Vigils Reading

A Letter from Blessed Maria Gabriella to her Mother

Dearest Mamma,

For a long time I thought that I would have already gone to Paradise, but on the contrary it seems the Lord has decided to extend my pilgrimage. May he always be praised in everything.

I am doing well with this illness, but we must always be prepared for death…Don’t worry about anything, but pray that when the Lord comes he will find me prepared.

I look forward to the feast of Christmas, and I hope to spend it well with the Child Jesus, because this year I am more especially united to him through the cross. I wish that the celestial Infant will bring you and the whole family joy, peace, and holy gladness. I hope that the angels will sing around you as they sang at the holy manger: glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to people of good will.

This Infant God teaches us many lessons that we will not perhaps ever understand fully. He, the Creator of the universe, God, humbles himself to be born in a poor stable, a place for animals where he is unknown to all. See how we are quite the opposite. We’re nearly ashamed to be poor, and sometimes wewould almost hide this poverty because it seems to humiliate us, and we don’t recognize that this is a privilege from the Lord to make us more like him. Who would dare to rebel, thinking of the humiliation and suffering of the man-God?

My wish, my dear Mother, is for you and for all that the Divine Infant would grant you the virtues of his own cradle, gentleness, humility, and love. May this be for you a feast of holy joy and gladness in accord with him.

May the Lord grant you to advance more and more in holiness and in love for him in the new year. I don’t want you to become rich or to be increasingly better off, but that you become more and more holy and abandoned to the will of God, and so I always pray the Lord to give you the graces necessary for your state in life. I also wish that you will always desire this for me: to become increasingly holy and grow continuously in love with the divine Bridegroom, from whom I received so many graces and predilections, and that you will pray for this.

At the cradle of the infant Jesus I’ll be united with you in thought and soul, and through him, I greet and embrace you all.

Once again I write farewell to you all and ask you to bless me. Always your daughter,

Sister Maria Gabriella

2 Bl. Gabriella Sagheddu. The Letters of Blessed Maria Gabriella with the Notebooks of Mother Pia Gullini. MW 57. Trans. David Lavich, OCSO. Collegeville, MN: Cistercian Publications, 2019. 124-126.