to my Creator’. I would want that one be the cry, one be the Will, one the harmony of all things: ‘Glory and love to my Creator’. And then, as though having gathered everything together, in such a way that everything says correspondence of love and attestation of glory for all that God has done in Creation, I bring myself to His throne, and I say to Him: “Supreme Majesty and Creator of all things, this little girl comes into your arms to tell You that all Creation, in the name of all creatures, gives You the correspondence, not only of love, but of the just glory for the so many things created by You for love of us. In your Will, in this immense void, I have wandered everywhere, so that all things may glorify You, love You and bless You. And now that I have placed for You the love between Creator and 52 creature in their relationship, which the human will had broken, as well as the glory that everyone owed You, let your Will descend upon earth, that It may bind and strengthen all the relations between Creator and creature. All things will return to the original order established by You. Therefore, hurry, delay no more: do you not see how the earth is full of evils? Your Will alone can stop this current, can place it in safety, but your Will known and dominant...” Then, after this, I feel that my office is not complete, therefore I descend down below within that void, in order to correspond to Jesus for the work of Redemption. And as though finding all that He did in one act, I want to give Him my correspondence of all the acts which all creatures should have done for Him, in awaiting Him and receiving Him upon earth. Then, as though wanting to transform all of myself into love for Jesus, I go back to my refrain, and I say: ‘I love You in your act of descending from Heaven’; I impress my ‘I love You’ in your act of being conceived; ‘I love You’ in the first drop of blood which was formed in your Humanity; ‘I love You’ in the first beat of your Heart, so as to mark all your heartbeats with my ‘I love You’. ‘I love You’ in your first breath; ‘I love You’ in your first pains; ‘I love You’ in the first tears You shed in the maternal womb. I desire to correspond to your prayers, your reparations, your offerings, with my ‘I love You’; I desire to seal each instant of your life with my ‘I love You’. ‘I love You’ in your being born; ‘I love You’ in the cold You suffered; ‘I love You’ in each drop of the milk You suckled from your Mama. I intend to fill with my ‘I love You’ on the clothes with which your Mama swaddled You; I lay my ‘I love You’ upon that ground on which your dear Mother laid You down gently in the manger, and your most tender limbs felt the hardness of the hay – but more than of hay, the hardness of hearts. My ‘I love You’ in each of your wailings, in all the tears and pains of your tender age. I make my ‘I love You’ flow within all the relations and communications and love You had with your Mama. ‘I love You’ in each word You spoke, in the food You took, in the steps You took, in the water You drank. ‘I love You’ in the work You did with your hands; ‘I love You’ in all the acts You did during your hidden life. I seal my ‘I love You’ in each one of your interior acts and in the pains You suffered; I lay my ‘I love You’ on the roads You covered, in the air You breathed, in all the sermons You gave during your public life. My ‘I love You’ flows in the power of the miracles You performed, in the Sacraments You instituted. In everything, o my Jesus, even in the innermost fibers of your Heart, I impress my ‘I love You’ for myself and for all. Your Volition has made everything present to me and I do not desire to leave anything in which my ‘I love You’ is not imprinted…Your little daughter of Your Will feels the duty, if she knows not of anything else to do, that at least you receive a small ‘I love You’ for all you have done for me and for all… Therefore, my ‘I love You’ follows You in all the pains of your Passion, in all the spit, scorns and insults that they gave You. My ‘I love You’ seals each drop of the blood You shed, each blow You received, each wound that formed in your body, each thorn that pierced your head, the bitter pains of the crucifixion, the words You pronounced on the Cross. Up to your last breath, I intend to 53 impress my ‘I love You’. I desire to close all your life, all your acts, with my ‘I love You’. I desire You to touch, see and feel my continuous ‘I love You’ everywhere. My ‘I love You’ will never leave You – your very Will is the life of my ‘I love You’. But do You know what this little girl desires? That the Divine Volition which You so much loved, and which You did during your whole life upon earth, make Itself known to all creatures, so that all may love It, and may fulfill your Will on earth as It is in Heaven. This little girl desires to conquer You in love, so that You may give your Will to all creatures. O please! Make this poor little one happy, who desires nothing else but what You desire: that your Will be known and that It reign upon earth”. (…) My sweet Jesus told me: “My daughter, to what you have said regarding fusing yourself in my Will, another appeal must be added, that of fusing yourself in the order of Grace, in everything that the Sanctifier (the Holy Spirit) has done and will do for those who are to be sanctified. More so, since, while We, the Three Divine Persons, are always united in operating, if the Creation points to the Father, and Redemption to the Son, the Fiat Voluntas Tua will point to the Holy Spirit. And it is precisely in the “Fiat Voluntas Tua” that the Divine Spirit will make display of His work. You do it when, on coming before the Supreme Majesty, you say: ‘I come to correspond You in love for everything that the Sanctifier does for those who are to be sanctified. I come to enter into the order of grace, so as to be able to give You the glory and the correspondence of love as if all had made themselves saints, and to repair You for all the oppositions and lack of correspondence to grace’. And as much as you can, you search within Our Will for the acts of grace of the Spirit Sanctifier, so as to make His sorrow your own, as well as His secret moans, His anguishing sighs in the depth of the hearts, in seeing Himself so unwelcome. And since the first act He does is to bring Our Will as the complete act of their sanctification, in seeing Himself rejected, He moans with inexpressible moans. And you, in your childlike simplicity, say to Him: ‘Spirit Sanctifier, hurry, I implore You, I pray You again – make your Will known to all, so that, by knowing It, they may love It, and may welcome your first act of their complete sanctification – which is your Holy Will.’ My daughter, We, the Three Divine Persons, are inseparable and distinct, and in this way do We want to manifest to the human generations Our works for them – that while being united among Ourselves, each One of Us wants to manifest individually His love and His work toward the creatures”. (May 17, 1925). ______________ In conclusion, there are persons that joyfully say that they do the rounds in the Divine Will…which is very beautiful if they really live (or make an effort to live) in the Divine Will. It is evident that it is not the same to do rounds by foot or on a bicycle, than to do them on a plane… that is to say, to do this in a human way, peddling ourselves, and not in the divine manner, which is born spontaneously when one lives in the Will of God. Therefore, this form of prayer is not a technique or a fashion, instead it is a Life, it becomes our life little by 54 The work of Sanctification little to the measure that our self-love dies in order to allow all that space to the Divine Volition. THE ORDER OF THE DECREES OF THE ONLY AND ETERNAL ACT OF THE DIVINE VOLITION 1 The Father begets the Divine Word and their mutual 13 Love “proceeds” 3 The Kingdom the Holy Spirit Mary, of God Mother of God 12 4 The fidelity The sons of God to the Grace (the elect (the Saints) of all time) 11 2 5 The Grace The Incarnate All created (Divine Life Word things in us) Jesus Christ 10 6 The Sacraments The proof 9 7 The Holy Give the existence Church 8 to the rebels (the elect) t (the reprobate) Redemption The Cross The Holy Mass The reign of sin (of Satan) This is the order (cause consequence) of the Divine decrees that form the only and eternal Act in the Volition of God. In these Decrees God awaits us for “walk” and so that we possess with Him, as did Adam, in the breeze of the afternoon (Gen 3,8), to recognize His marvelous Will in all of His acts and adore Him, to admire His Wisdom and His Beauty and to praise Him, to receive all the goods of His Providence and to thank Him, to allow His eternal Love to reach us and to love Him, to respond in the name of all, excusing them and repairing for them, and to ask in the name of all the supreme fruit and the finality of all the acts of God, that His Kingdom come “on earth as in Heaven”. The work of Redemption The work of Creation to be the Firstborn of all creatures to be the Redeemer to be the King of kings 55 The soul is called to unite to the Divine Will in all of Its works (Creation, Redemption, Sanctification) to adore it, bless it, offer thanksgiving and love it, invoking His Kingdom in the name of all. “Let there be Light!” It is necessary to have a clear understanding and concept of the content of our faith, especially in these times of confusion and spiritual error. Let us say together with God “Let there be light”, for love of Truth, because “the father of lies” is found in darkness, ambiguity, fog, deception and malice. 1 -“ Know that God is God”. There is one God. And God is Three Persons, not four. “Worship the Lord your God and serve Him only”, said Jesus to the tempter. Jesus Christ is a Divine Person, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity; He is the Son, “begotten not made, consubstantial with the Father”. They share the same Substance or Divine Being. Jesus Christ is the Uncreated image of the Father, He is the Word, the Other Himself of the Father. Jesus, by His Incarnation, has two natures: His Divinity and His Humanity. He is true God and True Man. By his own Divine Nature, He is uncreated, infinite, and eternal and by His Human Nature, He is true man, and His Created Humanity is limited and temporary. Jesus Christ is “Co-creator” with the Father and with the Holy Spirit in as much as the Three Divine Persons are inseparable in their Life and in their Works; however, each of the Divine Persons is attributed with a work or active role: the Father with Creation, the Son with Redemption and the Holy Spirit with Sanctification. Jesus Christ is the Firstborn among all creatures. All creatures have been created through Him, with Him, in Him, and for Him (Jn. 1,3; Col. 1,15-17) 2 - The Virgin Mary is and can be called “the Second-born” of the Father, known, beloved, decreed, and as such she was created in Jesus Christ, for him (to be his Mother) and with Him “in one single and eternal Decree of Predestination”. What therefore “God hath joined together, let not man put asunder”. The Virgin Mary is only a creature, she is not Creator, nor is She part of the Trinity; however, She was conceived in the womb of the Holy Trinity, She is a human person with a human nature (perfect and immaculate), limited and temporary as the human nature of Jesus Christ. Contrary to God, She is not the reason for her own existence. 3 - “Then God said; ‘let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness’… So God created mankind in “His own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” (Gn. 1,26-27). Notice that God speaks in the singular (there is one God) and works in the plural (Three Divine Persons). The double version of the human being (man and woman) reflects having been created in the image of God. Firstly, God created one male (Adam); on a 56 second instant Eve was formed from the side of Adam, and on a third instant, He called them to become a unity (one flesh). This unity as living beings is expressed in a third person: their son. Thus the image of the Three Divine Persons is seen in man individually as someone who possesses three faculties in his spiritual soul: will, intellect, and memory; gifts which correspond respectively to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And as a group of persons or family (husband or father, wife or mother and son) as a small created image of the Holy Trinity that must share in their same Love and Life with the intention to populate Paradise or Heaven after their time of trial on earth is fulfilled. 4 - “Image and likeness” is not the same; the divine image is in the human nature, in our being, created by God after his own model. Our likeness to God was meant to be in our living; that is in our way of loving, working, and being fruitful. Man should have been like God in his way of living by thinking as God thinks, seeing everything as God sees, loving with His Same Eternal and Infinite Love, having His same taste, happiness, divine rights (other than human!), operating as God, living the same life of the most Holy Trinity with his most adorable Will, which is source of all his works, Life, divine attributes, and of His own Volition and happiness. God has placed in the human natural life the image of his own Life; in the supernatural Life, the Grace, God makes man a share in his Life, makes similar to Himself, gives him the likeness of His Life. 5 - Man, created in the image of God, being responsible for his own life and destiny, thus equipped with free will (not the same as freedom), was placed by God in the face of this dilemma: God or their own 'ego', faced with the decision to adhere to the Will of God or to prefer his own human will. This was the proof needed willed by God to confirm him as son – but in the proof fits the temptation, stretched by the devil to ruin him. This decision was not and is not a real “choice”: God did not ask man to choose –for it is not right to choose between good and evil, life and death, or Christ and Barabbas!– but to make a decision for truth, goodness, life, God, and the Divine Will, not for whatever. We choose between two or more things which are considered comparable; therefore, we choose when we do not know the true value and most convenient of choices, but when we know, we do not doubt our decision; choosing indicates ignorance. “Choosing between good and evil”, after God expressed what was good, is unacceptable and offensive. For this reason, God asked man to make a decision, not a choice. This decision was to be manifested through obedience to the divine mandate to not eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. As one thing was the tree of Paradise, another the fruit of the tree, and yet another the effects of eating from it. Furthermore, the trees indicated were two: the tree “of Life” and the tree “of knowledge of good and evil”, from which God asked them not to eat, because it would not give them life but death. 57 If the tree “of Life” indicated the Divine Will, the tree “of Knowledge of good and evil” (of a knowledge which is not life) was image of the human will. Eat from it (give life to one’s own human will, against the Divine Will) would have caused, not life, but death. Those two trees were therefore kind of “sacraments”, instituted by God the Father, the Creator, since in their materiality mean a spiritual reality and at the same time give. They should have a physical reality (they are not only symbols or metaphors) but they express a spiritual significance. The respective fruits of one and the other should have been therefore real material fruits (nowhere is an apple mentioned); however, they had a precise meaning: either divine or human fruit, something in relation to the fruit of the womb or procreation. Blessed and divine fruit was that of Mary; without blessing and only human was the fruit of Eve; note that her eldest son, Cain, “was from the evil one”, according to the Scriptures (1 John 3,12). 6 - Man through sin has wounded and profaned the divine image that he carries within, thus losing his divine likeness to God. Man no longer resembled God because he wanted to do his own will instead of God’s will. Man sinned and lost Supernatural Life (Grace), thus also losing his natural life. His human will has withdrawn from the Divine Will; this is why the soul withdraws from the body. The soul experiences a spiritual and immortal death (in the sense that it loses Divine Life) and therefore also the body experiences death (when the soul departs from it). So, there is a double death: the soul’s death as well as the body’s. The death of the soul is sin; the death of the body is its consequence. This is why Redemption demanded that Our Lord Jesus Christ would take our double death in his Life and Passion: the Passion of His Soul and that of His Body. Sin is to reject God's will and Jesus has canceled it with His perfect adherence to the Will of the Father; the consequences of sin are the loss of all supernatural, preternatural, and natural gifts, culminating in death; and Jesus has destroyed it in Himself through His Passion and Death in a crescendo that started from the moment of His Incarnation. That double death corresponds to the two dimensions of human existence: one is during the time of the test and the other one is forever and beyond life. They are temporary death and eternal death, which does not mean back to nowhere but losing God forever, with all its consequences. The first death, which is universal (fruit of original sin), no living man can escape it, but at the end of history (end of the world) there will be a universal resurrection of bodies, and each one will go –body and soul– to their own definitive, and self-chosen destination: “For the hour is coming when the dead will leave their graves at the sound of His voice: those who did good will come forth to life; and those who did evil will come forth to judgement” (Jn. 5,28-29). From the second death, which is separation from God, it is possible to free ourselves while we are still alive through true repentance, reconciliation with God and divine forgiveness (given through the Church). But if the test of time 58 ends and man dies without Grace, without forgiveness and without invoking divine Mercy, the clash with Justice translates into eternal death and rejection of God forever. This burning lake, no more remedy, is the second death (Rev. 20,14). Since there is a double death, there is also a double resurrection. The spiritual resurrection is not just about recovering Grace, but even more it is for man to return “to the original order of Creation”, having as life the Divine Will. The second will be the glorious transformation of the body, at the end of the world. 7 - Having been the son of God by Grace man then became sinful, rebellious and through repentance he could only be admitted as a servant, in anticipation of Redemption. Two are the Comings of Lord. His first coming as Redeemer; His second, as King. In his first coming as Redeemer, He repaired the divine image, distorted and almost unrecognizable in man; at His second coming as King, He restores the lost divine likeness and leads everyone who welcomes Him back to the place, order, and purpose for which God created them. The Lord's first coming was to save man and re-open the doors of Heaven for anyone to enter. The second coming is to save the Eternal Decree of His Kingdom, by plunging heaven down to earth and renewing the face of the earth. The fruit of his first coming is to return the divine life of Grace to man and make him son of God (first resurrection); and the fruit of His second coming is to give man living by the Grace the possession of the Kingdom of God and the fullness of the goods of Creation, Redemption, and Sanctification. The first coming (or Advent) of the Lord was in “the fullness of times”. His second coming (or Parousia) is at “the end of times”; it is the end of waiting time and the arrival of the longed for time -the end of times of anguish and the arrival of the time for the fulfillment of the Kingdom, as St. Peter said: “Now you must repent and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out, and so that the Lord may send the time of consolation. Then he will send you the Christ he has predestined, that is Jesus, and Heaven must receive him until the time comes for God to restore everything, as he promised long ago through his holy prophets” (Acts 3,19-21). So we must distinguish the times of history: - the beginning of times or beginning of the world, - the “fullness of times” (Gal. 4,4), - the “end of times” (Gal. 4,2), - and the end of the world (the end of the history). Between these last two times there is a glorious time, a very long time for the fulfillment of the Kingdom of God promised in the Lord’s Prayer, the Kingdom of his Will on earth as it is in Heaven. It is what Revelation calls “the Millennium”. Image and prophecy of the same were the forty days that Jesus remained on earth risen and glorious before his Ascension into Heaven. 59 8 - God has created us to share His Life, Love, happiness, and Glory with us. He desires to overflow us with His infinite love in order to love us and be loved by us (because that is our happiness). But well, Love demands by Justice’ sake the correspondence of love: but how could the creature compete in love with God? How to fulfill the right of justice by loving with an infinitesimal love Him, who loves us with an infinite and eternal love? How could a little mirror tell the Sun: “I love you”? Would it suffice God to know that since the creature is small and limited nothing can be done and He must content himself with a substantial absence of the requital of His love on the part of the creature? “Nothing is impossible for God”. So He has decreed the solution: to offer His own Heart to the creatures so that they can love Him with His same love. Thus He gives man the very source of His love: the gift of His Divine Will. Naturally, this Gift is not part of our human nature but sheer grace, a completely undeserved gift. The creature should do no more than recognize it and accept it. This supreme gift, this royal and divine crown is what constitutes man as heir and king, “Adam son of God” (Lk. 3,38), a small god in the likeness of his Creator and Father, “son in the Son”. With this gift of the Divine Will, man could and should love God with His same Love just as the Son loves the Father with the Holy Spirit, who is Love. That which comes from Unity and which is distinguished in the Three Divine Persons is consummated in Unity by means of Love. In the same manner, man, created and coming from God must return (freely) to Him. Poor human words! The Reality of God transcends infinitely the poor concept that man is capable of expressing, for as much as they are (obviously) limited and inadequate, they, however, are not errors but are limited as man is limited. “He decided beforehand who were the ones destined to be molded to the pattern of his Son, so that he should be the eldest of many brothers; it was those so destined that he called; those that he called, he justified, and those that he has justified he has brought into glory” (Rom. 8,29-30). Man has been forever predestined; forever called (into existence = created), forever justified (i.e. redeemed), and forever glorified. That is, on God’s part; now we must confirm or ratify this vocation and grace in order to make it everlasting. “You will be like God”, proposed the father of lies to Eve, “to be like God”, but without God and away from Him. It is as if a ray of sun could exist by itself and become even a sun, away from the sun! This is our eternal vocation: to be like God by God’s grace, goodness and generosity. We are not like God, but He calls us to become like Him not in our created human nature but by living and loving with his same Will and Love: “By his divine power, he has lavished on us all the things we need for life and for true devotion, through the knowledge of him who has called us by his own glory and goodness. Through these, the greatest and priceless promises 60 have been lavished on us, that through them you should share the Divine Nature” (2nd Peter 1,3-4). “Your minds, then, must be sober and ready for action; put all your hope in the Grace brought to you by the revelation of Jesus Christ” (1st Peter 1,13) “Sons in the Son!” “May the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, give you a spirit of wisdom and perception of what is revealed, to bring you to full knowledge of him. May he enlighten the eyes of your mind so that you can see what hope his call holds for you, how rich is the glory of the Heritage he offers among his holy people, and how extraordinarily great is the power that he has exercised for us believers; this accords with the strength of his power…” (Eph. 1,17-19). Profession of Faith Oh, Jesus, my Lord and my God! I adore you, true God and true man, you give yourself to us in the Blessed Sacrament with your Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity, with your entire Being and Life from where the work of Creation, the work of Redemption, and the work of Sanctification proceed for the triumph of your Kingdom. All the work of Creation is by means of your INCARNATION, it is its finality and culminates in it. The entire work of Redemption is fulfilled in your entire Life, in your most Holy Passion and Death. All the work of Sanctification –which is to transplant in us Your Own Life– is fruit of your Resurrection, because you are the Incarnate Word, Dead and Risen! But your purpose was not only to create us, save us and make us holy, but to give us your Divinity, 61 and make us have as our life your same Will: for that is your Kingdom! Jesus, I love you! Come, Divine Will and take possession of all my being, my person, my life; 1 of all that I am, all that I have, all that I do; of my spirit, my soul, my body; of my powers, my senses, my limbs; of my intelligence, my memory, my will; of my mind, my heart, my breath; of my thoughts, my words, my works; of my eyes, my ears, my voice; of my movements, my actions, my steps; of my work, my fatigue, my rest; of my feelings, my sorrows, my joys; of the holy Masses, the Sacraments that I receive (or give), my prayers; of my past, my present, my future; of my life, my death, my eternity, to convert it all into perfect and universal praise of your Glory, life of Your Life, and triumph of Your Will. Jesus, may your divine Will become life in me and cover me with you. Today, I will do everything for you, with you and in you. In every moment of my life, may your whole life, death and resurrection live in me. Cover me with the mantle of your life, pain and love, so that I may adore you in your Truth, embrace you in your Immensity, and possess you in your Omnipotence. May you be glorified with your own Glory, praised with your own Wisdom, blessed with the very same voice of the Father. May I thank you with your own Justice, offer reparations to you with your own Merits, and love you with your eternal Love. At every moment I want to fill all Creation with my love that praises and thanks You, all of your Redeemer’s Life with my love that loves and blesses You, and all the Work of Sanctification with my love that loves you and implores in the name of all the triumph of your Kingdom. 1 - Each phrase, each line, expresses the mark of the most Holy Trinity who has created mankind to His image and likeness. 62 In this little Catechism of the Divine Will we see: 1 – The first questions regarding the Gift of God (p. 3) 2 – The spirituality of Luisa Piccarreta (p. 6) 3 – Eyes of the soul: Faith (p. 19) 4 – Entrusting and Consecration (p. 25) 5 – The starting point: “Who am I and Who are You?” (p. 29) 6 – How does one accept this Gift? (p. 33) 7 – The necessity of knowledge (p. 38) 8 – “Lord, teach us to pray” (p. 43) 9 – The order of the decrees of the “Fiat” Divino (p. 54) 10- “Let there be Light!” (p. 55) Profession of Faith (p. 60) “Jesus, I love you!” (p. 61)
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