A few days after what is said above, I felt like I was losing consciousness again (I remember that, at the beginning, every time I felt such a state come to me, I thought I was going to leave life). As I lost consciousness, Our Lord made Himself seen once again with the crown of thorns on His head, all dripping with blood; and turning to me, He said: “Daughter, take a look at what men do to Me. In these sad times their pride is so great that they have poisoned all the air; and the stench that spreads everywhere is such that it has reached even before my throne in Heaven. They act in such a way as to close Heaven by themselves. The miserable ones do not have eyes to know the truth, because they are obfuscated by the sin of pride, followed by the other vices which they bring with themselves. O please! give Me a relief from so many bitter spasms, and a reparation for so many wrongdoings against Me.” And in saying this, He removed the crown from Himself, which did not look like a crown, but all one piece, such that not even a little portion of the head remained free – it was all pierced through by those thorns. As He removed the crown, He drew near me and asked me if I accepted it. I felt so annihilated; I felt such pains because of the offenses that are given, that I felt my heart split. I said to Him: ‘Lord, do with me what You want.’ And so He took it, He drove into my head, and He disappeared.
Now, who can tell the spasms I felt when I came back into myself? At each movement of my head I thought I would breathe my last, so many were the pains and the prickings I felt in my head, in my eyes, in my ears, behind my neck. I felt those thorns penetrate even into my mouth, and it clenched in such a way that I could not open it to take food, so I would remain sometimes two days, sometimes three, without being able to take anything. When they somehow mitigated, I would feel, sensibly, a hand which pressed my head and renewed the pains; and sometimes the spasms were such that I would lose consciousness because of the pain. At the beginning, this would happen on certain days, while on others it wouldn’t. When they were repeated, it would be three or four times a day, and they would last sometimes a quarter of an hour, sometimes half an hour, sometimes one hour, and then I would remain free, though feeling very weak and in suffering. I would remain in suffering, more or less, depending on how much those pains were communicated to me during that state of dozing.
I also remember that, since sometimes I could not open my mouth in order to take food, as I said above, because of the sufferings in my head, and since my family knew that didn’t really want to be in company, when they saw that I was not eating, they would attribute it to a fuss of mine, and naturally, they would become irritated, they would get upset, and they would mock me. My nature wanted to resent this, because I saw that what they were saying was not true, but the Lord did not want this resentment - and this is what happened: