THE POEM OF THE MAN-GOD
Maria Valtorta
Maria Valtorta is the best author of Sacred literature to help understand the Gospels and the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
Jesus' Holy Hour
Excerpted from THE NOTEBOOKS 1944, June 14.
I. Jesus says: "If I do not wash you, you will have no part in My Kingdom."
You, soul that I love, and all of you that I love, listen. I am speaking to you because I want to spend this holy hour with you. I, Jesus, do not distance you from My altar even if you approach it with a sick soul covered in sores, or enslaved by passions; these same passions that, like vines, bind up your soul and hamper you spiritually in order to deliver you, thus imprisoned, to the power of the flesh and its king, Lucifer.
Its always Me, Jesus, the Rabbi of Galilee, the one to whom the lepers, the paralytics, the blind, the possessed, the epileptics cried out in loud voices: "Son of David, have pity on me." Its always Me, Jesus, the Rabbi who offers His hand to the one who is drowning, and tells him: "Why do you doubt Me?" Its always Me, Jesus, who tells the dead: "Rise and live. I want it. Come out of your death sleep, come out of your tomb and walk," and I return you to the ones who love you.
And who is it who loves you, O My loved ones? Who loves you with true love, love that is not egotistical, love that is not changeable? Who loves you with an unselfish love, not stingy, and whose goal is to give you what He has accumulated for you, while telling you: "Take it. Its yours. I've done all this for you so that this can be yours and you can profit from it?" Who? The eternal God. And Me, its to Him that I bring you. To Him who loves you.
I don't distance you from My altar, because this altar is My flesh, My throne, the dwelling place of the Doctor who cures you of all disease. From here, I teach you to be confident. From here, King of life, I give you life. From here I bend over your illnesses and I cure them with the breath of My love.
I do even more, O children. I come down from this altar and I come towards you. See Me appear at the door of the churches. Few are those who enter them, and even less numerous are those who enter with sure faith. Here I am. Like a figure of peace, I show Myself in your streets, where you pass by overburdened, poisoned, withered by pain, by selfishness, by hatred. I offer you My hands. I can well see that you stagger with fatigue under the enormous stones that you have taken up and that have taken the place of the cross that I had put in your hand to sustain you as the staff supports the pilgrim. See how I tell you: "Enter. Rest. Drink," because I can clearly see that you are exhausted, parched.
But you don't see Me. You pass right by Me, you jostle Me, sometimes by ill will, sometimes from lack of spiritual vision. Sometimes you don't look at Me at all. But you know you are soiled, and you don't dare approach the candor of My Divine Host. But this Candor knows how to be indulgent to you. Learn to know Me, men who distrust Me, because you don't know Me.
Listen. I wanted to leave the Liberty and Purity which forms the atmosphere of heaven and to descend into this prison of yours, into this polluted air, to help you, because I love you. I did more than that: I deprived Myself of My divine liberty and I became enslaved to a mortal flesh. The Spirit of God enclosed in a body, the Infinite closed up in a bundle of muscle and bones, submissive to the voices of this flesh, persecuted by cold and by the sun, by famine, thirst, fatigue. I could have ignored all that. I wanted to know the tortures of man torn from his throne of innocence. I did that in order to love you more.
That still wasn't enough for Me. I wanted--because to be indulgent it is necessary to know what those we treat with indulgence endure--I wanted to experience the assaults on all of your senses in order to know your struggles, understand what kind of underhanded tyranny Satan slides into your blood, understand how easy it is to be hypnotized by this Serpent if we lower, for only a moment, our eyes into his seductive glance, by forgetting to live in the light. The serpent does not live in the light. He hides himself in dim nooks that appear restful but are dangerous. For you the dark recesses are named: women, money, power, egoism, ambition, sensuality. They hide the light that is God from you. In these dark recesses hides Satan. He looks like a necklace, but that's the rope that will strangle you. I wanted to know all of that because I love you.
This still wasn't enough for Me. It would have sufficed but the Justice of the Father would have been able to say to His Flesh: "You knew how to avoid the snare. Man, flesh like You, actually doesn't know how to avoid it. Let him be punished because I can't forgive someone who is soiled." I took upon Myself your stains. Those of the past, those of the present, and those to come. I went beyond the experience of the prophet Job and, more than him, I was submerged in sin's putrid and rotten manure. This happened when, submerged by the sin of the entire world, I didn't dare to raise My eyes to heaven. I groaned under the weight of the anger of God the Father, anger accumulated over the ages, anger conscious of sins yet to come. A deluge of sins on the earth from its beginning to its end. A deluge of curses on the Guilty One. On the Host of Sin.
Oh, men! I was more innocent than the baby a mother kisses after his baptism. And the Most High, on seeing Me, was horrified, because I had become sin. I took upon Myself all the sin of the world. I perspired from disgust. I perspired My own blood because of the disgust caused by this leprosy that I had on Myself who am the Innocent One. The blood caused My veins to burst because of the disgust provoked by this fetid swamp that was covering Me. And to achieve this torture, to press even more of My blood from My heart, to these sufferings were added the bitter pain of the curse. In this hour I was no longer the Word of God: I was the Man. The Man. The Guilty One.
Is it possible I could not understand your dejection and cease to love you because you are dejected? On the contrary, that is why I love you. I have only to remember that hour to love you and call you "Brothers!" But that is not enough to make the Father call you "Sons", and I want Him to call you that. What sort of brother would I be for you if I didn't want you to also be in the paternal Home?
Therefore I tell you: "Come, so that I can wash you." No one is too dirty, to the point of not being able to be washed by My bath. No one is too clean, to the point of not needing My water. Come, My water isn't ordinary water. There are miraculous sources that heal sores and sicknesses of the flesh. This water is like that because it gushes from My bosom.
Love without selfishness. If you love with selfishness, it would be an impure love, destined to die in sickness. Love one another in a way where you wish others more good than you wish for yourselves. Its very difficult. I know. But, do you see this Eucharistic Bread? It has made martyrs. They were creatures like you: fearful, weak, even vicious sometimes. This Bread made heroes of them.
In the first part, I recommended My Heart for your purification. In this third part, to make saints of you, I am showing you this Table and this Bread of sinners. My Blood has transformed you into just men, My Bread will transform just men into saints. A bath washes everything, but it doesn't nourish. It refreshes, it gives some substance, but it doesn't become flesh within flesh. On the other hand, nourishment becomes flesh and blood; it becomes part of you. My Nourishment becomes part of you.
Oh! Think! Look at a little child. Today he eats his bread and also tomorrow, and tomorrow and again tomorrow. See him now become a man: tall, robust, handsome. Did his mother make him like that? No. His mother conceived him, carried him, gave birth to him, nourished him with her milk and loved him, loved him, loved him. But if the small boy had only received kisses, kisses and love alone, he would have died of starvation. The small boy becomes an adult thanks to the nourishment he eats. The man is thus an adult thanks to the nourishment taken daily.
The same thing applies to your spiritual self. Nourish it with the true nourishment that comes from heaven and gives you the energies necessary for your growth in Grace. Strong and healthy virility is always an advantage. Observe the behavior of someone who is always sickly; observe how easily he becomes harsh, impatient, unpleasant. My nourishment will give you health. It will make you strong and virile in spirit. You will be able to love others more than yourselves, as I did with you.
See, My children, how much I have loved you. Not only as one may love himself, but even more. To the point that I agreed to die in your place, to save you from death. If you love like that, you will know God.
Do you know what it is to know God? It signifies savoring true Joy, true Peace, true Friendship. Oh, the Friendship, the Peace, the Joy of God! Its the reward promised to the blessed. But it is already given to the one who, on earth, knows how to love with his entire being.
When it is authentic, love is not made only of words. It is also made of actions. Love is active as its source, who is God, is active. Love never tires of being active, even when the behavior of brothers engenders deception. Woe to him who, crashing into an obstacle, falls like a bird with wings that are too weak.
Even wounded, true Love rises. If it can no longer fly, it uses its claws and its beak, but it climbs. It doesn't want to remain in the dark and cold. It wants to be in contact with the sun, a remedy for all ills. As soon as it finds itself reinvigorated, it takes wing again. It shuttles between God and the brothers, and between the brothers and God, like an angelic butterfly that transports pollen from the heavenly gardens to terrestrial flowers to fecundate them and brings to God the collected perfumes of the flowers, even the most humble ones, for God to take them and bless them.
But woe to him who goes away from the sun. The Sun is My Eucharist. In It, the Father blesses you, the Holy Spirit loves you, while I, the Word, act.
Come, take and eat. This is the nourishment that I recommend for consumption.
IV.
"If you live in Me, and My Doctrine lives in you, you will receive whatever you ask for."
I descend into you and I become your nourishment. But, being the Center that I am, I attract you towards Myself. You nourish yourselves with Me, but for a greater reason I nourish Myself with you. Our two appetites are insatiable and continuous. The vine nourishes the buds. The buds shape the vine. Water swells the oceans, but it is the oceans that give water by evaporating into clouds and descending again in the form of rain. That is why you must remain in Me, as I remain in you. Our separation would bring death, not my death, but yours.
I am nourishment for the spirit and nourishment for the mind. The spirit nourishes itself on the Flesh of a God. All that is an emanation of God can only receive nourishment from God, who is the mold that formed it. Your mind nourishes itself on My Word, which is the Thought of God.
Your own mind! Intelligence is what makes you resemble to God. In intelligence, there is memory, understanding, and also will. As in the spirit there is a resemblance to God in being a free and immortal spirit.
Your own mind must be nourished by My Doctrine, to be capable of memory, understanding, and will for what is good. My Doctrine reminds you of the kindnesses and the works of God, it reminds you who God is, and what you owe Him. It causes you to understand goodness, and to discern evil. It gives you the will to do good. Without My doctrine you become slaves of other doctrines that carry the name of "doctrine", but are only fables, and, like ships deprived of their rudders and without a compass, you head for a shipwreck. You go off the pre-established course. How, then, can you say: "God abandoned me" if its you who abandoned God?
Remain in Me. If you do not remain in Me, it means that you hate Me. And My Father will give the same back to you because whoever hates Me, hates the Father, since the Father and I make only one God. Remain in Me. Act in such a way that the Father will not be able to make the distinction between the tree and its branch, because of the sap that unites them and permits them to form one inseparable being. Act so the Father can't determine where I end and where you begin, we are so much alike. Whoever loves ends up by borrowing the expressions, the ways, the gestures of the person who is loved.
I want you to be replicas of Jesus. Because I want you to receive what you ask for, and thus not have to endure any refusals (grounded in Me, you will only ask for good things). I want you to receive the same as what you asked for, because the Father continually pours His treasures of love onto His Son. The one who is in the Son benefits from this continuous outpouring without limit, who is Divine Love that rejoices in His Word and circulates in Him. Now I am the Body and you are the members of the Body. This signifies that the Joy that covers Me and comes from the Father, the Power, the Peace, and all other perfection that circulates in My veins, pours into you, my faithful who have become an inseparable part of Myself, here and in the hereafter.
Come and ask. Don't be afraid to ask. You can ask everything because God can give everything. Ask for yourselves and ask for others. I have shown you how to do it. Ask for those who are present, and for those who are absent. Ask for those who have already passed away, those who are alive now, and those who have yet to be born. Ask for your present time and for your eternity which will come. Apply that to yourselves and to those you love.
Ask, ask, ask. For everything. For the good people so that God will bless them. For the bad so that God will convert them. Say with Me: "Father, forgive them." Ask: health, peace in families, peace in the world, peace for eternity. Ask for sanctity. Yes, also that. God is Holy and He is Father. At the same time as you ask Him for the life that sustains you, ask Him for sanctity. Ask for all of His graces though the Force that emanates from Him.
Don't be afraid to ask. The bread of each day, and the blessing of each day. You are not solely matter, and you are not yet solely spirit. Ask for the former and for the latter, and you will receive.
Don't be afraid of going too far. For you, I have asked that we partake of the same glory. More than that, I have given it to you, so that you will resemble Us, who love you, and so that the world will know that you are sons of God. Come. In this Heart, which is mine, lives your Father. Enter. So that He may recognize you and say: "Let us rejoice greatly in the heavens because I have regained a son that I loved."
"I wanted to satisfy your request," says Jesus. "Its always I who have been talking: I wanted to let My Eucharistic Voice speak. Receive it as a gift from Me. I bless you, and with you I bless all those who will listen to it."
Written by Maria Valtorta
IMPRIMATUR:
Bishop Roman Danylak, S.T.L., J.U.D., wrote that Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) has affirmed in private letters that there are no moral or doctrinal errors in Maria Valtorta's POEM OF THE MAN-GOD. Five Cardinals, Telesphore Toppo of India, Luis Aponte Martinez of Puerto Rico, Varkey Vithayathil of India, Riccardo Vidal of the Philippines and Ernesto Corripio y Ahumada of Mexico have petitioned prelates worldwide to ask Pope Benedict to proclaim Mary as "the Spiritual Mother of All Humanity, the Co-redemptrix with Jesus the Redeemer, Mediatirx of all Graces with Jesus the One Mediator, and Advocate with Jesus Christ on behalf of the human race.... It is of great importance (...) that people of other religious traditions receive the clarification on the highest level of authentic doctrinal certainty that we can provide, that the Catholic Church essentially distinguishes between the sole role of Jesus Christ, divine and human Redeemer of the world, and the unique though secondary and dependent human participation of the Mother of Christ in the great work of Redemption." These teachings about Jesus and Mary are abundantly clear in the writings of Maria Valtorta.
Dated Rome, Italy
February 13, 2002
+ Roman Danylak, bishop
The Poem of the Man-God, as it is titled in the current English translation, or the "Gospel as it was revealed to me", as it is known in subsequent Italian editions, is now in its fourth Italian edition. It has been translated into many other languages. Cardinal Ratzinger in private letters has acknowledged that this work is free from errors in doctrine or morals. The Conference of Italian Bishops has acknowledged the same in its correspondence with the current editor, Dr. Emilio Pisani.
Pope Paul VI abrogated the Institution of the Index of Forbidden Books in 1965/6. Prior approval of writings reporting new revelations is no longer required. The authors and publishers must submit their judgment concerning the alleged revelations to the ultimate judgment of the Church, without making claims of their truth. This ruling is retroactive to accounts even of earlier revelations if there is nothing contrary to faith and morals. Through a comedy of errors, some of these same ecclesiastics themselves now ignore the rule of canon law, and continue to condemn the writings of Maria Valtorta.
The big issue is this: "Is there anything against faith or morals in her writings?" All her critics begrudgingly have acknowledged that there is nothing against faith and morals. The old Index of Forbidden Books has been abolished. Yet allegedly Catholic theologians, priests, Catholic websites, newspapers and even radio programs insist on bringing out old skeletons, the original condemnation of the Congregation for Doctrine of the Faith in 1958. Not only is this bad scholarship; it is outright immoral and sinful to continue to level their accusing fingers at this gift of heaven and God’s faithful servant and victim soul, Maria Valtorta.
The above is a somewhat lengthy introduction to my original intent: to present a letter of commendation, a Nihil Obstat, Imprimatur and a testimonial to this website of a Catholic monk on the writings of Maria Valtorta. Not only am I saying that there is nothing objectionable in The Poem of the Man-God and all the other writings of Valtorta in so far as faith and morals are concerned. …
Dated Rome, Italy
February 13, 2002
+ Roman Danylak, bishop