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 Kowalska from beginning to end.

Today we take up from where we left off, beginning with Diary Entry Number 101.

Jesus, you alone know how the soul

engulfed in darkness moans in the midst of these torments and despite all this

thirsts for God as burning lips thirst for water. It dies and withers.

It dies at death without death.

That is to say it cannot die.

All its efforts come to nothing.

It is under a powerful hand.

Now the soul comes under the power of the just one.

All exterior temptations cease.

All that surrounds it becomes silent, like a dying person who loses contact with everything

around it.

The person's entire soul is in the hand of the just God, the thrice holy God, rejected for all eternity. This is the culminating moment,

and God alone can test a soul in this way, because he alone knows what the soul can endure.

When the soul has been saturated through and through by this infernal fire, it is, as it were, cast headlong into great despair.

My soul experienced this moment when I was all alone in my cell, when my soul began to sink into this despair.

I felt that the end was near,

but I seized my little crucifix and clutched it tightly in my hand.

And now I felt my body separate itself from my soul,

...