In these Letters St. Margaret Mary provides a most perfect example of that mysterious, mystical connection between suffering and Divine Love which all Saints confirm. She was driven by a desire to be unknown and by an eagerness for pure love - for totality in loving God. THE LETTERS OF ST. MARGARET MARY ALACOQUE is a treasury which reveals the hidden depths of Christ's love and His desire to enflame souls with the same Dive Love.
Been my spiritual reading for the last three years. The introduction is a must-read for understanding St. Margaret Mary’s headspace as the language she uses can be quite dramatic and intense. Overall, in you can see that as she receives these visions and words about the Sacred Heart of Jesus, that it is perfectly loving and perfectly merciful, she still struggles to accept such a love for herself. In a particular way, the errors of her age (Quietism, Jansenism) weigh on her heavily as she tries to receive and share this message of Christ’s boundless love for her and all of humanity.
There’s so many things I underlined but here are a few:
“No one can love without suffering”
“God is an unfathomable abyss of every good. But the Giver is more precious than all His gifts.”
“Ingratitude has never yet entered heaven”
“Let us not hesitate a moment longer to remove every obstacle to grace”
“As for your entering into His Sacred Heart: enter in! What should you fear, since He invites you to come in and rest there?”
“One can be of no help to others until after one has first reformed oneself.”
“But in this divine Heart everything, even the bitterest suffering, is changed into love. Let us make there our real and continual dwelling. If only we abandon ourselves entirely to Him, nothing will trouble us any more.”
So good, her total focus on the Sacred Heart is wonderful. She is also so real, her tone changing depending on whom she's writing to (eg. calling out her siblings made me smile). "Love brings peace. The gift of self in pure love for the Sacred Heart establishes in our hearts His reign of love and peace...the enemy of peace is the very same enemy of pure love... self-love, leading to that useless reflection on self which troubles and upsets our souls." xiii "He is more precious than all His gifts." 32 <3 makes me want Heaven more!! "I am a mere lump of every kind of misery." 75
In every letter she stresses how much she doesn’t want people to read them which makes one feel quite guilty while reading them. She is the origin of the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ.