Jesus says:
“Strip yourselves not only of what constitutes the weight of sheer humanity, but also of what is spiritual anxiety. I will now explain to you what this is so that you will not interpret my phrase incorrectly.
“Spiritual anxiety is not that healthy tending towards God with all one’s intellectual power. Spiritual anxiety is that distress which sometimes grasps even the souls most advanced in holiness and which consists of the fear of not having time to do all that, spiritually speaking, one would like to do, all that God seems to want from the soul, the fear of disengaging from prayer, dreading that you will not be able to savor that clear stream of sweetness which I send you, the fear that you will no longer be able to find it. These fears are still a remainder of humanity infiltrating itself into spirituality and harming it.
“One must follow the way of the spirit with firmness and calm. No anxiety, no fear. It is I who create time. Won’t I have, then, all the time that each soul entrusting itself to Me needs? It is I that make the wave of grace flow into you; I am thus able to regulate its flow and send you my lights at the most favorable times.
“If you are disturbed in prayer, it is not a reason for anguish. It is enough that you should not be the ones to separate yourselves from it voluntarily, for human and personal reasons. In this case it is certain that the fount dries up and turns aside towards other souls open to prayer. But if your disturbance is caused by charity towards your neighbor, it does not dry up the source of light in you and does not turn it away, but, rather, increases it and attracts it, for whoever has charity has God, and whoever has God has his lights.
“Never be anxious, then. Always pray, listen, meditate, suffer, work, and rest calmly, trusting Me. I am a perfect Guest. I am able to converse and be silent according to whether I see that the one hosting me is able or unable to listen to Me. What would you say about a guest that stuck to your side and didn’t let you concern yourself with the needs of the house, especially on a day with guests? You would say that the person is unfamiliar with the elementary rules of good manners and the most common needs of the mistress of a house. But I am Jesus. I thus know everything.
“When your neighbor takes you away from prayer and conversation with Me, I don’t take offense, and you must not get nervous. Be patient and charitable. Later, when charity has been shown, I will speak to you more luminously than before. If you instead get anxious or nervous, the light is obfuscated, as if a cloud were to place itself between your Sun and your soul.
“Trust and trust and trust your Jesus. No matter how much you may love Me, you love Me only to a degree which is infinitely small in comparison to how much I love you. Trust, then. My Bread, which is not only the Eucharist that nourishes, but also the word that instructs, will never be lacking to you if you remain good and trusting.”
“It is supremely important for the soul wanting to advance on the heavenly way to be able to keep its faculties unwavering in God. When this happens, the soul is safe.
“What are the faculties of the soul? Now I will offer you a human comparison. How is the wheel made? With a circle, with many spokes inserted into it, with a ring joining together the spokes and causing them to revolve around a hub. In this way the wheel functions. If anyone of the parts is broken, it functions poorly, but if the ring clinching the spokes is broken, the wheel is of no use at all.
“And now pay attention, little Maria, who are listening to your Master. The circle is humanity, which gathers together all the moral, physical, and spiritual powers which are in a created being. It is the band which joins everything in a man. The spokes are the sentiments concentrated in a mystical ring - the spirit - which gathers them in and radiates them out, for it is a twofold operation. The hub is God. If humanity is damaged by fleshly caries, the sentiments are left unbound and are eventually scattered in the dust. ,But if the spirit is ruined or simply detached from its hub, then the wonderful movement of the being created by God stops and death takes over.
“It is thus an absolute necessity for the soul wanting to merit Heaven never to depart from the divine hub. Let your humanity also offer itself to help your neighbor and labor in serving him. That is charity. But let your sentiments not cease to converge upon the spirit and depart from the spirit. They will thus be nourished by God and bear God’s seal, even in humble tasks, for your spirit is and must remain centered on God, the divine hub of all creation, the very sweet hub of your soul, which has found his Way.
“When the faculties of the spirit are fixed in God, also believe that no force can remove them from there. Motion becomes increasingly whirling, and you know that there is a force called precisely ‘centripetal’ which, the more motion is whirling, draws things more and more towards the center.
“Love is what gives motion. The spirit fixed in God loves God, its hub. God loves the spirit centered on Him; and this twofold love increases the whirling motion, the winged race which ends with the meeting in my Kingdom between the loving spirit and its Creator.”