Mortification Part 1 - Luisa Piccarreta Volume Excerpts

Pick up from where we left off the last day, and I will read it and just comment as we go along.

Is that all right? Uh, the way I do this is that if I read it slowly and meaningfully and prayerfully, the Lord illuminates me, and I illuminate you.

Prayers.

That's marvelous.

It's a, it's a good method.

[laughs]

And doesn't matter how much I prepare it, I still get something when I'm reading it.

It's, it's really amazing.

So for example, Louisa said, "If I woke up in the morning..." Now, she's talking about a time when the Lord is teaching her a lot of mortification and self-discipline.

"If I didn't get up immediately," she said, "the interior voice would tell me, 'You rest,' and I had no other bed but the cross." Now, I know you don't use the snooze button or anything, you know?

Mm-mm.

And when your alarm clock goes off.

But what the Lord was asking her is as soon as she woke up, that she was to have the discipline of actually getting out of bed.

That's very difficult, unless it's the end of the world or something.

I would find that difficult.

I don't know about you.

"So if I walked and my sight would run a little further, uh, He would immediately reprimand me, 'I don't want this.

You're not to let your sight move away but the length of your step so that you won't trip.' If I was in the countryside and I saw flowers and trees, He would say to me, 'I've created everything for love of you, and you deprive your sight of this pleasure for love of Me.' Even the most innocent and holy things, as for example, the thoughts for the altars, the processions, He would say to me, 'You must take no pleasure but in Me alone.' If I was sitting while working, He would say to me, 'You're too comfortable.

Don't you remember that my life was a continuous suffering, and you, and you...'" "In order to content Him, I would immediately shift," watch the sense of humor coming out, "uh, to half the chair, leaving the other half empty, and something, sometimes jokingly I'd say to Him, 'See, Lord, the other half's for you.

Come and sit near me.' Sometimes it seemed that He would content me, and I felt such delight that I myself cannot express it.

Sometimes then, when I was working a little slowly and listlessly..." Her work was in mostly crochet, needlework, that kind of stuff.

Yes.

"He would say to me, 'Hurry up.

Hurry up.

Hurry yourself, for the time you gain by helping yourself, you will spend with Me in prayer.' Sometimes He Himself would assign to me how much work I was supposed to do, and then I would pray Him to come and help me.