Jesus, in private revelation given to Gabrielle Bossis, on January 17, 1946:
Don’t you see that faith should permeate everything you do? Faith in My actual Presence in you. Faith in the love that is leading. When you are very sure of the love living in you, what a change in your life, My child!
You know the difference between a solitary voyage and one with a companion—two dear friends, or a man and his wife? There is no comparison, is there? Well, when you have given Me the joy and honor of sharing everything with My all-loving Presence, your being will be, as it were, enfolded in another being—Mine. So try to form the habit of seeing everything with the eyes of faith. You can practice this many times during the day.
You don’t like to run out of wool or thread for your spinning wheel, do you? And you find it easy to make provision for all these earthly things. Then how could you go through this life, so brief in reality yet so seemingly long, without this spirit of faith so necessary for holiness? Faith—the living spring of the fountain of love.
And do you realize that love is the one and only goal and that everything should serve to lead you to it? A very little thing becomes big if it takes you to love. O humility… contrition—if love enlivens you, what power is yours, close to the heart of the Man-God! And how could you love if you did not believe in the love living in your heart? My home is there.
Jesus, in private revelation given to Maria Valtorta, on June 21, 1944:
When the bride leaves her parents’ home, then, and becomes the wife of the man she loves, she rises to a greater degree of love. They are no longer two who love one another. They are one loving himself in his double. One loves himself reflected in the other, for love fastens them into such a tight knot that joy annuls personality, and the two individuals relish a single joy.
These correspond to the first two periods in mystical betrothal. First, you are loved and become fond of God, Who loves you. You then penetrate into a higher love and rejoice in His joys, which become yours. But this is not the perfection of the bride. I have already told you this and now repeat it to you in response to your question. “Why, now, do You no longer speak those words of such secure peace, of such an affirmative promise that You would spare me certain pains?” you asked a short time ago while rereading the pages in October.
O Maria! Why! Because I have taken you higher.
Men accuse Me of repeating Myself in My statements. But if I must repeat Myself with you, that are entirely intent on listening to Me and seem to Me like a little bird in its nest with its mouth wide open, waiting for the food which its father offers it—your food, which is My word—how can I fail to repeat Myself when speaking for those who are not attentive to Me? I must reiterate the same truths once, twice, a hundred or a thousand times to get a morsel of them into their hearts and arouse light there. And if that light later goes out, I am not to blame, and they cannot accuse Me of their blindness.
Now I tell you this. When the exciting period of love has passed, love matures into a dignified strength in both the man and the woman, shortly before, nothing more than two inhabitants of the earth and later becoming one single flesh, and it makes them a father and a mother who love one another over a cradle and look at each other, saying, saying as God the Creator said on observing man, “We have made a creature who is eternal, who belongs to the Heavens, to God.” This is man’s destiny, and if his ill will does not pervert it, this is his glorious goal. But when they arrive at this perfect union, doesn’t the wife also become a mother, sister, and friend to her husband?
Oh, what a sweet comfort for man is the woman able to love him with such perfection that he can convey all his thoughts to her and be sure they are understood and will find consolation!
Oh, blessed is the house where the sanctity of the Sacrament lives in the true sense of the word and produces an inexhaustible flowering of acts of love. Not only love in the flesh, but more in the spirit. A love which lasts and, indeed, grows, as the years and concerns grow. A love which is true love. For it is not limited to loving for enjoyment, but embraces a spouse’s pain and bears it with oneself to lighten its weight.
Do two who weep together love one another less than two who kiss each other and smile? No, Maria. They love one another more. A man shows he esteems his wife greatly if he entrusts everything about himself to her to receive her advice and comfort. A woman shows she loves her husband greatly if she is able to understand him in his thoughts and willingly helps him to bear his concerns. There will no longer be fiery kisses and words of poetry. But there will be caresses from soul to soul and secret words which spirits murmur to each other, giving one another the peace of true love. Of true marriage.
Well then, soul of Mine. You are now in this state. With your love fused to Mine, you have given birth to children. All those who have known Me, or known Me better, through your active love are children you have given Me. You will meet them one day and rejoice.
Now that I love you many times more for every child you have given Me, now that I know that you love Me to the point of wanting to take upon yourself the cross of what I am concerned about, for the glory of your Lord spurs you more than your life. I thus act with you as a Husband Who is sure of his wife. I no longer show you only a smile, but My tears as well. I no longer caress you with roses, but impress roses of blood upon your heart, leaning you against My brow crowned with thorns; I no longer kiss you with My lips soaked in honey and wine, but with My mouth bitter with the vinegar and gall which was My last beverage and with which there was mixed the acrid taste of the blood rising from My lungs, broken in the last death rattle. If I treat you like this, it is because I regard you as a “strong woman,” in the biblical sense of the word (cf. Proverbs 31:10-31).
Oh, how restful for Me to have hearts like these! You generous ones who are able to love—give this rest to the Eternal Beggar, Who goes on asking you for love and receives only indifference and offenses. Give it to Me, Maria. And do not be afraid that you have descended. If you had the wings of an angel, you would always rise less swiftly than you do with the wings of generous love.
Each flower in a bouquet is important. No one flower is more important or less important, but each one is indispensably valuable. What a joy for each member of the Church when he realizes and accepts this truth. How much bitterness would disappear from hearts, how much evil talk would cease, how many would be healed from a belief that they are inferior beings.
—Father Slavko Barbarić, “In the School of Love”
