Skip to content

Notes for this keyword

Animals

Theme: Animals · Page 3 of 5

Reading comfort

Aa

GRM 167.12

The Gospel as revealed to me

Translation in progress

Keywords

GRM 180.6 · Volume 3

The Gospel as revealed to me

Quotation

The thorny fields are those in which thorny tangles of personal interests, which suffocate the good seed, have been allowed to grow by carelessness. You must watch yourselves all the time. Never say: “Oh! I am well formed, I have been sown, I can rest assured that I will bear seeds of eternal life”. Watch yourselves; the struggle between Good and Evil is still on. Have you ever watched a colony of ants that install themselves in a house? There they are, near the fireplace. The housewife takes all foodstuff away from there and puts it on the table. They sniff the air and attack the table. The housewife puts the food in a cupboard and they get into the cupboard through the keyhole. The woman hangs her food supply from the ceiling, and they go a long way along walls and beams, down the rope and reach the food. The woman burns them, scalds them, poisons them. And thinking that she has destroyed them she is happy. But if she does not watch, what a surprise she gets! The new hatched ones come out and she has to start all over again. And that is what happens while you live; you must be careful and uproot the evil weeds as soon as they come up. Otherwise they will form a ceiling of brambles which suffocate the corns. Worldly cares, deceiving wealth form the tangle, suffocate the seed of God and prevent it from coming into ears.

GRM 181.1 · Volume 3

The Gospel as revealed to me

Quotation

A clear dawn causes the lake to sparkle like pearls and envelops the hills in a mist as light as a muslin veil, through which olive and walnut-trees, houses and the background of villages look prettier than usual. Boats are sailing smoothly and quietly towards Capernaum. All of a sudden Peter turns the tiller of the rudder, so abruptly that the boat heels to one side.

«What are you doing?» asks Andrew.

«There is the boat of an owl[1]. It is leaving Capernaum now. My eyes are good and since yesterday evening I have the scent of a hound. I do not want them to see us. I am going back to the river. We will go on foot.»

Also the other boat has followed the manouevre, but James, who is holding the rudder, asks Peter: «Why are you doing that?»

«I will tell you later. Follow me.»

Jesus, Who is sitting astern, rouses when they are almost off the Jordan. «What are you doing, Simon?» He asks.

«We are getting off here. There is a jackal about. It is not possible to go to Capernaum today.»

Detail

It's the day after John the Baptist's arrest, and the apostles are suspicious of everyone.

Annotation

- I see an owl's boat! This sobriquet in Peter's mouth was inspired by the Palestine owl, otherwise known as the Great Horned Owl or Desert Owl (Bubo ascalaphus). It inhabits ruins and desolate places in great numbers, to which its mournful cry is well suited(source).

There's a jackal in sight. The jackal (schoual) is sometimes called a fox in the Old Testament. Indeed, they physically resemble each other.

GRM 181.7 · Volume 3

The Gospel as revealed to me

Quotation

«If You maintain that Satan and his followers are always to be blamed… it seems to me that the responsibility of the disciple diminishes» says Matthew.

«Do not believe that. If there is Good there is also Evil and man is gifted with discernment and freedom.»

«You say that God does not allow more than what is useful to the triumph of His loving will. Therefore such an error is useful too, if He allows it, and it serves the triumph of the divine will» says the Iscariot.

«And you infer, as Matthew does, that that justifies the disciple’s crime. God created the lion without ferocity and the snake without poison, now one is ferocious and the other poisonous. That is why God separated them from man. Ponder over that and draw conclusions. »

Detail

Jesus has just spoken of the disciple who becomes the Master's enemy, following Satan and the demons.

Annotation

"God does not allow us to oppose, any more than is useful, the triumph of his will of love". On a leaf inserted in the typed copy, Maria Valtorta wrote:

"God has given man the intellect to understand, the reason to guide himself as a reasonable creature, the conscience to advise, the law to know how to regulate himself, the freedom to deserve what he wants to deserve: God and glory, or Hell and damnation.

Moreover, He gave him grace, or predestination to grace, so that it might be a stimulus, or a means, to raise the things listed below to a level capable of giving him a holy taste for the supernatural and for God.

Now, in the man who is intelligent, reasonable, conscious, free, and above all instructed in the Faith, knowing his last end and the divine Law, there should be only such actions as the Law prescribes and the knowledge of the end incites us to practice, even as reason and conscience indicate them as good to all, even to those who do not know revealed religion, in order toto obtain the eternal reward that the human intellect, all the more so when enlightened by Grace, is infinitely superior to all conceptions a believer can imagine.

But it sometimes happens that man, acting against reason, turns his freedom into a yoke of the cruellest of slaveries: that of the devil and sin, preferring Evil to Good.

Even if God allows man to do what he chooses of his own free will, in order to judge and confirm him in grace, or to judge that he deserves punishment, nothing lessens man's guilt. For while it is true that man, at God's prompting or Satan's instigation, can do good or evil, it is no less true that man should follow God alone and his loving invitations, for it is from him that he has received all those natural, moral and supernatural gifts capable of making him a child of God, heir to the Kingdom."