I Have Given You the Example . . .

Jesus:

My brother, you love My Blessed Mother and you are glad to love her. But your love for her is far from what I would like it to be.

1. You love her because it is natural to love what is pure and beautiful, and she is ideally pure and beautiful. You love her because it is natural to love those who are good and helpful, and no one is better or more helpful than she. You love her because you regard her as a Mother and because every child loves its mother. You love her because you have felt the influence of her love and have found out that with her you succeed more easily in keeping your purity and fervor. You love her because you have learned from books and sermons that devotion to her is the easiest way of assuring your salvation and the surest way of attaining perfection—and you wish above all to save and sanctify yourself.

2. All these motives of love are good, but there is another much more excellent. These can serve as a foundation for a tender devotion to My Mother; they do not, however, lay the foundation for that devotion which I wish you to practice. Devotion to My Mother is something so important, so beneficial to you, so acceptable to her and to Me, that you cannot be satisfied with something mediocre, or good enough, or even very good, but solely with what is perfect.

3. Do you know the most perfect kind of devotion to Mary? Search in books, consult theologians, ask the greatest servants of Mary that the earth has ever produced for the secret—and you will find nowhere a devotion more perfect than the one which I am going to teach you and which consists in sharing in My own filial love for My Mother. Does not perfection for My disciples consist in being like their Master?

Have I not given them the example, that, as I have done, they should also do? Did not My apostle Paul repeat again and again that everything, for them, consists in imitating Christ, in clothing themselves with Christ, in taking on the dispositions of Christ, in living no longer their own life but the life of Christ?

Tell Me, can you imagine any more perfect disposition toward My Mother than Mine?

The Faithful Soul:
O Jesus, what a supremely charming prospect: to share in Your filial love for Your Mother! But, poor sinner that I am, how can I attain such an ideal? How can I even understand it?