Hello, I'm Father Joe Roche of the Marian Fathers of the Immaculate Conception.

Thank you for joining us as we continue with our year-long journey,

reading the Diary of St. Maria Faustina Kavalska from beginning to end.

Today we take up from where we left off, beginning with Diary Entry Number 77.

Darkness and Temptations off, beginning with diary entry number 77.

Darkness and Temptations My mind became dimmed in a strange way.

No truth seemed clear to me.

When people spoke to me about God, my heart was like a rock.

I could not draw from it a single sentiment of love

for him. When I tried, by an act of the will, to remain close to him, I experienced great

torments, and it seemed to me that I was only provoking God to an even greater anger. It was absolutely

impossible for me to meditate, as I had been accustomed to do in the past.

I felt in my soul a great void, and there was nothing with which I could fill it.

I began to suffer from a great hunger and yearning for God, but I saw my utter powerlessness. I tried to read, slowly, sentence by sentence, and to meditate in this way.

But this also was of no avail. I understood nothing of what I had read.

The abyss of my misery was constantly before my eyes.

Every time I entered the chapel for some spiritual exercise,

I experienced even worse torments and temptations.

More than once, all through Holy Mass, I had to struggle against blasphemous thoughts

which were forcing themselves to my lips.

I felt an aversion for the Holy Sacraments, and it seemed to me that I was not profiting from them in any way.

It was only out of obedience to my confessor that I frequented them,

...