Forty and it's deeper meaning

 

http://www.thereligionteacher.com/videos/lent/number-40/

 

I had often wondered about the frequency of the number 40 in the Bible.  Jesus spent 40 days after his Resurrection before he Ascended to Heaven.  There are the 40 years in the desert by the Israelites, the 40 days of rain with Noah and the ark, the 40 days of lent that represent the 40 days Jesus spent in the desert.  Here are the main quotes in the Bible that I could find that mentions the number 40.

⁴ For in seven days I will send rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights; and every living thing that I have made I will blot out from the face of the ground.” Gen. 7:4

 

³⁵ And the people of Israel ate the manna forty years, till they came to a habitable land; they ate the manna, till they came to the border of the land of Canaan. Exodus 16:35

⁹ When I went up the mountain to receive the stone tablets, the tablets of the covenant that the Lord made with you, I remained on the mountain forty days and forty nights; I neither ate bread nor drank water.  Deuteronomy 9:9  ²⁵ At the end of forty days they returned from spying out the land. ²⁶ And they came to Moses and Aaron and to all the congregation of the people of Israel in the wilderness of Paran, at Kadesh; they brought back word to them and to all the congregation, and showed them the fruit of the land. Numbers 13:24-26

³³ And your children shall be shepherds in the wilderness for forty years, and shall suffer for your faithlessness, until the last of your dead bodies lies in the wilderness. ³⁴ According to the number of the days in which you spied out the land, forty days, for every day a year, you shall bear your iniquity, forty years, and you shall know my displeasure.”  Numbers 14:33-34


And the people of Israel again did what was evil in the sight of the Lord; and the Lord gave them into the hand of the Philistines for forty years. Judges 13:1
[the birth of Samson]

¹⁵ but David went back and forth from Saul to feed his father’s sheep at Bethlehem. ¹⁶ For forty days the Philistine came forward and took his stand, morning and evening. 1Samuel 17:15-17


¹¹ The time that David reigned over Israel was forty years; he reigned seven years in Hebron, and thirty-three years in Jerusalem.  1Kings 2:11


⁴² The time that Solomon reigned in Jerusalem over all Israel was forty years.  1Kings 14:42


⁷ The angel of the Lord came a second time, touched him, and said, “Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.” ⁸ He got up, and ate and drank; then he went in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights to Horeb the mount of God. ⁹ At that place he came to a cave, and spent the night there.
Then the word of the Lord came to him, saying, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”   1 Kings 19:7-9


Jonah began to go into the city, going a day’s journey. And he cried, “Yet forty days, and Nin′eveh shall be overthrown!” Jonah 3:3-5


Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. ² And he fasted forty days and forty nights, and afterward he was hungry. Matthew 4:1-2

To them he presented himself alive after his passion by many proofs, appearing to them during forty days, and speaking of the kingdom of God.  Acts 1:2-4

I have also heard that after Jesus' death he spent a total of 40 hours in sealed in the tomb, although I have no documented proof of this one.

In the Volumes Jesus explains the significance behind the number 40 and reveals that it has occurred even more than I had realized.


My daughter, the number forty is symbolic and significant in my life down here. When I was born, for forty days I wanted to remain in the grotto of Bethlehem - symbol of my Divine Will which, while being present in the midst of creatures, was as though hidden and outside of the city of their souls. And I, in order to repair for the forty centuries of human will, wanted to remain outside of the city for forty days, in a miserable hut, crying, moaning and praying, to call back my Divine Will into the city of souls, so as to give It Its dominion. And after forty days I went out to present Myself to the temple, and reveal Myself to the holy old Simeon. He was the first city I was calling to the knowledge of my Kingdom; and his joy was so great, that he closed his eyes to the earth to open them to eternity. Forty days I spent in the desert, and then, immediately, I did my public life, to give them the remedies and the means in order to reach the Kingdom of my Will. For forty days I wanted to remain on earth after my Resurrection, to confirm the Kingdom of the Divine Fiat and Its forty centuries of Kingdom which It was to possess. So, in everything I did down here, the first act was the restoration of the Kingdom; all other things entered into the secondary order, but the first link of connection between Me and creatures was the Kingdom of my Will. Therefore, when it is about my Will, I hold nothing back, neither light, nor sacrifices, nor manifestations, nor happiness – they are seas that I release from Myself so as to make It known, to make It reign, and to make It loved.”

Vol. 22, Sept. 8, 1927


The number 40, symbol of the time mankind had lived without the manifest presence of the Divine Will, 40 centuries or 4,000 years.  The Jews at that time could trace their lineage back to Adam and the time that spanned was ~4,000 years (,Time Line From Adam to Yeshua.)  The Divine Will is always present but after the fall of man it was not given it's due place, recognized and honored.  In the beginning of his life as a babe Jesus first atones for the Divine Will being dethroned from his seat in mankind.  At the preamble of his ministry he spends 40 days in the desert in order to obtain all the remedies needed for mankind to be able to reach the Kingdom of the Divine Will again.  And finally for the third time after his resurrection he again spends 40 days on the Earth confirming his Kingdom and how long of a time it will exist on the Earth before the end of time.  Reparation, Preparation, Confirmation.  Luisa as well fell under the number of 40.  Jesus explains how it is significant in all preparatory acts.

Forty years and more of exile; virtue and strength of a prolonged sacrifice. Gathering of the materials, to then order them. Happiness of Jesus in blessing His little prisoner daughter. Kisses in the Divine Will. Decision from priests to prepare the writings for printing. Surprising graces that Jesus will give to priests

          My life is carried out before my Jesus in the Sacrament, and - oh! how many thoughts crowd my mind. I was thinking to myself: ‘After forty years, and months, that I had not seen the Tabernacle, that I had not been given to be before His adorable sacramental presence – forty years, not only of prison, but of exile – finally, and after so long an exile, I have come back as though to my fatherland, though a prisoner, but no longer exiled, near my Jesus in the Sacrament; and not once a day, as I used to do before Jesus made me a prisoner, but always – always. My poor heart, if I have it at all in my chest, feels consumed at so much love of Jesus.’ But while I was thinking of this and other things, my Highest Good, Jesus, moving in my interior, told me:

          “My daughter, do you think that my keeping you imprisoned for forty years and more has been by chance, without a great design of mine? No! no! The number forty has always been significant and preparatory to great works. For forty years the Jews walked in the desert without being able to reach the promised land, their fatherland; but after forty years of sacrifices they had the good of taking possession of it. But, how many miracles, how many graces, to the point of nourishing them with the celestial manna during that time. A prolonged sacrifice has the virtue and strength to obtain great things from God. I Myself, during my life down here, wanted to remain in the desert for forty days, away from all, even from my Mama, to then go out in public to announce the Gospel which was to form the life of my Church – that is, the Kingdom of Redemption. For forty days I wanted to remain as risen, to confirm my Resurrection and to place the seal upon all the goods of Redemption. So I wanted for you, my daughter: in order to manifest the Kingdom of my Divine Will, I wanted forty years of sacrifices. But, how many graces have I not given you! How many manifestations! I can say that in this great length of time I placed in you all the capital of the Kingdom of my Will, and everything that is necessary in order to make creatures comprehend it. So, your long imprisonment has been the continual weapon, always in the act of fighting with your very Creator, to have you manifest my Kingdom.
          Now, you must know that everything I have manifested to your soul, the graces I have given you, the many truths you have written on my Divine Will, your pains, and everything you have done, has been nothing but a gathering of the materials in order to build; and now it is necessary to order them and to get everything settled. And just as I did not leave you alone in gathering the necessary things which must serve my Kingdom, but I have been always with you, so will I not leave you alone in putting them in order and in showing the great building which I have been preparing together with you for many years. Therefore, our sacrifice and work is not finished. We must go forward until the work is accomplished.”
Vol. 25, Oct 10, 1928

On the road to Emmaus



Ever wonder what Jesus really said to the two disciples on the road to Emmaus.  In Lukes gospel we are only given the abbreviated form:

 ²⁵ Then he said to them, “Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared! ²⁶ Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?” ²⁷ Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures. Lk 24: 25-27

But in the Gospel as Revealed to Me, formally the Poem of the Man-God, there is a much more detailed version open to discernment.

"Oh!  how foolish you are and hard to understand!  And how slow you are in believing the words of the prophets!  And had all that not already been said?  The error of Israel is this:  they have misinterpreted the regality of the Christ.  That is why He was not believed.  That is why He was feared.  That is why you are now in doubt.  In high places, in low ones, in the Temple, in villages, everywhere people thought of a king according to human nature.  The reconstruction of the Kingdom of Israel was not limited, in the mind of God, in time, in space and in means, as it was in you.

Not in time:  no royalty, even the most powerful one, is eternal.  Remember the mighty Pharaohs who oppressed the Jews in the days of Moses.  How many dynasties have come to an end, and only soulless mummies remain of them at the bottom of secret hypogea!  And a remembrance remains, if even that still remains, of their power of one hour, and even less, if we measure their centuries by the eternal Time. This Kingdom is eternal.

In space.  It was called:  Kingdom of Israel.  Because the stock of the human race came from Israel; because in Israel there is, so to say, the seed f God; and therefore, by saying Israel, it was meant:  the kingdom of those created by God.  But the regality of the King Messiah is not limited to the small space of Palestine, but it stretches from north to south, from east to west, wherever there is a being with a spirit in its body, that is, wherever there is a man.  How could one person alone gather under him all the peoples, hostile to one another, and from only one kingdom, without shedding rivers of blood and subjecting them all by means of cruel oppressions of armed men?  So, how could He have been the peaceful king mentioned by the prophets?

In means:  the human means, I said, is oppression.  The superhuman means is love.  The former is always limited, because peoples rebel against the oppressor.  The latter is unlimited, because love is loved or, if it is not loved, it is derided.  But as it is spiritual, it cannot be attacked directly.  And God, the Infinite, wants means to be like Himself.  He wants what is not finite, because He is eternal:  the spirit; what belongs to the spirit; what leads to the Spirit.  That has been the error:  that men conceived in their minds a messianic idea that is wrong in means and form.

Which is the highest regality?  God's.  Is it not so?  Therefore, this Admirable, this Immanuel this Holy, this sublime Germ, this Strong, this Father of the future century, this Prince of peace, this God like Him from Whom He comes, because so is He named and so is the Messiah, will He not have a regality like that of Him Who generated Him?  Of course, He will!  A regality which is completely spiritual and eternal, immune from violence and blood, unaware of betrayals and abuse of power.  His Regality!  That which the Eternal Goodness bestows also on poor men, to give honor and joy to His Word.

But did David not say that this powerful King had all things placed under His feet as a footstool?  Did Isaiah not narrate all His Passion, and did David not count, one might say, also His tortures?  And is it not said that He is the Savior and Redeemer, Who with His holocaust will save sinful mankind?

And is it not stated, and Jonah is the sign, that for three days He would be swallowed by the insatiable stomach of the Earth, and then He would be ejected as the prophet was by the whale?  And was it not said by Him:  "My Temple, that is My Body, the third day after being destroyed, will be rebuilt by Me (that is, by God)?"  And what did you think?  That by magic He would raise the walls of the Temple again?  No.  Not the walls.  But Himself.  And God only could make Himself rise from the dead.  He has raised the true Temple:  His Body of the Lamb.  Sacrificed, as Moses received the order and the prophecy, to prepare the "passage" from death to Life, from slavery to freedom, of men, the children of God and slaves of Satan.

How did He rise? you ask each other.  I reply:  He has risen with His true Body and with His Divine Spirit that dwells in it, as in every mortal body there dwells the soul as queen of the heart.  That is how He has risen after suffering everything to expiate everything, and make amends for the primitive Offence and for the countless ones that every day are committed by Mankind.  He has risen as it had been said under the veil of the prophecies.  He had come at His time, I remind you of Daniel, at His time He was sacrificed.  And listen and remember, at the time predicted after His death the deicide town will be destroyed.

I advice you to do this:  read the prophets with you souls, not with proud minds, from the beginning of the Book to the words of the Sacrificed Word remember the Precursor who indicated Him as the Lamb; recall which was the destiny of the symbolic Mosaic lamb.  The first-born of Israel were saved through that blood.  Through this Blood the first-born of God will be saved, that is those who with goodwill have made themselves sacred to the Lord.  Remember and understand the Messianic psalm of David and the Messianic prophet Isaiah.  Remember Daniel, recall to your minds, but raising these from the filth of the earth to the celestial blue, recall every word on the regality of the Saint of God, and you will understand that no other more just or more strong sign could be given to you than this victory over Death, than this Resurrection accomplished by Himself.  Remember that it would have been contrary to His mercy and to His mission to punish from the height of His Cross those who had put Him on it.  He was still the Savior, even if He was the Crucified scoffed at and nailed to a scaffold!  His limbs were crucified, but His spirit and will were free.  And with the latter He wanted to wait, to give the sinners time to believe and to invoke His Blood on themselves, not with blasphemous cries, but with groans of contrition.

Now He is risen.  He has accomplished everything.  Glorious He was before His incarnation.  Three times glorious He is now that, having humbled Himself, elevating Obedience to the perfection of being able to die on the Cross to do God's Will.  Most glorious, with His glorified Body, now that He ascends to Heaven, and enters into the eternal Glory, beginning the Kingdom that Israel has not understood.

To this Kingdom, in a more and more pressing manner, through the love and the authority of which He is full, He calls the tribes of the world.  As foreseen and predicted by the just of Israel and by the prophets, all peoples will come to the Savior.  And there will no longer be Judeans or Romans, Scythians or Africans, Iberians or Celts, Egyptians or Phrygians.  The land beyond the Euphrates will join the springs of the perennial River.  The Hyperborians beside the Numidains will come to His Kingdom, and races and languages will fall away.  There will no longer be different customs and different colors of skins and hair, but there will be an immense bright pure people, one language only and one love.  It will be the Kingdom of God.  The Kingdom of Heaven.  And eternal Monarch:  the Sacrificed Lord Who has risen again from the dead.  The eternal subjects:  the believers in His Faith.  Do believe, in order to belong to it."

The Gospel as Revealed to Me, Volume10, pgs 274-279.  by Maria Valtorta


Well... a couple of things really strike me from all this.  The first is the stark acknowledgement of how greatly the Christ and Redeemer was misinterpreted by his Chosen people.  Applying human restrictions on a boundless Spiritual Being.  The second is how careful we have to be not to do the same thing again.  Actually we are doing the same thing again trying to make his Kingdom all holy, all peaceful, all glorious, all love, all spiritual into a physical Kingdom that we can comfortably understand with our physical natures.  How often have we met those people that believe that once everyone is Catholic then the Kingdom will come or similar.  But as always God is not limited by our understanding and he acts in a way worthy of the Divine Omnipotent Being that He is.  In the Volumes Jesus refers to each individual as being a kingdom.

“My daughter, it is certain that the Kingdom of my Divine Will has existed upon the earth and therefore there is the hope that he will return again in his full vigor; our house of Nazareth was his true kingdom, however we were without people.  Now you should know that every creature is a kingdom, hence one who lets my Will reign in her can be called a little kingdom of the Supreme Fiat.  So that she is a tiny little house of Nazareth that we hold upon the earth, and for however little being (that) our Will reigns in her, Heaven is not closed for her, she observes the same rights of the Celestial Country, loves with the same love, feeds herself with the foods of up there, and is incorporated in the kingdom of our interminable regions.  Now in order to form the great Kingdom of our Will upon the earth, we will first make the so many little tiny houses of Nazareth, that is the souls that will want to know him in order to make him reign in them.  I and the Sovereign Queen will be at the head of these little tiny houses, because we having been the first ones that possessed this kingdom in earth, it is our right, that we won’t surrender to anyone to be the managers of them.  Whence [with] these tiny little houses we repeat our house of Nazareth, we will form so many little states of ours, so many provinces, that after it has been well formed and ordered as so many little kingdoms of our Will, they will fuse together and will form one kingdom alone and one great people.

Vol. 29, 1931



It is so very true that each individual contains the potential to be an entire kingdom where Jesus will reign as king that he goes on to emphasize later on in Vol. 29 the details of what is contained within each kingdom.

     “My daughter, life, sanctity consists in two acts:  God gives his Will and the creature receives him, and afterwards the life has been formed in herself with that act of Divine Will that she has received, to re-give it as act of her will, in order to receive it again, and to give and to receive, and to receive and to give, in this is everything.  God could not give more of his continuous act of his Will to the creature; the creature could not give more to God, for as much as it is possible for (the) creature, his Divine Will received in her as formation of divine life.  In this way, to give and to receive, to receive and to give, my Divine Fiat takes dominion and forms his kingdom there, and all the interior of the creature forms as the people of the kingdom of the Divine Will, the intelligence, faithful people that glories with being directed by the Sovereign Commander of the Divine Fiat, and the crowd of thoughts that press around and aspire to know always more and to love the great King, who takes a seat as enthroned in the center of the intelligence of the creature.  The desires, the affections, the heartbeats that issue forth from the heart, augment the number of the people of my kingdom, and oh! how they crowd around his throne, they are all at attention in order to receive the divine orders and even to put forth (their) life in order to execute them; what an obedient, ordered people, are the people of the kingdom of my Fiat, there are no contentions, no dissensions, but this entire crowd of people of the interior of this fortunate creature want one thing alone, and as a trained army they put themselves in the fortress of the kingdom of my Divine Volition.  Whence when the interior of the creature becomes all my people, he emerges outside from the interior and augments the people of words, the people of works, of steps, it can be said that every act that this Celestial people forms contains the word, the written order in gold characters:  ‘Will of God.’  And when this crowd of people move in order to exercise each their office, they put forth the flag with the motto ‘Fiat’, followed by the words written with living light:  ‘We belong to the Great King of the Supreme Fiat.’  You see therefore, every creature that lets herself be dominated by my Volition forms a people for the kingdom of God.”

Vol. 29, Oct. 26, 1931

 

May he reign both upon the earth and within the earth of each of us and may his Kingdom come and reign as he ordains.

Be the Light to the World

At Sunday's mass, 2/5/17, the priest gave an amazing insight into the first reading which got me to thinking.  He told us about how there were three switches to turn the light of God on in us and three switches to turn off the darkness.  He also mentioned that there are some parts to this reading that were poorly translated from the original Hebrew. 

 

Reading 1 Is 58:7-10

Thus says the LORD:
Share your bread with the hungry,
shelter the oppressed and the homeless;
clothe the naked when you see them,
and do not turn your back on your own.
Then your light shall break forth like the dawn,
and your wound shall quickly be healed;
your vindication shall go before you,
and the glory of the LORD shall be your rear guard.
Then you shall call, and the LORD will answer,
you shall cry for help, and he will say: Here I am!
If you remove from your midst
oppression, false accusation and malicious speech;
if you bestow your bread on the hungry
and satisfy the afflicted;
then light shall rise for you in the darkness,
and the gloom shall become for you like midday.

 

The three switches to turn on the light are:  1- Share your bread with the hungry, 2 - shelter the oppressed and the homeless, 3- clothe the naked, not turning your back on your own.

 

The three switches to turn off the darkness are to remove from your midst: 1- oppression, 2- false accusation,  3- malicious speech.

 

The pieces of this reading which are subject to a relook at the original Hebrew are: 

 

"Is it not to deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that are cast out to thy house? when thou seest the naked, that thou cover him, and that thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh."

 

"If thou take away from the midst of thee the yoke, the putting forth of the finger, and speaking wickedness;"

 

"And if thou draw out thy soul to the hungry, and satisfy the afflicted soul; then shall thy light rise in darkness, and thy gloom be as the noon-day"

Hebrew - English Translation

 

The points that he emphasized were the fact that the actual passage calls us to not just to shelter the homeless but to bring them into our own homes, that in clothing the naked, they are not just our own but our own flesh, our own family.  That in removing from our midst "oppression" the actual word is "the yoke" which has a much deeper association with slavery and overburdening as overburdening a beast.  A sense that people can be dehumanized and isolated.  Instead of false accusation the real phrase used is "putting forth of the finger" which is more of blaming others, and for that matter judging others.  And not just removing "malicious speech" but removing "speaking wickedness."  This is more to the idea of any focus on anything wicked.  In other words the focus should be God.  And the one that really caught my attention was:  "draw out thy soul to the hungry", not "bestow your bread on the hungry."  Now I can sympathize with the translators, in our own base frame of reference that doesn't make any sense but in the light of the Divine Will it makes a world of sense.

So in looking at these topics in the Volumes of feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless and feeding the hungry he calls us to do these things in imitation of how he deals with us but more so he even wants us to do these things in turn for him.

Now nakedness has such a deeper meaning in the light of God.  He speaks of how he was stripped in his passion and how this was necessary to repair for how Man stripped himself of his royal garment given to him by God.  We lost the light of the Divine Will which clothed us and we were left naked in our own base nothingness.

 

“My daughter, in my Passion there is a lament of mine which came out with immense sorrow from the depth of my tormented Heart:  ‘They divided my garments and drew lots for my tunic.’  How painful it was for Me to see my garments being divided among my very executioners, and my tunic being gambled away.  It was the only object I possessed, given to Me, with so much love, by my sorrowful Mama; and now, they not only stripped Me of it, but they made of it a game.  But do you know who pierced Me the most?  In those garments, Adam became present to Me, clothed with the garment of innocence and covered with the indivisible tunic of my Supreme Will.  In creating him, the uncreated Wisdom acted as more than a most loving mother; more than with a tunic, It clothed him with the unending light of my Will – a garment which is not subject to being either disarranged, or divided, or consumed; a garment which was to serve man in order to preserve the image of his Creator and the gifts received from Him, and which was to render him admirable and holy in all his things.  Not only this, but It covered him with the overgarment of innocence.  And Adam, in Eden, with his passions divided the garments of innocence, and he gambled away the tunic of my Will – a garment which is incomparable and of radiant light. 

Vol. 20, Dec 12, 1926

In My Passion I wanted to suffer being stripped in the flagellation and placed nude on the cross, being torn apart in such a horrible way that My bones could even be counted -[I wanted to suffer] all amid the confusion, abandonment, and unspeakable bitternesses.  All of that was nothing other than the fruit of the human volition which had stripped (the creature) of all goods, and with its poisonous breath had covered him with confusion and humiliations to the point of transforming him in a horrible way and making him the object of scorn for all his enemies. 

Vol. 21, April 14, 1927


But Jesus wants to cloth us again.  As God calls us to cloth the naked because they are our own flesh so he wants to cloth us.  We are his own flesh.  And he can only do this with the soul who wants to live in his Divine Will being willing to let go of the rags of her human will.

By entering into It[the Divine Will], the soul forms one single act with the Divine Will, and as though naturally she takes part in what It does and contains.  More so, since in order to live in my Will, the soul is first stripped of the garments of the old guilty Adam, and is clothed anew with the garments of the new and holy Adam.  Her garment is the light of the Supreme Will Itself, through which all Its divine manners are communicated to her, which are noble and communicative to all.  This light makes her lose the human features and restores in her the physiognomy of her Creator.

Vol. 19, February 28, 1926


But when Jesus asks us to cloth others he is also asking us to cloth him and as he does for us so are we to do for him.

“My Person is surrounded by all the works that souls do, as by a garment; and the more purity of intention and intensity of love they have, the more splendor they give Me, and I will give them more glory; so much so, that on the Day of Judgment I will show them to the whole world, to let the whole world know how my children have honored Me, and how I honor them.”

Vol. 2, May 7, 1899



But this is not all.  In the Divine Will all the creatures acts become veils, accidents, like in the Eucharist, to cloth, enclose our God so that he might have true life in us.  But life needs to be nourished.  So we ourselves feed him with our loving acts, which are all his acts which we take on as our own and return to him.  These nourish his Divine life in us.  So as he feeds us so we feed him, as he clothes us so we clothe him and as he shelters us in his own home so do we do so for him.  And so we "draw our soul" out to him to feed him.

The Divine Will forms the true and perfect consecration of the Divine Life in the soul.

 

Continuing in my usual state and being very afflicted because of the privations of Jesus, after many hardships He came, making Himself seen in all of my poor being.  It seemed to me as if I were the garment of Jesus.  Then, breaking the silence, He told me:

 

“My daughter, you too can form hosts and consecrate them.  Do you see the garment that covers Me in the Sacrament?  These are the accidents of the bread with which the host is formed.  The life which exists in this host is my Body, my Blood and my Divinity.  The attitude which contains this life is my Supreme Will, and this Will carries out the love, the reparation, the immolation, and all the rest that I do in the Sacrament, which never moves one point from my Volition.  There is nothing that comes from Me which is not led by my Volition.

“Here is how you too can form the host.  The host is material and totally human; you too have a material body and a human will.  This body and this will of yours - if you keep them pure, upright and far away from any shadow of sin - are the accidents, the veils, so that I may be able to consecrate Myself and live hidden within you.  But this is not enough; it would be like the host without consecration - my life is needed.  My life is composed of sanctity, of love, of wisdom, of power, etc., but the engine of all is my Will.  Therefore, after you have prepared the host, you must make your will die in this host; you must cook it well, so that it may not be born again.  Then you must let my Will permeate all your being; and my Will, which contains the whole of my life, will form the true and perfect consecration.  So, the human thought will have life no more, but only the thought of my Volition, and this consecration will create my wisdom in your mind; no more life for what is human, for weakness, for inconstancy, because my Will will form the consecration of the Divine Life, of fortitude, of firmness, and of all that I am.  So, each time you make your will, your desires, and all that you are and that you may do, flow into my Will, I will renew the consecration, and I will continue my life within you as in a living host - not a dead one, like the hosts without Me. 

“But this is not all.  In the consecrated hosts, in the pyxes, in the Tabernacles, everything is dead - mute; not a heartbeat sensibly, not a surge of love which may correspond to so much love of mine.  If it wasn’t for the fact that I wait for hearts in order to give Myself to them, I would be quite unhappy, I would remain defrauded in my love, and my sacramental life would remain without purpose.  And if I tolerate this in the Tabernacles, I would not tolerate it in living hosts.  So, life needs nourishment, and in the Sacrament I want to be nourished, and I want to be nourished with my own food – that is, the soul will make my Will, my love, my prayers, reparations and sacrifices her own; she will give them to Me as if they were her own things, and I will nourish Myself.  The soul will unite with Me, she will prick up her ears to hear what I am doing so as to do it together with Me; and as she keeps repeating my own acts, she will give Me her food, and I will be happy.  Only in these living hosts will I find the compensation for the loneliness, the starvation, and all that I suffer in the Tabernacles.”

Vol. 11, December 17, 1914   


We are not only called to help our neighbor in these acts of feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, clothing the naked.  These are only the beginning lessons that God is leading us in.  As in all things everything returns to God and so must our acts.  He calls us to imitate him as he feeds us, clothes us, and brings us into his home.  So that we might in turn, feed him, clothe him and make a life together with him.

“My daughter, the Creation of man was the center where our Divinity centralized all the goods that should rise in the creature, we put in her Divine Life and Divine Will, human life and human will; human life should serve us as residence, and the two Wills fused together should make life in common with highest accord, indeed the human will should take from ours in order to form her acts, and ours should remain in the continuous act to give of his, in order to make that the human will might remain modeled and all informed in the Divine Will.  Now, there is no life, as much human, spiritual and divine, that doesn’t have need of food in order to grow, in order to become stronger, to embellish and to felicitate himself.  More so that we put our Divine life in man, [and] because he was incapable of receiving the whole fullness of our Divine Being, we put in him how much he could contain of our life, giving him the liberty to let him grow how much more he could and wanted.  Hence our life in man for growth had need of food, behold the necessity to put in him a Divine Will; our Divine life would not have adapted himself to foods of the human will.  Behold therefore all the acts of the creature done in virtue of and in our Divine Will, would serve to feed and to make our Divine Life grow in her, in a way that as soon as she went doing her acts in our Fiat, now she took our love and fed us, now she took our fortitude, now our infinite sweetness, now our Divine joys in order to feed us.  What order, what harmony put between him and us in creating man between him and us, even to ask of him our own foods through his means, not because we had need, no, but in order to maintain the enthusiasm of love, the correspondence, the inseparable union between him and us.  And while he occupied himself with us, we occupied ourselves with feeding him and with conserving our dear residence, not only, but making him other more beautiful gifts in order to render him more happy, to love him more and make ourselves more loved.  But do you want to know what are our most beautiful gifts that we make the creature?  To manifest to her a knowledge of our Supreme Being, a truth that pertains to us, one secret of ours is the most beautiful gift that we make her; each of these gifts is one more bond that we put between Her and us, our every truth is a property that we put in her soul.  Behold therefore that in the soul where our Will reigns we find our Divine foods, our property for how much it is possible for a creature, our residence, hence we find ourselves in our house, in our center, in the midst of our properties.  Do you see therefore what it means to make our Will reign and the great good to make you know our truths?  Our every knowledge carries, each one, its distinct gift, some carry his light, some fortitude, some goodness, some wisdom, some love and so on, each one of them binds the creature in a special way to God and God to her.  Therefore know how to correspond to the so many gifts that your Jesus has made you, and you live always in our Volition.”

Vol. 29, Aug 3, 1931


 All of this can only happen when one makes a firm decision to turn from one's own human will and asks to live only of His Divine Will.  This is the starting point to switching off the darkness in ourselves and switching on the light of God.

Advice from St Joseph

 

 

 

I was thinking about St Joseph and how much he suffered quietly.  A just and righteous Israelite.  How easily we gloss over his role in the holy family.  How that in accepting Mary as his wife he in a sense abandoned his ideal of remaining just in the eyes of men and opened himself up to gossips and snickers.  How much he suffered in feeling like he was unable to provide properly for Mary in dragging her off for a census in her late stage of pregnancy, having made a crib for the baby and prepared so many things for Mary in Nazareth.  He must have felt like a failure so many times having to abandon everything he proposed to follow the course disposed by God through the path of life.  And in his homeland where he believed he would be welcomed he met only closed doors.  A stable the best accommodations he could find for his wife and Messiah in his own homeland.  How hard he tried to make that stable comfortable, cleaning it up as much as possible, trying to keep the drafts out hanging his own cloak over the entrance.  But a cloak over a cave entrance only goes so far to warm it and sweeping and moving hay around doesn't cover up the smell of animal waste and odors.  And then in raising Jesus and providing for his little family, the poverty and not being able to provide all the materiel things a father would want to give to his family and never showing his disappointment to his family but always placing them first.  There is so much in the quiet just man to be pondered over  and emulated even in how readily he takes the back seat to Mary and Jesus in the storyline.

 

But Joseph was the true just and righteous Israelite.  He, beside Mary who was Immaculate,  was the ideal Israelite in resigning his will to the Will of God.  He was willing to cast his own ideals aside to accommodate God's plans and ideals.  He never brooded over what he could have considered his own failings, which never were failings in the eyes of God, or the way he would be mistreated by those who took advantage of him in his labors.  He always focused on God and placed his family's needs first.  In The Gospel as revealed to Me I found a passage where Jesus is advising Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus in regards to how they should act in letting go of their false notions of what the Messiah should be, using St Joseph as his model. 

 

 

 

Be just.  Just like him who was My guardian for so many years and who was capable of every renovation to serve the Lord his God.  If he were here, among us, oh!  how he would teach you to serve the Lord perfectly, to be just, just, just.  But it is right that he should already be in Abraham's bosom!...  A new Abraham, with a broken heart, but with perfect will, he would not have advised Me to be cowardly, but he would have spoke the words that he used to utter when anything painful weighed heavily on us:  "Let us raise our spirits.  We shall meet the yes of God and we shall forget that it is men who grieve us.  And let us do whatever is burdensome, as if the Most High presented it to us.  In this way we shall sanctify also the least things, and God will love us."  Oh!  He would have said so also to comfort Me to suffer the deepest sorrows...  He would have comforted us...  Oh!  My Mother!...

 

The Gospel as Revealed to Me, Vol. 9, pg 56.

 

 

Joseph the model man and father, laborer and Israelite.  He, in his silence and resignation, teaches so much.  Truly the Just Man who always placed God and others first and himself last.