'Hear', said the Mother of God to Saint Birgitta, 'that with all your heart you pray to God that your children may please God. Truly, such prayer is pleasing to God. For there is no mother who loves my Son above all things and asks the same of her children, but that I am immediately ready to help her to effect what she asks. There is also no widow who firmly prays for the help of God to remain in her widowhood consecrated to God until her death, but that I am immediately ready to fulfill her will with her. For I was as a widow, in that I had a Son on earth who had no bodily Father.

There is also no virgin who desires to keep her maidenhead to God to her death, but that I am ready to defend her and to comfort her. For I myself am truly a Virgin. Nor ought you to marvel why I say these things. It is written that David desired King Saul's daughter, when she was a maiden. He received her also, when she was a widow. He had also the wife of Uriah, while her husband lived. Nevertheless, the desire and lust of David was not without sin.

But that spiritual delight of my Son, who is Lord of David, is without all sin. Therefore, as these three lives, that is, maidenhood, widowhood, and wedlock, pleased David bodily, so it pleases my Son to have them in his most chaste delight spiritually. Therefore it is no marvel though I help them and draw their ghostly delight into the delight of my Son, for his delight is in them'.