Alexandrina, Messenger of Jesus

This booklet offers a small anthology of the Bd. Alexandrina’s writings.

There are two sources: Sentimentos da Alma (Feelings of the Soul) indicated with an S and Cartas ao Primeiro Director (Letters to her first Director), indicated with an L.

All the “flowers” are attributed, either to the field in which they were harvested, or to the date in which they bloomed.

Our gratitude to the painter Brenda Hunter for the cover and to the Bd. Alexandrina Group for financial help in realizing the project.

The sign (...) indicates that a fragment is omitted. In contrast the three points… without parenthesis are in the original text.

Publisher´s Note: The Italian title of this book, Zampilli Incandescenti (Bursts of Illumination), was suited to the intentions of the compiler of the book. It seems to us, however, that such title does not suggest the essence of the work for the English reader and therefore we have altered it to Alexandrina, Teach Me. The reader will find that the spirit of the work is very well expressed in the cover illustration.

PRESENTATION

If we attempted to present the reader with just the words of the Bd. Alexandrina, we would run the risk of impoverishing them. On the other hand those who have the grace of reading them directly, as they had left her heart enamoured of Jesus, will experience the world of the Saints and will be so fascinated with that heart that they will want to enter it. Alexandrina knew how to flee from sin, abandoning herself with closed eyes, not into a vacuum, but into the arms of her only Love, Jesus Crucified. With Him and for Him, in illness, immobility, humiliations, isolation and almost uninterrupted sufferings, she drank deep of the cup of the Passion, day after day, night after night, denying nothing whatsoever to her Beloved. Therefore Jesus granted to her the mystical gift of living again the very painful episodes of His Passion.

And she accepted everything without complaint, always transformed into a flame of sacrificial love that fed itself on Jesus and that transmitted itself to her brethren who were so in need of being enlightened by that divine fire.

Once Jesus said to her:

“Your thorns in this world will be transformed into splendid roses, in Heaven”.

Thus it was with her, thus may be for all us.

Fr Maximo Astrua       

INTENTION

Jesus, standing up, proclaimed in a loud voice:
“If anyone thirst let him come to me and drink.

He who believes in me, as the scripture has said,
‘Out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water’ ”. (Jo 7, 37)

All true Christians receive this divine invitation: to immerse themselves in Jesus, to absorb His Life, to assimilate it to transmit it to their brethren. May Bd Alexandrina serve us as an example!

For that purpose sample selections of her writings are presented here: they will tell us how much Alexandrina thirsted for Jesus, how much she believed in Him, and of the rivers of living water she channelled to her brethren.

The selected writings are brief, incisive; they are “incandescent” because they pour from her heart, inflamed with love, to reach the heart of the reader and setting it on fire with the same love.

The selection is divided in two parts:

Part I, where we see Alexandrina who is thirsty, immerse herself in Jesus and slake that thirst.

Part II, where Alexandrina give voice to ‘outbursts’ which will course down the centuries forming rivers.

Eugénia Signorile

Corpus Christi
 June 2006