While I was waiting for Father, who was to bring me Holy Communion, I got to thinking about it. I thought of the very simple form Jesus had taken to give Himself: a fragment of bread which a few words turn into the Body of Jesus Christ. And I thought about what I would experience if I were a priest, on taking Jesus’ place to say those words and change bread into the Divine Body. To call God, the Incarnate God, from Heaven, have Him come down there, with his Flesh, Blood, Soul, and Divinity, not just once, but every day.... And touch Him, this meek Jesus as Eucharist, who abandons Himself to the priest’s hands, as He did to the hands of Joseph and Mary when he was a newborn Baby. My heart would break with love! And my body, my thought, and my spirit would want to be purer than a budding lily to be able to touch the Lord in a way that was not unworthy. And I thought about his graciousness in resting upon a tongue and in a mouth which are not always clean or fragrant and in descending into a stomach which is sometimes still cluttered up with poorly digested food. On many occasions I have seen Jesus rest his hand on lepers and horrendous wounds. And that is already a great deal. But here he does not rest for an instant: here He descends and merges into our fetor and regurgitation. I plunged into abysses of humility before the humility of Divine Jesus, into abysses of grateful love before the generous love of Jesus as Eucharist.
Then there was a thought and a question for my present Lord: “If man had not sinned and he and all his descendants had not been left with the inheritance of sin, would the Eucharist have existed - indeed, the Communion between God and man - as intimate and real as we sinners have it?”
Jesus, sparkling with love, replied:
“Indeed! You would have had not the particular communion of the Incarnate Word for his faithful, but total communion with the Most Holy Trinity. For I, in descending as a Host into you, bring threefold and indivisible Love with Me, but I feed you with Myself in particular. I said, ‘This is my Body. This is my Blood.’ And the Church says, ‘This is the Body of Our Lord Jesus Christ. May it keep you unto eternal life.’ But if you had remained innocent, with no need for fragments of bread you would have had Communion with God. The substance is for your humanity, which became overbearing after Adam’s Sin. Spirituality was the queen before. And spirituality has no need for material substances to grasp that it is receiving and possessing an object. In our case, God.
“If man had remained innocent, already just through God’s free gift, he would have evolved increasingly towards perfection, for all holiness, except for divine perfection, is capable of being perfected. The stairway leading from the relative perfection indispensable for possessing the Kingdom of Heaven one day to the perfection inferior to God alone is extremely lofty. Soul of mine, you must consider the great difference between the perfection a soul attains after having purged itself for years or centuries in Purgatory of its imperfections which were not eliminated during the earthly day and the perfection a soul attains during sometimes very brief mortal time, not by action through a means created by God, as is Purgatory - a merciful workshop where imperfect souls become as the inhabitants of the Heavenly City must be, where nothing impure and ugly can enter - but through their own heroic will.
“Even innocent men could have worked to attain a very lofty perfection with their own will. The human race would have evolved into ever-greater spirituality. As witnessed to by these points: ‘And God said to the man and the woman...’ (Genesis 1:28-30); and ‘The Lord, having formed all the animals..., brought them before Adam...’ (Genesis 2:19); and also ‘And with the rib taken from Adam the Lord God formed woman and brought her before Adam’; and, finally, in the third chapter, the voice of the Lord, who would stroll through Paradise in the freshness of the evening and who called Adam and had the last conversation with him and the woman, ending in the condemnation, from the blessedness of being able to know and love God, then, in familiar contact with Him as a Father with his dear children, they would have passed on to possession of God. For God always gives a hundredfold to the creature who loves Him. And in this case He would have given Himself to be possessed, the Spirit of Love fusing Himself with the spiritual love of the creature who has become perfect. And this would have been the Communion of the Innocent, with a spirit refined enough to sense God and consider that it was receiving God, not through the help of faith and substances, but through an exact perception of God’s arrival with all his gifts to embrace his loving child once again.
“Love’s coming to man over and over. Like a divine wave of the divine Ocean upon the shore calling and reaching out towards the divine Ocean to be kissed and covered by it. An ongoing kiss, a new, ever loftier virginalization of the already virgin spirit, which would have become increasingly virginal, a pure whiteness which is no longer a color, but fire, the very same incandescent, virginal whiteness of Mary Immaculate, the Mirror of God shining within Her and perfectly reflected outside of Her.
“That would have been your Communion if you had remained pure, as the Eternal created you. God in you, One and Threefold. You in Him. In your spirit-king, the Spirit-King. The difference, so perceptible at present, between the place where you exist and the eternal place would have been reduced to a very thin diaphragm which a more intense throb of love would have brought down, causing the creature to move without exertion or pain from the earthly paradise, where it would have communicated with God in spiritual love, into the heavenly paradise, where it would have remained in God, with a twofold power of enjoyment and love.
“You, that know what Love coming to communicate itself with its Trinitarian fires is like, can intuit, though vaguely, the perpetual ecstasy, the fullness of life, the security, the wisdom, and the peace which innocent man would have had as his constant companions through the perpetual Communion of God with man. It would no longer have been ‘This is my Body and my Blood,’ but ‘Here we are, O child! Receive Us and possess in yourself the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, to be perfect in union with Us.’
“Oh, union with Us! Your union with Us! My burning desire, which shaped my ardent prayer on the night of Passover! My glory for you so that you will be one with Us!
“Maria, you are quite familiar with Love, but still know nothing of the Immensity of Love. A mortal creature cannot know it. But you shall come where I am and shall know it. You shall know the degrees of intensity in gifts that God wanted to arrive at to reward his faithful children. These are mysteries which Heaven will disclose.
“Be at peace.”