May 21, 1945prev home
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Monday after Pentecost, 11 a.m.
The wave of sweetness promised me last night by the Paraclete is a welcome event, squeezing tears of joy out of me. It came with an entirely spiritual caress, with a breath which was a very light kiss, grazing my forehead, and with such a deep impetus of love in me that my physical heart suffered therefrom, and at the same time all is sweetness and joy. And, simultaneously, the voiceless Voice of the Paraclete spoke and speaks to me, bringing me, as a metaphor for the way God loves me, the lily which blossomed.42 Their lily.... He says:
“You are loved like this.... You are maintained like this.... [He waits for me to write the foregoing and then continues.] God is your strength. See how the stem is quite rigid. It lacks nothing, not even leaves, which are not useless, but necessary for the protection of the flower. God is your stem; the divine virtues, your leaves. God is your end. The flower is at the top of the stem. You are like the long pistil protruding from the calix of snow, surrounded by the golden flames of the anthers filled with pollen. God loves you like this. He created you, sinking you into the earth, like a bulb in a flowerbed, but He gave you a soul - the core of your life - and, after having mortified it by having it taste the mortifying darkness of the earth, He took that soul ever upwards, protecting it with the virtues set as a defense, inhaling it as far as the white embrace of the Eternal Corolla: our Most Holy Trinity. Our love enwraps you exactly like this - in whiteness and fire, peace and rejoicing. Look: since you are our little Maria, entirely ours, your spirit, the long style, enclosed in our Heart, possesses our sign - it is one and is marked by three separations which do not divide it, but render it tricuspid in its stigma. Maria, little Maria....”
And the Voice becomes silent, but is succeeded by a choir filled with angelic hosannas, above which there clearly and joyfully rises the voice of the Virgin singing the Magnificat.... How She sings! I have never heard that psalm sung with a singing of this kind. Only She can sing like this.... I do not see Her. I see only an immense and very powerful splendor. But I know it is Her, and with my soul I join in the song....43
42 See the entry for May 10 in The Notebooks. 1943.
43 We pass over fourteen handwritten pages, dated May 22, 1945, containing the first episode of “The Sermon on the Mount” in The Second Year of the Public Life.