'Our sweet Jesus has pierced your heart so deeply with
the thorns of His sorrows that you will say henceforth: To suffer and
not to die! or else: To suffer or to die! or better still: Neither to
suffer nor to die, but entire submission to the good pleasure of God.
Love has an unitive quality, and makes the sufferings of the beloved its
own. If you feel yourself penetrated interiorly and exteriorly with the
sufferings of your divine Spouse, rejoice; but I may say that this joy
is experienced only in the furnace of divine love, for the fire which
burns into the marrow of the bones transforms the loving soul into the
object of her love; and there, love and sorrow are so sublimely blended
that the one can no longer be distinguished from the other, and the
loving soul rejoices in her sorrow, and finds her happiness in her
dolorous love. Persist in the study of your nothingness, and be faithful
in the practice of virtue, above all in the imitation of our sweet
Saviour in His patience, for this is the cardinal point of pure love.
Never neglect to offer yourself as a holocaust to the infinite goodness
of God. This sacrifice ought to be made in the fire of divine charity;
light it with a bouquet of myrrh, that is, with the sufferings of your
Saviour. All this should be done behind closed doors, that is, apart by
yourself, in pure and simple faith.'
