The “Our Father” as Explained by Our Lord – Part Three.
The
Lord is speaking to His Apostles after His Resurrection.
“Bless
those who humiliate you.”
Jesus
stretches out His arms in His usual attitude of prayer and intones: «
Our Father Who art in Heaven. » He stops and comments: « That He is
a Father is proved to you by the fact that He has forgiven you. [The
Apostles had fled after He was arrested]. You, obliged to be perfect
more than anybody else, you, who have received so many favors, and
so, as you say, unsuited for the mission, which Lord, who were not
your Father, would not have punished you? I have not punished you.
The Father has not punished you. Because the Son does what the Father
does, because the Father does what the Son does, as we are one only
Divinity united in Love [...]. So, when I shall have gone, and in
this manner you will pray: our, My, your Father, whereby we are
brothers, I the first-born, you, the younger brothers, be always
willing to see also Me in My Father and yours.
Be
willing to see the Word, Who was "the Master" for you, and
loved you even to accepting death and beyond death, leaving Himself
to you in food and drink, so that you may be in Me and I in you as
long as the exile lasts, and then you and I in the Kingdom, for which
I taught you to pray, saying: "Thy Kingdom come", after you
have implored that your work may sanctify the Name of the Lord,
giving Him glory on Earth and in Heaven. Yes. There would be no
Kingdom for you in Heaven, the Kingdom for those who will believe
like you, if first you did not want the Kingdom of God in yourselves
through the real practice of the Law of God and of My word, which is
the perfecting of the Law, having given, in the time of Grace, the
Law of the chosen ones, that is, of those who are, beyond the civil,
moral, religious constitutions of the Mosaic time, already in the
spiritual Law of the time of Christ.
You
see what it is to have the closeness of God, but not God in you; what
it is to have the word of God, but not the real practice of that
word. Man has committed every crime by having God close to him, but
not in his heart; by having the knowledge of the word, but not the
obedience to it. Everything! Everything because of that. Dullness and
delinquency, deicide, betrayal, tortures, the death of the Innocent
and of His Cain, everything has come through that. And yet, who was
loved by Me like Judas? But he did not have Me-God in his heart. And
he is the damned deicide, infinitely guilty as an Israelite and as a
disciple, as a suicide and a deicide, in addition to his seven deadly
sins and every other sin of his.
You
can now have the Kingdom of God in yourselves more easily, because I
have obtained it for you with My death. I have redeemed you with My
sorrow. Bear that in your minds. So let no one trample on Grace,
because it cost the life and the Blood of a God. So let the Kingdom
of God be in you, men, through Grace; let it be on the Earth, through
the Church, let it be in Heaven, for the blessed souls who, having
lived with God in their hearts, united to the Body of which Christ is
the Head, united to the Vine of which every Christian is a branch,
deserve to rest in the Kingdom of Him for Whom all things have been
made: Me, Who am speaking to you and Who have given Myself to the
Will of the Father, so that everything might be accomplished.
I
can therefore teach you, without hypocrisy, that you must say: "Thy
Will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven". How I have done the
will of My Father can be told even by the clods of earth, by plants,
by flowers, by the stones in Palestine, by My wounded Body and by a
whole population. Do as I did. To the very end. Even unto death on a
cross, if God so wishes. Because, remember, I have done it, and there
is no disciple who deserves mercy more than I do. And yet I have
consumed the greatest sorrow. And yet I have obeyed with perpetual
renunciations. You know. You will understand even more in future when
you resemble Me drinking a draft at My chalice… Let this thought be
constantly present to you: "Through His obedience to the Father,
He saved us".
And
if you want to be saviors, do what I have done. There will be some
who will be acquainted with the cross, some with the tortures of
tyrants, some with the torture of love, some with the exile from
Heaven, to which they will tend until a very late age before
ascending there. Well, in everything let the will of God be done.
Consider that the torment of death or the torment of life, while you
would like to die to come where I am, are the same in the eyes of
God, if they are suffered with cheerful obedience. They are His Will.
So they are holy.
Give
us this day our daily bread". Day by day, hour by hour. It is
faith. It is love. It is obedience. It is humility. It is hope, this
asking for the bread for one day, and accepting it as it is. Sweet
today, bitter tomorrow, much, little, with spices or with ashes.
Always as it is just. God, Who is a Father, gives it. So it is good.
Another
time I will speak to you of the other Bread, which it would be
healthy to eat every day, and to pray the Father to keep it […].
Pray the Father that He may defend His Bread and give you it.
"Forgive
us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us".
Since you are all sinners, be meek with sinners. Remember My words:
"Why do you observe the splinter in your brother's eye, if first
you do not take the plank out of your own eye?" That Spirit that
I infused into you, that order that I gave you, grant you the
authority to remit the sins of your neighbor, in the name of God […].
Forgive those who offend you, in order to be forgiven and to be
entitled to absolve or to condemn. He who is without sin can do so
with full justice. He who does not forgive, while he is in sin and
feigns to be scandalized, is a hypocrite and Hell awaits him.
Because, if there is still mercy for wards, severe will be the
verdict against the guardians of wards, guilty of the same or greater
sins, although they had the fullness of the Spirit to assist them.
"Lead
us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil". That is
humility, the fundamental stone of perfection. I solemnly tell you to
bless those who humiliate you, because they give you what is
necessary for your celestial thrones. No. Temptation is not a ruin,
if man remains humbly near the Father and asks Him not to allow
Satan, the world and the flesh to triumph over him. The crowns of the
blessed souls are adorned with the gems of the temptations they
overcame. Do
not look for them. But do not be cowards when they come. Humble, and
thus strong, shout to My Father and yours: "Deliver us from
evil", and you will defeat evil. And you will really sanctify
the Name of God with your deeds, as I said at the beginning, because
every man, when seeing you, will say: "God exists, because they
live as gods, so perfect is their behavior", and they will come
to God, multiplying the citizens of the Kingdom of God.
Kneel
down, that I may bless you and My blessing may open your minds to
meditate. » They prostrate themselves on the ground and He blesses
them, then He disappears, as if He were absorbed by a moonbeam.
Shortly afterwards the apostles raise their heads, surprised at not
hearing any more words, and they realize that Jesus has disappeared…
They prostrate themselves again with their faces on the ground, in
the age-old fear of every Israelite who experiences the sensation of
having been in touch with God, as He is in Heaven.
Based
on Chapter 626, Volume 5 of The
Gospel as Revealed to Me,
by Maria Valtorta.
Maria
Valtorta was an Italian Catholic writer and mystic. Bedridden for a
large part of her life, she was a Franciscan Third Order member and a
lay member of the Servants of Mary. Maria was born on March 14, 1897
in Caserta, a city near Naples, where her father Giuseppe’s cavalry
regiment was stationed. Giuseppe Valtorta was a warrant officer in
the regiment. He was a devoted father to Maria, who was an only
child. In contrast, her mother, Iside Fioravanzi, who was a French
teacher, was often severe and even cruel to both her husband and her
daughter.
In
her youth, Valtorta traveled around Italy due to her father's
military career and the family eventually settled in Viareggio. In
1920, aged 23, while she was walking on a street with her mother, a
delinquent youth struck her in the back with an iron bar for no
apparent reason. In 1934, the injury confined her to bed for the
remaining 28 years of her life. Her spiritual life was influenced by
reading the autobiography of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux and, in 1925,
at the age of 28, before becoming bedridden, she offered herself to
God as a victim soul. From 23 April 1943, until 1951 she produced
13,193
handwritten
pages in 122 notebooks, mostly detailing the life of Jesus in his
hidden life, public life, and his Passion.
Her
handwritten notebooks containing close to 700 supernaturally
experienced episodes in the life of Jesus were typed on separate
pages by her priest and reassembled, becoming the basis of her
10-volume book The
Gospel as Revealed to Me.
The remaining pages were published in three volumes as The
Notebooks.
She also wrote an autobiography. Valtorta lived most of her life in
Viareggio, where she died on October 12, 1961.
She
is buried at the grand cloister of the Basilica of Santissima
Annunziata in Florence. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the
Faith gave permission to Emilio Pisani at the Centro Editoriale
Valtortiano (the publishing house of Maria Valtorta’s works) to
continue publishing her work as it is without modifications. In a
letter dated May 6, 1992 addressed to Pisani, Bishop Dionigi
Tettamanzi, secretary to the Italian Episcopal Conference, gave
permission for the work to continue to be published for the “true
good of readers and in the spirit of the genuine service to the faith
of the Church.”
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