Jesus says:
“Even if the observation is made that I repeat Myself, I won’t change my mind. Men’s sins are also repeated, in spite of all the warnings, with discouraging monotony. I set my Voice of justice over against their voices of sin so that it will not be said that I have not spoken and I will not be accused of having left them in error.
“My Voice has been saying the same things for twenty centuries, and such an accusation should not arise. But man, who finds it convenient to forget what is condemnation of his misdeeds, always says that he did not know this or that. It is an excuse which dishonors and debases him, for it is deceitful and, in being dishonest, it amounts to accusing his intelligence of being imperfect and his memory of being damaged.
“How can the teachings repeated over and over not be remembered? You place yourselves beneath the beasts that learn what man teaches them. Do you, that are so proud, not reflect that this is a great disgrace for your pride?
“Maria, write the explanation of the parable of the sower once again.241 I will dictate it to you for a special group of persons whose error saddens Me. An error of imprudence in some; an error of pride in others; an error of rebelliousness in still others; and of scandal in the other group.
“The parable states that one part of the seed fell along the way and was eaten by birds. The second part fell upon stone and sank in roots, but it at once dried up because of a lack of moisture. The third part fell among brambles and died of suffocation. The fourth part, having fallen on good soil, brought forth fruit in different measures.
“The Word of God is the seed of eternal life. But the Word is beset by many dangers. I will leave aside these many dangers and speak of one thing alone, which I would say is as deadly - perhaps more so - as sin itself. And let no faint-hearted spirit get scandalized if I say that it is perhaps more deadly than sin. It’s the truth.
“The sinner whose mind is not corroded by the acid of rationalism has a ninety percent chance of being able to receive the Word and find Life. The rationalist has only a ten percent chance, and even less, of keeping himself capable of salvation through the Word.
“Rationalism is worse than couchgrass. When its action is seen, at the moment when everything concerning the earth and men is made known, this heresy will be seen to have been the most pernicious one because it is the most subtle and penetrating of all. It is like a gas. You absorb it, and it kills you, but you don’t see it; you sometimes don’t even smell it, or, since this smell is pleasant, it is breathed in by you with pleasure. Rationalism is just like that.
“The major heresies have contained two good things: first of all, they were originated by a faith. As erroneous as it may seem to you, as worthy of condemnation as you may think. But still a faith. They have thus had their martyrs, their tears, and their struggles to assert themselves, and upright souls have over the centuries embellished them with lights of holiness whose only disadvantage is to have blossomed on a wicked tree not grafted onto Christ. The second good thing about heresies is the loud noise produced by them, whereby whoever did not want to belong to them knew how to act so as not to belong to them. The struggles with the Church and with States were an indication to Catholics; they constituted a boundary beyond which one went only knowingly.
“In rationalism this is lacking, and it penetrates unnoticed even where it is thought that it cannot enter. It enters through a thousand foramens, like a snake. It dresses in licit - indeed, admirable - clothing and acts underneath it, but against it. It is a virus. When one notices it, it has already spread through one’s blood, and it is hard to get free of it.
“The reaction of sin is violent under the ray of my Mercy. But that of rationalism is nil. Like a burning glass, it makes the way to grace impassable and rejects it. Indeed, it turns it into a harmful burning to finish giving itself its own condemnation.
“The rationalist makes the things of God serve his purpose. He does not make himself serve God’s purpose. He bends, explains, and uses the Word in the light - poor light - of his disturbed mind and, like a madman who no longer knows the value of things and words, he gives them the sort of meanings which can emerge only from one whom the extremely crafty action of Satan has sterilized.
“There are rationalists and rationalists.
“I will begin with the greatest. The ‘supermen.’ The deniers of God. They want to explain creation, miracles, and the divinity according to their concepts filled with human pride.
“Where there is pride, God is not present. Be sure of this. Where there is pride, Faith is not present. Satan is there, and Satan is the most skilled juggler in seducing man and making the leaf of tinfoil picked up in the mud appear to him to be pure gold.
“These deniers of God, who think they degrade themselves by humbly accepting what they are unable to explain through their mental capacity alone and have slain the capacity to love in themselves, are the giants of rationalism.
“I am not giving a speech to men and thus do not cite names. You can include the names on your own. For Me they are dead stars which have plunged into the mud in bits and pieces. They no longer have a name or have one alone which shall be engraved in fire upon their arrogant brows and their hearts more arid than flint on the Day of Justice. They spend their lives devastating. They are worse than an avalanche or a hurricane, worse than dementia, worse than a fever. They kill wherever they arrive.
“The Word does not descend at all into these. Too many things remain upon them to act as an obstacle to the Word. They belong to the category of the ‘spiritually Dead.’ Rebellious and scandalous.
“The second category are the humanly learned. These do not deny God. But over divine simplicity - which has become such so that even the humblest can grasp it in the light of love – they set a whole thicket of human erudition. They dress themselves in it like peacocks proud of their tails with a hundred eyes, and, like peacocks, they are beautiful only in appearance: they are unable to walk; they are unable to sing on the way and in the praises of the Lord.
“They lack the love which is a sinew for the wing to fly towards God and a string for the lyre to bless God. The Word descends upon them and sinks in roots. But it later dies because they oppose and choke it under the useless leaves of their human knowledge.
“Do you know how they hear the Word? Like one hearing someone else speak in another language unknown to him. He hears the voice and sees the movement of the lips, but understands nothing. They also resemble one who, hard of hearing, howls while another speaks softly. In the end the roar of his words covers over the other’s voice. They create Babel in themselves because of too many words. Because of too much knowledge they do not accept the lights, so simple and pure, which God has established so that man will see the way leading to the Father. And they create Babel and darkness for others, too.
“The third category involves those who have paved their hearts with the stones of the rationalism of others to make them less ignorant. They are the worshippers of human idols. They are unable to worship God with their whole self, but are able to remain ecstatic before a poor man who poses as a superman. They close the door to the Divine Word with distrust, but accept the explanations of one of their fellow men who is famous for being learned.
“It would be enough for them humbly to ask Grace to illuminate and instruct them on the value of those notes, and Grace would make them see how those explanations and those doctrines rest upon props whose base is corroded by woodworms and mold and how those voices are jarring and in disagreement with those of God.
“They want to be cultured and supermen and take the first food they see. And the idols have pompous clothing and promise deity to all. It is the voice of the Serpent: ‘Eat this fruit, and you will be like God.’ And in their ignorance they eat.
“There is one fruit that makes you gods, O men. The one hanging from my Cross.
“There is one who says to your minds, ‘Epheta.’ The Christ.
“There is one who fecundates the mystical soil of your hearts so that the seed will rise there. My Blood.
“There is one sun that warms the ear of grain of eternal life in you and makes it grow. Love.
“There is one science that, like a ploughshare, opens and tills your glebe and makes it fit to receive the seed. My Science.
“There is one Master: I, the Christ. Come to Me if you want to be instructed in Truth.
“The fourth category is that of the imprudent. They are open ways over which everything passes. They do not surround them selves with a holy defense of faith and fidelity to their God. They receive the Word with great joy and open themselves to receive it, but they also open themselves to receive any doctrine under the specious pretext that one must be condescending.
“Yes. So condescending with one’s brothers and sisters. Not to disdain anyone. But severe with the things of God. To pray for one’s brothers and sisters, instruct them, forgive them, and defend them against themselves with a true supernatural love. But not to become accomplices of their errors. To remain as granite over against the crumbling of human doctrines. Nothing passes without leaving a trace. And it is great imprudence to place a sharp point against the heart. It might take your lives or ingrain wounds that heal with difficulty and always leave a scar.
“Blessed are those who are only God’s terrain and remain such by assiduous vigilance. Blessed are those who, as soft as sod which has just been dug up, do not have stones for their brothers and sisters or rocks for the Word.
“Love makes them souls worshipping the Word and souls merciful towards those straying far from the Word. But love is their most beautiful defense, and no work of evil can harm their spirit, in which the Word of Life grows like a copious ear of grain. The vaster love is in them, the more He grows there, yielding fruit - sometimes thirty, sometimes fifty, and sometimes one hundred.
“For those who possess Him absolutely, the Word becomes their own word, for they are no more, but are one with God, their love.”
Jesus says:
“Little Christ that have fallen under the cross, get up again and take the cross and walk, shedding tears and shedding blood.
“One does not always fall because of sin. The victims fall from the pain of the sins of others and from knowledge of the fruit of that pain. And they are the holiest falls, the falls similar to mine, for they are falls of charity.
“Maria, the victims bear up two crosses on their fragile backs. That of their Jesus, which they want to carry, and that which would be for the punishment of their brothers and sisters. To the victims, to whom the future is unveiled, the ocean of pain caused by men’s sins appears as a sea, and in spite of the veil of tears, all the future weeping is revealed to them.
“It is of no benefit to close one’s eyes, Maria. It is the mind which sees, for, when joined to mine, it possesses the extraordinary perceptions of mine. It is a gift. But it is like the gift which Pilate’s soldiers made Me to crown Me as king: it is a gift which wounds. There are thorns. There are thorns here. But be faithful to them. Hereafter they shall be roses.
“See beyond the weeping, beyond the darkness, beyond the ocean of human sorrow, whose wave covers and permeates you - for the place of the victim is like the wavebreaker of a port and he receives upon himself the fury of the storms along the coast and splits them by letting himself be split - see, beyond the horror which the world creates for itself, the land of peace, the love of joy, the life of ecstasy which awaits you.
“Beyond this torment is your Jesus, who awaits you. Beyond these flames is the freshness of the eternal gardens. There you shall no longer undergo thirst, hunger, weariness, and pain. I will be a fountain and food for you; I will be rest and joy for you. You shall rest upon Me, hearing yourself be told that I love you and being able to tell Me that you love Me. Beyond this poor life is true love. For the time being there is the cross. A little longer, and I will come. write for the spiritually deaf.
“Isaiah says, ‘Where must I still strike you if you add on other acts of overbearance?’ And he adds the description of a body in agony which they have applied to Me in the hour of the Passion.
“But it is not I - you are the ones who are reduced in this way by your sinning. And if I was entirely wounds and bruises, I was such only because at that moment I was as you are now, having reached mastery in sinning.
“The works of your minds (the head) are sick works. It is very hard for your thought to be upright. Corrupted and eaten by the threefold concupiscence, you can generate only sick thoughts. Your actions and your works bear the sign of your spiritual mental infirmities. Your sentiments flowing forth from a heart as sick as your mind are even more burned by lust and pride. To call them sentiments is improper: they are even less than senses; believe this, O men hungry for sensualism and egoism. Your motor is no longer love. It is self-interest, satisfaction, pride. Profaners of yourselves, you enslave your members and your organs to your sick desires.
“Where is your spirit? In the flesh heap where dying things rot. How much room for your spirits I have given you! And you corrupt your spirits into wanting prison and pervert them towards the actions of prison, and, along with it, your whole selves. ruin one another, and there is no balm for your wounds, for the ones who would give you that balm are crushed and slain.
“You still come to Me sometimes. And why do you come? To make Me an accomplice of your murderous actions? God does not lend Himself to killing. Do you come out of fear of being killed? Then why do you kill? It is of no benefit to present offerings to Me when beyond the clean table I see blood dripping from your hands, rottenness from your hearts, and, above the deceitful babbling of your prayers, I hear the wicked thoughts teaming in your minds hissing.
“False Christians, you cause Me disgust. You seem to Me to be Judases close to my altar. It is not by selling their brothers and sisters, robbing, killing, lying, fornicating, and corrupting that people can say they are my faithful ones. I told you with my final words as the Master - and even among you, when one is in agony, he never lies - what people must do to be my friends and have my Father and yours at their side. I told you to be pure, good, charitable, and obedient; I told you to believe in my Word and follow my teachings; I told you to remain united to Me so as not to die.
“Have you done this? No. And you are dying as a result. I turn my gaze away from you because for Me you are as many other traitorous disciples. And if it is true that I would have liked to redeem even the Iscariot, for I am the Entirely Loving One, it is no less true that when I saw him close to Me at the Table and close to Me in the Garden after having already concluded the vile barter, everything in Me rose up in disgust.
“I do not close the gates to Life and Peace to you. But in the kingdom of Life and Peace impure beings must not circulate. Dive into the blessed pools where the purple of my Blood makes your stained stoles snow-white. Dive into the flames of Love by sacrificing your shameful loves to a love which makes you worthy of your origin and your goal. I destroyed Myself to make Myself a fire of purification for the sins of men.
“Want not to sin. Just want not to. I, who love you divinely, will do the rest. Say it: ‘We do not want to sin.’ And try not to do so. Like those who were ill with a tremendous disease which has now been overcome, you shall see the fever of evil fall day by day and the strength of health increase. The taste for what is good and useful shall return to you. Serenity, which you now seek in vain by way of your obscene diversions and merciless occupations of egoism, shall flow back into you through justice and compassion, practiced by you again. Being good, children, makes the soul like that of a child again: trusting, cheerful, light, in peace.
“The kingdom of Heaven, I said, belongs to those who become like children. But you shall have a foretaste of that blessed kingdom even on earth if you come to the Father with souls which have again become innocent, for God loves children, and before a soul that is able to become a child out of love for Him and again becomes pure, honest, loving, and faithful, He opens the dikes of Mercy, causing torrents of graces to flow out from them.
“The dying world needs this lavacre of Mercy to wash away its filthiness and all the blood and cover itself again with goods for the needs of men.
“It is not ferocity which gives bread and wealth. Believe this. Ferocity lacks the divine blessing, and where it is lacking, even if you sow wheat, hemlock will arise, and if you raise lambs, they will turn into hyenas for you.
“No, children. Come back to the Lord, and God shall repeat for you, having returned to the dwelling, the miracle of the manna of old. Nothing is impossible for God, and nothing is impossible for the man who lives in God.”
241 Echoes of the parable may be found in the dictations of July 5 and July 24, for example.