(from private revelation given to Maria Valtorta on June 24, 1946)
Also excessive and disorderly love for religion and fatherland is sinful, because it becomes selfishness. And selfishness is always the reason and cause of sin. Yes. Selfishness is a sin, because it sows in hearts an evil will, which makes people rebel against God and His commandments. The mind of a selfish person no longer sees God or His truth clearly. Pride exhales fumes in the egoist and dims the truth. The mind, which in the fog no longer sees the pure light of truth as it saw it before becoming proud, begins the process of queries, and from queries it passes on to doubt, from doubt to indifference not only with regard to love and trust in God and His justice, but also in respect of the fear of God and of His punishment. And thus the easiness to sin, and from such easiness the solitude of the soul which departs from God, and as it no longer has the will of God as guidance, it lapses into the law of its own will of sinner.
Oh! the will of a sinner is a nasty chain, one end of which is in the hands of Satan, and the other end is fastened together with a cannon ball to the feet of man to hold him there, a slave, in filth, bent, in darkness. Is it then possible for man not to commit mortal sins? Is it possible for him not to commit them, if he is urged only by his evil will? Only then God does not forgive. But when man is animated by good will, and performs also spontaneous acts of virtue, he certainly ends up by possessing the Truth, because good will leads to God, and God, the Most Holy Father, bends lovingly, pitifully, leniently to assist, to bless, to forgive His children who have good will.
Our greatest evil is the opposition we present toward God’s designs, and the resistance we make to His inspirations; for either we choose not to hear them, or having heard them we reject them, or having received them we weaken and dirty them by a thousand imperfections of attachment, complacency, and self-satisfaction.
However, the main point of spiritual life consists in so disposing ourselves to grace through purity of heart that, of two people who consecrate themselves at the same time to God’s service, if one gives himself wholly to good works and the other applies himself entirely to purifying his heart and cutting away what there is in it that opposes grace, this second person will achieve perfection twice as quickly as the first.
Thus our greatest concern should be not so much to read spiritual books as to pay great attention to divine inspirations, which are sufficient with very little reading, and to be extremely faithful in corresponding to the graces that are offered to us.
It sometimes happens that having received a good inspiration from God, we soon find ourselves attacked by repugnance, doubts, bewilderment, and difficulties that come from our corrupt nature and from our passions that are contrary to divine inspiration. If we receive that inspiration with total submission of heart, it will fill us with the peace and consolation that the Spirit of God brings with Him, and that He communicates to souls whom He encounters no resistance in.
-Father Louis Lallemant, “Doctrine spirituelle”
