“My Lord, appearing before me, revealed to me His loving Heart: ‘Here is the Master I give you, who will teach you all that you must do for my love. That is why you shall be His beloved disciple.’”
Thus Marguerite-Marie (1647–1690) recounts in her autobiography the words of Christ as He offered her His Divine Heart to be “her refuge and her strength in her weaknesses”. What happiness it is to have such a refuge. Yet nothing in the life of the young Visitandine is simple or self-evident, as she herself adds: “Finding myself overwhelmed with suffering and pain, caused by His holy justice, which reduced me to within two fingers of death […] when He saw me in this extremity, He said to me: ‘Come and take rest, so that you may suffer more courageously.’” The rest in question is beyond price: Marguerite-Marie then feels herself “plunged into this furnace of love, where she thinks of nothing but loving Him”.
