Everything is possible for God. But as far as you are concerned, know that God requires only faith from you in order to act. We accuse Him so often of not listening to us and of not satisfying us.
On December 31, 1943, Our Lord said to the mystic Maria Valtorta that “...under the devil's lash, your hearts are led to waver in doubt, the first step towards despair. That is what Satan wants. He is not so interested in the material ruins he produces as in the spiritual effects they have on you. It is thus appropriate for Me, the Master, to repeat to you once more the lesson concerning the way to behave so as to obtain.” The Lord then reflects on two points.
[First point:] “Mark, in the sixth chapter of his Gospel, verse 5, says, ‘And he could not do any miracles there, only that he cured a few that were sick, laying his hands upon them.’ Only someone considering the perfection of the God-Man […] can comprehend how lovingly I had gone to my homeland. God does not deny and forbid your sentiments when they are honest and holy. He condemns only the ones which you erroneously call sentiments, but which are in reality perversions.
“I loved my homeland, then, and, within it, my home town, with a special love. My heart returned every day with loving thoughts to Nazareth, from which I had set out to evangelize, and I returned as well, for I would have wished to benefit and sanctify it, even though I knew it was closed and hostile to Me. If I lavished the power of the miracle everywhere, in Nazareth I would have wanted this power not to leave any case of physical illness, moral illness, or spiritual illness unresolved; I would have wanted to provide consolation for every form of misery, give light to every heart. But against Me was the incredulity of my fellow townsmen.
“Therefore, only those few who came to Me with faith and without pride in judgment were granted a miracle [of cures if sickness]. You accuse Me so often of not listening to you and of not satisfying you. But examine yourselves, O children. How do you come to Me? In you where is that constant, absolute faith like that of an innocent child who knows that his older brother, his loving father, and his patient grandfather can help him and make him content in his needs as a child because they love him so much? In you where is such faith towards Me?
“Am I not perhaps a foreigner among you, as I was in Nazareth, because incredulity and criticism expelled Me from it as a citizen? You pray. There are still some who pray. But as you ask Me for a grace, you think, without saying so even to yourselves, but thinking in the depths of your spirit, “God does not listen to me. God cannot grant me this grace.”
“He cannot?! What is God unable to do? Consider that He made the Universe from nothing consider that for millennia He has been launching the planets into space and governing their course; consider that He holds back the waters on the shores, and without barriers; consider that from the mud He made that organism which you are; consider that in this organism a seed and a few drops of blood mixed together create a new man, who in being shaped is in relation to the phases of the stars thousands of kilometers away, but also present in the work of forming a being, [In what way are the stars present in the work of forming a being? A mystery that Jesus hints at, but certainly not in the astrological sense that one’s destiny is fated in some way by the position of the stars at one’s birth.] just as, with their ethers and their rising and setting in your skies, they regulate the sprouting of crops and the blossoming of trees; consider that in his wise power He has created flowers endowed with organs capable of fecundating other flowers for which winds and insects act as pollinators. Consider that there is nothing which has not been created by God, so perfectly created, from the sun to the protozoon, that you can add nothing to such perfection.
“Consider that, from the sun to the protozoon, his wisdom has ordered all the laws for life, and be convinced that nothing is impossible for God, who at his ease can have all the forces of the cosmos at his disposal, increase them, halt them, and speed them up, provided his Thought so considers. How often, in the course of millennia, have the Earth's inhabitants remained astonished at stellar phenomena of inconceivable grandeur: meteors with strange lights, nighttime sun, comets and stars arising like flowers in a garden, in God's garden, and being launched into space as if by child's play, to amaze you?!
“Your scientists give ponderous explanations of the […] stellar bodies to make the incomprehensible development of the skies human. No. Be silent. Say a single word: God. Here is the shaper of those shining, rotating, burning lives! God is the one who, as a warning to you that are forgetful, tells you that He exists by way of the northern lights, the darting meteors tingeing the ether furrowed by them with sapphire, emerald, ruby, or topaz, the comets with a flaming tail like the mantle of a heavenly queen flying across the firmaments, the opening of the eye of another star in the vault of heaven, and the whirling of the sun perceptible at Fatima to convince you of God's will. Your other inductions are the smoke of human science and envelope error in the smoke.
“Everything is possible for God. But as far as you are concerned, know that God requires only faith from you in order to act. You act as a barrier to God's power with your distrust. And your prayers are contaminated with distrust. And I am not counting those who do not pray, but curse.
[Second point:] “Another point in Mark's Gospel is verse 13 in the same sixth chapter: ‘...And they anointed the sick with oil and healed them.’ In empirical medicine at that time oil played a leading role. Nor can it be said that it was more harmful or less effective than your complicated medicines at present. Indeed, it was certainly more innocuous.
“But it was not in the oil that the power of healing lay for the sick upon whom my apostles carried out the anointings. As always, a visible sign was needed for human dullness. Who could have thought that a touch of the hand of those poor men who were my apostles, known to be fishermen and common people, could heal? If they had thought so, they would have said, ‘You heal by the power of the prince of the demons,’ as they said to Me. And they would have accused them of being possessed by devils. That was not to be. I thus gave them the human means to be believed by the empirical, if nothing else. But the power was God, who infused it into them to make proselytes for his doctrine.
“I said, ‘Those who believe in Me will be able to walk upon serpents and scorpions and do the works I do.’ I never lie, and into the hand of a child believing and living in Me I can infuse divine power. Isn't the history of Christianity filled with such miracles? The early centuries are strewn with them, and the flowering of them has gradually diminished, not because God's power has diminished, but because you are not equal to the task of being ministers of God.
“Have faith. Have faith. Have faith. It will save you."
Maria Valtorta, The Notebooks 1943, December 31. Available from the “Maria Valtorta’s Readers’ Group,” https://www.valtorta.org.au/
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