And, as occurred last year, on this anniversary100 Jesus shows me a “little old lady who does not escape from Jesus....”
Do you know what pain this is for me? She alone, she alone, my mother, did not receive Jesus.... That pain is always there, you know? A pain stronger than death itself. The pain I always feel when I see a soul that rejects, drifts away from the Lord. But it is accentuated even more as regards my mother, since, because of the love I have for her, I would have wanted her complete union with my Jesus.... Tears, then, this year, too.... And I do not ask, as I did last year, “Why didn’t she love You?” Jesus already gave me the answer last year....101 And I weep.
However, I don’t know from what depths of heaven, I don’t know who has spoken, who has manifested - and precisely because it is so immaterial that it is much more incorporeal than the usual “voices,” representing only “thought which is illuminated and bestows peace,” I think it is my Guardian Angel that is bringing them to me - these words come: “Your parents have been placed in good hands. Your father rested his head on the lap of the Apostle upon whom all power of absolution was conferred and whose frank, affectionate goodness with a common touch you are familiar with. Peter came to take your father, for Peter could well understand your father’s justice. St. Joseph, St. Peter.... And you tremble for his sake? No! The Seraphic One came to gather the soul of your mother in his wounded hands. Francis, the beloved of Jesus, the one to whom nothing is refused in Heaven or by Heaven. At heart your mother felt veneration for him, and he came. Don’t you remember that he is said to save those who are devoted to him...?”
It is true. Hope is set more brightly aflame.... And who will I be gathered in by? I, who am so ill and gnawed at by Satan’s torment, like a woodworm? He gives me no respite. Since he cannot catch me in any other way, he catches me like this: with the insinuation that I am the one who is writing and it is not Jesus who shows and dictates. He knows that if he could convince me of this, I would retreat into desolation and the terror of having sinned and I would be afraid of death and Judgment. Oh, he really tortures me! He dazes me so with his constant voice that as soon as Jesus terminates visions and words, I lose all capacity to enjoy what my life is - that is, this supernatural dimension enveloping me and making me a “spokesman.”
Do these episodes strike you who read them as very beautiful? I, too, once felt them to be so. Now, apart from the artistic side, I perceive nothing else in them. In vain I seek out and seek again the sentences which, while they were being spoken, took me so high up, to beatitude. In vain I recall and recall again attitudes whose sweetness so impressed me while I was seeing them.... All is extinguished; all is ashes. Paradise - for this is paradise - has lost its splendor, or, rather, it opens as long as my daily service as a spokesman lasts, inundating me with all its light, song, sweetness, and joy; and then, when the work is done, it closes hermetically, and I am enveloped and engulfed in mist and obscurity, with no other voices but those of Doubt and Negation which prods and mocks. Isn’t this a great affliction? And yet I don’t want to despair or say, “I’ll stop since it’s my own doing.” No, it is not! Especially now, exhausted as I am, overwhelmed by so many things and ignorant of so many others, I could not do this; in the state I am in of physical weakness and moral dejection, I could feel only nausea towards this, and I would write nothing. Rendered materially incapable of thinking and morally nauseated by thinking....
I turn on the radio at random and pause at Florence Radio at 5:30 p.m. - something I never do because I look for music and not words, and at that time Florence broadcasts only “words.” I hear the woman announcer saying, “In a few moments we will be broadcasting the ceremony from the Assisi Basilica which will close with the benediction imparted by His Eminence Cardinal Canali with the relic of the blessing written by St. Francis.” I listen: it is peace that is coming. It is my St. Francis, my first comforter in Compito,102 who is coming to bestow peace....
100 The anniversary of her mother, Iside Fioravanzi, who died on October 4, 1943.
101 See the entry for September 27 in The Notebooks. 1944.
102 See The Notebooks. 1944, note 312