The reality of life, death and suffering

Do not accumulate your treasures on the earth, living for them, being cruel for them, cursed by your neighbour and by God on account of them. It is not worth it, They are never safe in this world. Thieves can always rob you. Fire can always destroy your houses. Diseases of plants and animals can exterminate herds and orchards. How many things undermine your property! Whether it is real estate and unassailable, such as houses and gold; whether its nature is liable to be damaged, such as all living things, vegetables and animals, or precious cloths, they can be ruined. Thunderbolts, fire and floods can destroy houses; thieves, blight, dry weather, rodents and insects can damage fields; catching diseases, fever, crippling, murrain can destroy cattle; moths and mice can ruin valuable pieces of cloth and precious pieces of furniture; oxidization can corrode vases, chandeliers and artistic gates; everything is subject to destruction.

But if you turn earthly welfare into supernatural good, then it becomes free from all damage by time, men and calamities. Store your treasures in Heaven, where thieves cannot break them, and where no calamities occur. Work with merciful love for all the miseries of the earth. You may caress your money and kiss it if you wish so, you may rejoice at the plentiful crops, at the vineyards laden with grapes, at the countless number of olives which bend the branches of the olive-trees, and at your prolific sheep with turgid udders. You may rejoice at all that, but not in a sterile or human way. Rejoice with love and admiration, with supernatural delight and foresight.

“Thank You, my God, for this money, for these crops, plants, sheep and for this business! Thank you, sheep, plants, meadows, business, which serve me so well. May you all be blessed, because through Your goodness, o Eternal Father, and through yours, o things of mine, I can do so much good to those who are hungry, or are naked, homeless, sick, alone… Last year I did it for ten. This year — as I have more money, although I gave away much as alms, and the crops are more plentiful and the flocks larger — I will give twice, three times as much as last year. So that everybody, also those who have no wealth of their own, may partake of my joy and bless with me the Eternal Lord”. That is the prayer of a just man. A prayer, which joined to your deeds, transfers your wealth to Heaven, and not only keeps it eternally for you, but you will find it increased by the holy fruit of love.

Store your treasure in Heaven so that your heart may also be there, above and beyond the risk that not only your gold, your houses, fields and herds may suffer damage, but that your very heart may be attacked and robbed, corroded, burnt and killed by the spirit of the world. If you do that, you will have your treasure in your heart because you will have God within you until the blessed day when you will be in Him.

• Acts - Actions
• Cruelty
• Curse
• Doing Good
• Flight
• God's curse
• Heaven - Paradiso
• How to perfect and sanctify yourself
• Illness - Disability - Handicap
• Mercy and forgiveness
• Misfortunes
• Poverty - Misery
• Where your treasure is, there your heart will be too
• Work

And I therefore say to you: do not worry too much because you are afraid of having too little. You will always have what is necessary. Do not worry too much about your future. Nobody knows how much future there is ahead of him. Do not worry about what you will eat to support yourselves in life or what clothes you will put on to keep your bodies warm. The life of your souls is by far more precious than your stomachs and your limbs, it is much more valuable than your food and your clothes, exactly as material life is more valuable than food and the body more precious than its clothes. And your Father knows. You ought to know, too. Look at the birds in the sky. They do not sow or reap or gather into barns, and yet they do not starve to death because the heavenly Father feeds them. And you men, the favourite creatures of the Father, are worth much more than they are.

Which of you, with all his talent, can add one single cubit to his height? If you cannot raise your height even by a span, how can you possibly change your future conditions, increasing your wealth, to ensure that you will live to a long and happy old age? Can you say to death: “You shall come for me when I want”? You cannot. Why, then, worry about your future? And why go to so much trouble lest you should be left without clothes? Think of the lilies growing in the fields: they do not work or spin, they do not buy any cloth from vendors, yet I assure you that not even Solomon in all his regalia was robed like one of them. Now if that is how God clothes the grass in the field, which is there today and will be thrown into the furnace tomorrow or used to feed the cattle and will thus end up in ash or dung, how much more He will see to you, His children?

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.

So do not go to any trouble for what is not worth your trouble. Let your imperfections grieve you, not your scanty earthly means. Do not worry about tomorrow. Tomorrow will take care of itself, and you will take care of it when you live it. Why worry today? Is life not already quite full of yesterday’s sad memories and of today’s troubles, that we should feel the need to add the nightmares of tomorrow’s uncertainties? Leave to each day its own trouble! There will always be in life more pains than we would wish, without adding the present pains to future ones! Always say the great word of God: “Today”. You are His children, created to His likeness. So say with Him: “Today”.

• Abandon
• Anxiety - Fear - Fearfulness
• Children of God - Sons of God
• Field lily
• Food
• Future
• God the Father
• How to perfect and sanctify yourself
• Life and death
• Material wealth
• Providence
• Reading and knowing the future
• Salomon (biblical character)
• Tomorrow will worry about itself; each day has its own punishment
• Trust in Providence - Be like the birds

I am the Master of Life and of Death.

• Life and death
• Who is Jesus? How Christ defines himself

Such is life, it bestrides past and future, good and evil. Man is in the centre with his willpower and free will; at the ends, on one side there is God and His Heaven, on the other side Satan and his Hell. Man can choose. Nobody forces him.

• Damnation - Perdition - Hell and the damned
• Free will
• Freedom
• Future
• God
• Good and evil
• Heaven - Paradiso
• Life
• Lucifer - Satan
• Man - God's creature
• Will
• Words of wisdom

O children of God, defend yourselves against yourselves. Look after yourselves diligently against all temptations. There is no evil in being tempted. An athlete prepares himself for victory fighting. But it is evil to be overcome because you are not prepared and you are negligent. I know that everything serves as a temptation. I know that defence is exhausting. I know that it is tiring to have to struggle. But think of what you will gain through these things. And for one hour of pleasure, whatever kind it may be, would you like to lose an eternity of peace? What does the pleasure of the flesh, of gold, of thoughts leave you? Nothing. What do you gain by rejecting them? Everything. I am speaking to sinners, because man is a sinner. Well, tell me the truth: after satisfying your senses, your pride, your greed, have you felt fresher, happier, safer? In the hour following your satisfaction, which is always the time of meditation, have you sincerely felt that you were happy? I have never tasted the bread of sensuality. But I will reply in your stead: “No. Languor, unhappiness, uncertainty, nausea, fear, restlessness: that was the juice squeezed out of the hour spent in pleasure”.

• Anxiety - Fear - Fearfulness
• Chair
• Children of God - Sons of God
• Fighting temptation
• Fishermen
• Gold
• Jesus Christ's words to a sinner
• Mal
• Restlessness - Preoccupation
• Sensuality - Pleasure of the senses - Enjoyment
• Sin
• Spiritual warfare
• Temptation
• The fruitfulness of suffering
• Vigilance

There is no evil in being tempted. An athlete prepares himself for victory fighting. But it is evil to be overcome because you are not prepared and you are negligent. I know that everything serves as a temptation. I know that defence is exhausting. I know that it is tiring to have to struggle. But think of what you will gain through these things. And for one hour of pleasure, whatever kind it may be, would you like to lose an eternity of peace? What does the pleasure of the flesh, of gold, of thoughts leave you? Nothing. What do you gain by rejecting them? Everything.

• Eternity - Eternal life
• Pain and suffering
• Peace
• Words of wisdom

It is true that it is stated that deformed people cannot serve God in the Temple. But after this life, the deformed by birth who are holy and those who are deformed out of virtue, will become more beautiful than angels and will serve God, loving Him in the happiness of Heaven.

• Angels
• Bible - Book of Leviticus
• Heaven - Paradiso
• Holiness
• Illness - Disability - Handicap
• Jerusalem Temple (spiritual state - teachings - various episodes)
• Pain and suffering
• Virtues
• Words of wisdom

It has also been said to you: “Anyone who divorces his wife, must give her a writ of dismissal”. But that is to be condemned. for it does not come from God. God said to Adam: “This is the helpmate I made for you. Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and conquer it”. And Adam, full of superior intelligence, because Sin had not yet dimmed his reason made perfect by God, exclaimed: “This at last is bone from my bones, and flesh from my flesh. This is to be called woman, that is: another I, because this was taken from man. This is why a man leaves his father and mother and joins himself to his wife and the two become one body”. And in an increased splendour of light the Eternal Light approved smiling Adam’s word, which became the first indelible law. Now, if owing to the ever increasing hardness of man, the human lawgiver had to give a new law; if owing to the ever increasing inconstancy of man. the lawgiver had to put a restraint and say: “If you have dismissed her you cannot take her back”, that does not cancel the first genuine law, passed in the Earthly Paradise and approved by God.

• Adam and Eve
• Bible - Book of Deuteronomy
• Bible - Book of Genesis
• Bible - Gospel of Matthew
• Divorce
• Divorced and remarried
• Earthly paradise
• Family
• Husband and wife - Husband and wife
• Moses (biblical character)
• Repudiation
• Wedding
• Word of God - Law of God

I say to you: “Whoever divorces his wife, except for the case of fornication, exposes her to adultery”. Because what will the divorced woman do in ninety per cent of situations? She will get married again. With what consequences? Oh! How much there is to be said about that! Do you not know that you can cause involuntary incests by such system? How many tears are shed because of lust. Yes: lust. There is no other name for it. Be frank. Everything can be overcome when the spirit is righteous. But everything is an excuse to satisfy sensuality when the spirit is lustful. Woman’s frigidity, dullness, inability for housework, shrewish tongue, love for luxury, everything can be overcome, also diseases and irascibility, if one loves holily. But as after some time one does not love as on the first day, what is more than possible is considered impossible and a poor woman is thrown onto the road and to perdition.

He who rejects her commits adultery. He who marries her after divorce, commits adultery.

Death only dissolves a marriage. Remember that. And if your choice is an unhappy one bear the consequences as a cross, being both of you unhappy but holy, without making also the children unhappy, as they are innocent and suffer more because of such unfortunate situations. The love for your children should cause you to ponder one hundred times, also in the case of death of your partner. Oh! I wish you could be satisfied with what you already have had and to which God said: “Enough!” I wish you, widows and widowers, realised that death is not an attenuation but an elevation to the perfections of parents! To be a mother instead of a dead mother. To be a father instead of a deceased father. To be two souls in one and receive the love for the children from the cold lips of the dying partner and say: “Go in peace, without worrying for those who were born of you. I will continue to love them, on my own and on your behalf, I will love them twice and will be their father and mother and they will not suffer the unhappiness of orphans, neither will they feel the inborn jealousy that the children of a remarried consort experience with regards to him or her who takes the sacred place of mother or father called by God to a new abode”.

• Carrying the Cross
• Death
• Divorce
• Divorced and remarried
• Incest
• Lust
• Orphans
• Parents and children
• Repudiation
• Sensuality - Pleasure of the senses - Enjoyment
• Wedding
• Widow - Widower - Widow

Everything can be overcome when the spirit is righteous. But everything is an excuse to satisfy sensuality when the spirit is lustful. Woman’s frigidity, dullness, inability for housework, shrewish tongue, love for luxury, everything can be overcome, also diseases and irascibility, if one loves holily.

• Anger - Irascibility
• Fault
• Holiness
• Illness - Disability - Handicap
• Love
• Love of neighbor
• Lust
• Material wealth
• Right
• Sensuality - Pleasure of the senses - Enjoyment
• Spirit
• Words of wisdom