Jesus’ Passion
The Very Saint Virgin Mary to Saint Brigitte
translated from the French Précieux Recueils, Sursum Corda, Ponthaud, Printing library Don-Bosco, 1950
A mother would be very painfully troubled if she saw her own son put to death; I was so during my Son’s Passion. Oh my daughter! Even though I talk to you only, I feel through you all men following the holy faith. Oh my daughter! Look at what things my dear Son has endured for you: as the time of so strong and hard a fight had come, when with many pains and sufferings He redeemed the souls, my Son cried and His bloody sweat dripped from His body, as His Humaneness was consumed by the natural fear He was feeling… His enemies seized Him, stroke His cheeks and mocked at Him. He was tied, slapped, and they spit at His face.
After having been taken to the column, my Son Himself took off His clothes and brought close to the column His hands, that were tied merciless by His enemies. As He had nothing more to cover Himself with, He endured the shame and the nakedness. I saw His holy body, whipped, covered with blood. When they pulled back the whip, His flesh was run through and lacerated. He has been whipped to the inside. Man has been maliciously wrong in all his limbs, my beloved Son fulfilled in all His ones.
The blood was pouring; His sacred flesh flied in strips as to show His ribs. There was nothing more in Him than wounds, bruises, inflamed sores, that were neither dressed, nor relieved with the oil. All those who were in Abraham’s womb would have preferred to be eternally in hell, rather than to see such horrible a pain in their Lord.
Then someone said with emotion: “What! You will make Him die without being judged?” And he cut the ties chaining Him to the column. My Son wanted to take His clothes again, but His enemies did not bear that He dressed; they pushed Him obliging Him to move on. He could finally cover Himself and with His tunic dried His eyes and face all dripping with blood. Then I saw the place where His feet full of blood were, and my Son’s footprint. Wherever He passed by, the ground was stained with His blood.
When they crowned Him with thorns, hitting hardly His head, these long, hard, sharp like darts, thorns opened their way through my Son’s holy head. Unprecedented invention! Horrible torment! Horrible suffering! All His body was trembling with the immense pain! Think what my torment was. Ah! Sure, no one can understand it, as my Son’s limbs were almost my limbs, His Heart was almost my Heart. And when He suffered I felt His tortures; when He was struck, whipped, my Heart was too; streams of tears were pouring from my eyes and my body dried with pain.
While my Son was going to His death, loaded with the Cross, someone hit Him on the neck, others in the face, He was so hardly stricken, that I could feel the strikes. Which eye could contemplate the violence He suffered, the slaps, the spits, the hair torn out? Think always to His mercy, to His love that made Him bear so many tortures, to His enchanting sweetness that gave Him but the bitterness of the most horrible death. And I dare say His pain was my pain. My dear Son and I have redeemed the world by one heart.
The hard and cruel executioners took Him and stretched Him on the Cross. His adorable hands were the first to suffer the excruciating torture. What a torture, when the nails penetrated the part where the bone was hardest and strongest! What a torment at each hammer stroke!… His flesh was brought by the nails up to the wood of the Cross. These nails were very big, squared and so badly hit, that all their sides had thousands of splinters lacerating Him with dreadful sufferings.
When His feet and hands have not been nailed to the wood yet, the Passion was still awful, but the nails themselves did not satisfy the executioners. They pulled His feet with such a violence that they tore His nerves and they dislocated His body by extending it horribly. The sore of His hands, where all the efforts concentrated, widened, His head was in a bush of thorns, and one could count His bones according to the dreadful prophecy: “I can count everyone of my bones”.
I saw my very dear Son miserably hanging on the Cross, on which He strived sometimes to stretch, because of the excess of pain. All the veins, the nerves, the muscles were stretched and torn. Since the weight dragged the body, He was hanging by the hands and the feet so that the hardness of the nails was felt more cruelly, so that the death was perfect in the torture. His flesh had been crushed as in a press.
And being so reddened with blood and so pierced, I heard people crying He was a robber, a liar, that there was not a man worthier of dying than Him. These outrages were more humiliating for my Son because of the reputation that His virtues and His miracles had earned Him. The crowd irritated to have been misused by an impostor, as His enemies called Him, addressed him thousand of insults and curses that strongly renewed His pain.
His eyes were half-dead, His mouth bleeding, His Face annihilated, bruised. And looking at me crying without consolation, and at His friends, my Son cried with a voice full of tears: “My God! Why have you forsaken me?”. And when I, His Mother, heard these words, all my limbs trembled with an agonizing pain, too bitter for my heart; and until I have lived, I could have never forgotten, it seemed like I could hear them again and always.
While my Son stayed this way, racked and bruised, His Heart only was alive. Life fought with the death in a tortured body. When, for too bitter a martyrdom, His pain went from the limbs and the nerves up to the Heart, this heart felt unbelievable sufferings. And when the pain descended from the Heart to the limbs in shreds, then it protracted His death with bitterness. But eventually, His Heart broke down under the unbearable pain.
A soldier came to pierce my beloved Son’s chest with his spear, so deeply to come out from the other side. Then, seeing my dear Son’s Heart pierced, it seemed to me that my one was too. They made Him come down from the Cross, and I received Him on my knees all livid and bruised! His dead eyes were full of blood, His bear like a rope, His face contracted. I saw the dislocated limbs, the interior thorn provoked by the horrible pull of the body. This limbs dislocation, this inhuman tension of the nerves, this unnatural stretch the deicide have provoked, pierced my heart in a still more painful way than the view of the open sores.
My Son was on my knees the way He had been on the Cross, tightened in all His limbs. I washed His cruel sores. I closed His eyes and His mouth kept open at His death. Finally we put Him in the sepulchre. Oh! How gladly I would have made myself buried alive with Him, if this had been His will! I can say that two hearts were in a sepulchre.
Oh my daughter! I have brought an overwhelming weight of pain and of so prickly a tribulation that no creature could ever understand. My trials have equalled the greatness of the graces God has put in me.
I look at all those who are in the world to see if there is someone who considers my pains so bitter to have no equals… and I find very few ones. You, my daughter do not forget it, look at my sufferings, my tears, and remember my dearest Son’s Passion. Never let this pain leave your heart.
