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Faith

Theme: Virtues, Christian Qualities, and Human Qualities · Page 5 of 7

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Aa

GRM 173.6 · Volume 3

The Gospel as revealed to me

Quotation

You may say: “You can cure people”. Yes, I can do that and other things. But I do not always find faith in men, and I cannot do what I would do and would like to do, if the hearts of men had faith in Me.

GRM 173.7 · Volume 3

The Gospel as revealed to me

Quotation

Do not be of little faith. Do not worry about an uncertain future saying: “What shall I eat when I am old? What shall I drink? How will I clothe myself?”. Leave such worries to the Gentiles, who do not have the lofty certainty of the divine paternity. You have it and you know that the Father is aware of your needs and loves you. Therefore trust Him. Seek first what is really necessary: faith, goodness, charity, humility, mercy, purity, justice, meekness, the three and four main virtues, and all the others as well, in order to be the friends of God, and have a right to His Kingdom. And I can assure you that all the rest will be given to you as well, without having to ask for it. There is no rich man richer than a saint or any man safer than he is. God is with the saint and the saint is with God. He does not ask anything for his body, and God supplies what is necessary. But he works for his soul, and God gives Himself to him in this world, and Paradise in the next one.

GRM 174.21 · Volume 3

The Gospel as revealed to me

Quotation

I have told you much, My children. Listen to My words; he who listens to them and puts them into practice, can be compared to a thoughtful man, who wishing to build a house, choses a rocky place. He certainly worked hard to lay the foundations. He had to work with pick and stone chisel, he got callous hands and broke his back. But he was able to put lime in the fissures of the rock and lay bricks one close to the other, like the wall of a fortress, and the house was as solid as a mountain. The house was exposed to the inclemency of the weather and to downpours, the rain caused the rivers to overflow their banks, the winds whistled, the waves beat it, but the house resisted everything. Such is he who has a sound faith. Instead he who listens superficially and does not strive to engrave My words in his heart, because he is aware that to do so he would have to work hard, suffer and extirpate too many things, is like a man who out of indolence and foolishness builds his house on sand. As soon as the inclement weather comes, the house quickly built, quickly collapses and the forlorn fool contemplates the rubble of the house and the ruin of his capital. And in that case the ruin can be repaired with expenses and work. But if the edifice of the spirit crashes, because it was badly built, there is no way to rebuild it. One cannot build in future life. Woe to those who present themselves there with rubble!

GRM 178.3 · Volume 3

The Gospel as revealed to me

Quotation

«Say with Me: “I bless You, o Father, and I invoke Your light for those who weep in the haze of life. I bless You, o Father, and I invoke Your strength for those who are like a child in need of support. I bless You, o Father, and I invoke Your love that it may cause men to forget everything which is not Yourself, as they can find all good in You, both here and in Heaven, although they cannot believe it”.»

GRM 180.2-4 · Volume 3

The Gospel as revealed to me

Quotation

« I was rich and powerful. If God had not decided to preserve me for a purpose of His, I would have surrendered myself to despair and perished when I was persecuted and a leper. I would have acted harshly against myself… Instead a new wealth, which I had never possessed before, descended upon my desolation: the wealth of a conviction: “God exists”. First… God… Yes, I believed, I was a faithful Israelite. But mine was a faith of formalism. And I thought that the reward of my faith was always inferior to my virtue. I took the liberty of debating with God because I felt that I was still something on the earth. Simon Peter is right. I, too, was building a tower of Babel[1] by praising myself and satisfying my ego. When everything collapsed around me and I was like a worm crushed by the weight of all this human futility, then I no longer debated with God, but with myself, with my stupid self and I ended up by demolishing it. And as I did so, by making room for what I think is the God immanent in our earthly beings, I gained a new strength and wealth: the certainty that I was not alone and that God was watching over man defeated by men and by evil.»

«According to you, what is God, “the God immanent in our earthly beings” as you said? What do you mean? I do not understand you and I think it is a heresy. God is the One we know through the Law and the Prophets. There is no other God» says rather sternly Judas of Kerioth.

«If John was here he would tell you better than I can. But I will tell you as best I can. God is the One we know through the Law and the Prophets. That is true. But in what do we know Him? And how?»

Judas of Alphaeus exclaims: «Little and badly. The Prophets, who described Him for us, knew Him. The idea we have is a muddled one, as we can just see through a mound of explanations piled up by sects…»

«Sects? What do you mean? We have no sects. We are the children of the Law. We all are» the angry aggressive Iscariot says.

«The children of the laws. Not of the Law. There is a slight difference. Plural, not singular. In actual fact, we are the children of what we created, no longer of what God gave us» retorts Thaddeus.

«The laws derive from the Law» says the Iscariot.

«Also diseases originate in our bodies, but that does not mean that they are good» replies Thaddeus.

«But let me hear what this immanent God of Simon Zealot is.» The Iscariot, who cannot argue against the remark of Judas of Alphaeus, endeavours to take the discussion back to where it started.

180.3

Simon Zealot says: «Our senses need a term to catch an idea. Each of us, I am referring to us believers, believes, by the virtue of faith, in the Most High Lord and Creator, Eternal God, Who is in Heaven. But every being needs more than such bare, pure, incorporeal faith, which is fit and sufficient for the angels who see and love God spiritually, as they share with Him a spiritual nature and can see God. We have to create a “picture” of God for ourselves, which picture is made with the essential features that we ascribe to God, to give a name to His infinite absolute perfection. The more a soul concentrates, the more it succeeds in achieving an exact knowledge of God. That is what I say: the immanent God. I am not a philosopher. Perhaps I have applied the word wrongly. In short, I think that the immanent God is to feel, to perceive God in our spirits, to feel and perceive Him no longer as an abstract idea, but as a real presence, bestowing strength and a new peace upon us.»

«All right. But, to sum up, how did you feel Him? What is the difference between feeling by faith and feeling by immanence?» asks the Iscariot somewhat ironically.

«God is safety, boy. When you perceive Him, as Simon says, by means of that word, which I do not understand literally, but I understand its spirit — and believe me, the trouble is that we understand only literally and we do not understand the spirit of God’s words — it means that you are able to grasp the idea of the terrible majesty, but also of the most sweet paternity of God. It means that, should all the world judge and condemn you unjustly, you would feel that One only, He, the Eternal One, Who is your Father, does not judge you, but absolves and comforts you. It means that if all the world should hate you, you would feel over you a love greater than any this world can offer. It means that if you were isolated in jail or in a desert you would always hear One speak to you and say: “Be holy, that you may be like your Father”. It means that for the true love for this Father and God, Whom at last you perceive as such, you accept, work, take and leave without any human consideration, as you are concerned only to return love for love and to copy God as much as possible in your actions» says Peter.

«You are proud! To copy God! You are not entitled to» declares the Iscariot.

«It is not pride. Love leads to obedience. To copy God seems to me a form of obedience because God said that He made us in His own image and likeness» replies Peter.

«He made us. We must not go higher up.»

«You are a poor wretch, my boy, if that is what you think! You are forgetting that we fell and that God wants to take us back to what we were.»

180.4

Jesus begins to speak: «Even more, Peter, Judas and you all. Even more than that. Adam’s perfection was still susceptible of improvement through love, which would have made him a more precise image of his Creator. Adam without the stain of sin would have been a most shining mirror of God. That is why I say: “Be perfect as your Father Who is in Heaven is perfect”. Like your Father. Therefore like God. Peter is quite right. And so is Simon. I ask you to remember their words and apply them to your souls.»

Peter’s wife almost faints from joy on hearing her husband being praised thus. She weeps behind her veil: she is quiet but happy.

Peter blushes so much that he seems to be having a stroke of apoplexy.

Detail

Simon the Zealot speaks. The question of faith is discussed further in 180.3.