COURSE XLV
INTIMACY OF THE PERFECT
Teaching 1: Call to Ordination
Teaching 2: Vocational Discernment
Teaching 3: Contact with Community
Teaching 4: Adaptability
Teaching 5: Blood Sublimation
Teaching 6: Oblivion of the World
Teaching 7: Correspondence
Teaching 8: Expanded Soul
Teaching 9: Impermeability to External Things
Teaching 10: Modesty of the Eyes
Teaching 11: Perfect Observance
Teaching12: Purifying Void
Teaching 13: Spiritual Life
Teaching 14:Love and Sacrifice
Teaching 15: Women’s Ordination
Teaching 1: Call to Ordination
Although all souls are called to the Supreme Renunciation, just some few realize it by means of the Ordination.
It would be inconvenient to believe that any vocation to Ordination becomes manifested and develops in the same way, but in all of them there is a similar point that one could call internal divine motion in the souls.
This internal call, intense or vague, can be insistent or fleeting; can cause attraction or be refused in the beginning. But basically is always the same: an internal unexplained feeling that calls the soul to the most perfect life by means of the Ordination.
Whoever experiences this internal motion, this Divine call, is obliged to respond to it.
But when vocation emerges from dreamy imagination, personal desires, disappointments and human bitterness, it must be rejected because is not a true vocation. These wrong trends may be however beside a true vocation, but just in a soul that at certain moment felt that internal divine motion. Then, these natural impulses have to be disposed of like passions and obstacles that hinder a true vocation.
Those souls that feel this internal motion in a very vivid and intense way, experience as if it were a sudden wound in the soul. They cannot wait, be happy or resigned to anywhere or anything. Now nothing calls their attention, and anything that moves them away from the divine call is cause of grief and sadness to them; anything that impedes or delays the fulfillment of their desires is death to them
These souls do not admit delays and quickly go up the Way to Renunciation.
Those souls that feel the internal call in a vague way, usually take a long time to realize their vocation; generally, they are unable to travel through the way to perfection and ascend step by step toward the summit. Souls of this type run the risk of failing if a good Spiritual Director does not lead them well. Since they are reluctant to great sacrifices, as soon as they find a serious problem, feel that they are unfit to anything, and here the steady hand of the Director becomes necessary.
Also in life there are certain periods when vocation is apparently forgotten, but it is not so: a true vocation never dies, although ashes cover ashes in such a way that you do not see them, but a little movement, a renewed fervor or a holy reading is enough to revive them.
An internal vague motion is more and more usual in the soul and at the end becomes a true vocational realization.
Certain souls perceive the divine call through an insistent internal motion, which is unrealizable; these souls are immobilized by human bonds and duties of life: so, their desires do not come true because they delay them, but the divine motion is always there and ready inside them.
The soul gets used to that saintly and insistent desire and would wish to realize it, but does not do its best to put it into practice. On this occasion, the divine power that calls this person to his Ordination, makes use of any means to awake him and tests him through pains, mourning and dire losses, and so leads him to realize his vocation.
Despite this, once these souls abandon any worry and break any mental and sentimental bond that ties them to the world, surrender totally to their spiritual vocation.
Those souls that receive their internal spiritual motion in an entirely fleeting and passing way take a long time to realize it. This internal desire appears in the intimacy of the soul, and later disappears and sometimes seemingly does not leave any trace or memory. But once the divine touch takes place, never can be deleted; sometimes many years and one day later, suddenly, that vocational idea appears again, the divine feeling moves the heart in a powerful way, and finally the soul follows the way for which it had been chosen.
Those souls that feel that internal motion and are powerfully attracted by it respond spontaneously. But as soon as they express their purpose, a wave of trials and storms starts against them: habits, family, race and many other factors furiously emerge to hinder their intention. Then these souls suddenly feel belittled and frightened, and do not know what to do. They must be very careful with these trials because these great storms do not last too much, and the stronger they are, the quicker is their passage, and later these souls find again energy, understanding and means to answer to the call.
Those souls that do not resist this internal motion are softly led to the Ordination.
Seemingly, nothing is against them, and everything occurs slowly and without any trouble. Their vocation makes its way within little by little, as if it were a natural and logical consequence of their lives. Nothing and nobody hinders their vocation. This internal spontaneous motion apparently is protected against any contrary wind.
But beware!, the time of trial will come.
Many souls feel this internal call and reject it in a systematic way. Before the idea of abandoning the world and their dear ones, get scared and reject entirely their vocation because of their future hardships and fights.
How many souls experienced this terrible state and almost were forced to follow the Way to Renunciation!
Sometimes, these souls experienced very hard and drastic trials, and almost were forced to fulfill their mission of Ordained Sons, which their performed in a splendid way.
Any soul destined to the Sanctuary, sooner or later, if they are properly guided, will realize their divine destiny.
It is the Divine Mother who calls her Chosen Sons, and this is fundamental y valuable in regard to vocation. Preparation and the way to fulfill the divine injunction are made in many ways.
But as soon as a soul receives the internal divine motion, inevitably it must respond to the sublime call.
Teaching 2: Vocational Discernment
Vocation to Ordination is an unyielding feeling of the soul, a dark state of being, a determining idea of the mind, and an unknown certainty about one’s destiny and choice.
A soul describes this vocational state to his Spiritual Director as follows: “What a strange thing! Every day I recognize less all those things and beings that before were familiar to me. I feel that I am dreaming when I see them and the world around. Now the cause of my suffering is my selfishness, my faults and all those things that refuse to die in my personality. I would want really to die, and I meditate much on death in order to abandon my human personality, fragile and unhappy. But its roots are very deep! Here is my pain and my hardest cross: to see myself in this way, with so many graces that I do not deserve, and being so hard-hearted because of my evils! I do not understand this, and my Director never wished to explain this to me: he just said they are crosses. I did not know that faults were crosses... But they are crosses, or should be crosses in proportion to a real eagerness for purity, innocence and humility that now is just an aspiration in my soul! What a hard, ugly and sad thing is to fall! Truly, if She does not intervene, it is our ruin! And all this without any merit or virtue for my part; just because She simply wants... What a great deal is to die in order to resuscitate! What a sad and despicable thing is to live without renunciation and to miss one’s dynamics for the frightful statics of attachment”.
Vocation is true when what you feel within is love, nothing more than love, and this love becomes surer and more unyielding through trials and hardships. Vocation is true when your love is so self-possessed that does not wish comfort, compassion, distinction or understanding, because love of your vocation is enough.
If your love is a volitive feeling, a power of love, does not need any other love to be sustained or filled, because you sustain yourself through your own vocational love.
Vocation is an unyielding feeling of the soul because emerges like true love; it does not know why, when or how.
Desires of vocation against the true vocation are sensible and also bodily incentives based on certain personal tendencies to seem different from others and to achieve some characteristic and especial gift. These desires lead always to failure and disappointment, and the Director Spiritual must be very watchful not to confound desire for love. If the spiritual aspirant tends to be easily enthusiastic and carried away by affections and flatteries, makes easily particular friendships, and loves to keep them, then we can doubt of his vocation.
Vocation is a dark state of the being, because clear things are not human, but those states that come close to God are dark, because Gods is always darkness to the soul. It is a dark state because logical reasons or common actions of other human beings do not explain it and because it is something undetermined but irresistible.
True vocation cannot be humanly explained, but just divinely intuited.
Whoever wants to reason much and brood about vocation waste his time; he digs a well in the sea. But whoever surrenders trustfully to the arms of his vocation, that is, to the arms of the Divine Mother, reaches eternal shores.
Vocation is a determining idea of the mind, which is sure of its good result and of its final perseverance, because it comes into being within and its root is in the Divine Voice that has called the soul to the Path to Renunciation.
A Soul will fail when it has many vocational ideas. What is real never is the result of our thoughts or dreams.
Vocational ideas come into being from fantasy, never are the idea of true vocation or vocation in itself. If he aspirant considers beforehand his future life, how his companions will be, where he will live and which tasks must perform, we should doubt much of him; he is building “a priori” his own castle on the air, not considering his true vocation.
Vocation is an idea that remains there in a permanent way and disposes of other ideas. It is an idea that knocks and repeats: that is your destiny, God wants you there. It does not create any illusion; any fantasy is out of question there.
Vocation is an idea converted into a permanent habit of the mind and centered on it, and rejecting all in a systematic and stubborn way. It is an idea that becomes effective and permanent through certainty and continuity; it becomes a living and unavoidable power. It is nothing more than an idea, but is the unique idea of vocation and determines life of a being in a direct way. All can change, but vocation, that vocation, cannot change.
Vocation is an unknown certainty of one’s destiny because its basis is an inner, intimate and divine impulse.
On this earth there is no greater certainty than that of knowing that we are chosen, divinely chosen.
When a soul feels it is chosen for a vocation through a divine call, its vocation is certain for the rest of its life. Although this call was nothing more than a very soft internal call, it remains so real as if it were the Mother’s Voice speaking to the ear.
To refuse a divine call would the worst evil; although you totally rebel, the divine call would remain there intact, and if you do not answer, a terrible burden would remain on you.
A call is surer when is more visibly unknown, because when is visible unknown, its roots are deeper in the intimate, dark and divine part of your being, and more established in the unshakeable rock of the Divinity.
Teaching 3:Contact with the Community
Preparation for Ordination life is a constant effort of the soul for many months to get used to higher nervous tensions than to ordinary tensions.
The soul accustomed to this psychical run experiences a violent shock as soon as it arrives at the House of Community.
Doves blinded by sunbeams collide with the white walls of the houses. This occurs with the soul that illuminated by the divine sun of its vocation comes from the world and does not know how to stop on time before this change of vibration, which it experiences when it enters the Seminary. It is precise to put signals of warning and the best signal of warning in this case is a backward survey of the past life.
While the thought runs backward looking at the traveled road, the mind will loose its decisive tension, the heart will slow down its beats of immense desire and, little by little, in that immobility of the soul, the eyes will begin to see the new world where the aspirant entered.
The soul must enter the Silence of the Holy House, slowly, without efforts.
When the aspirant enters the Seminary, his rules of life must be imparted slowly and warnings given little by little. Old men said to those who came back hot and thirsty: “Wait for a while, do not drink water yet”.
After this violent shock, the soul comes in true contact with its vocation and comprises entirely its sense, because vocation and soul look one another square in the eye, not through the veil of the unknown ideal, but in contact with the simple reality.
At once, through an internal state that is entirely new, the soul senses how all its natural powers decrease and become weaker.
Wounds of the soul, even the most old and distant, become patent; all that was hidden appears as if a large screen were open before it.
The oldest desires and bad instincts emerge and everything that seemingly was abandoned forever gains new life.
The Great Current operates during these first days like a huge compressor that removes any humor, even the oldest and most hidden. The soul feels its misery, and the more this misery becomes manifested, the more gigantic appears the greatness and purity of the spiritual vocation.
Through a permanent silence in the Seminary, through the absence of any stranger and through an impossible communication or information about anything or anyone, the aspirant feels that he lacks any support, that he may fall any time and that nobody will run to help him.
People are all day excited by their curiosity, distraction and continuous escape of what they must do and consider. But the almost superhuman silence of the Seminary removes any intoxicating variety and becomes overwhelming and painful. Very few privileged souls are able to enter this silence and to remain immersed in it at once.
The eyes looking down and the absence of images and figures are as if something were rent or broken; it is as if the images of the world had taken an ideal form and were not any more what they are.
The habit of never saying what one wants or would wish, and prayers and Hymns chanted and repeated almost uninterruptedly are for the soul as if it had not any force or capacity for anything.
The apparent monotony of the regulation rhythm, hours repeated always the same through successive exercises during all day, and the new way of walking, of saying, of speaking and of being, produce a painful shock in the soul. But this pain becomes indispensable, because it is as the passage to a new birth.
The soul, put into the vibration of Community, is subject to a constant pressure and finally gets used to dispose of exciting and disconnected movements from the world. But this painful contraction, which in the beginning harries the brain and leaves it tired, rent and empty, is followed by a subsequent period of indifference, relaxation and inner silence. And it is there that the vision and sense of conformity and peace suddenly emerge.
And this wonderful vision of peace places the soul definitively in the perfect and serene rhythm of life in Community.
Teaching 4: Adaptability
An unmistakable internal motion determines the vocational state, but this divine gift must be assisted to make the best possible use of it.
Vocation can be assisted by usual media, which are of physical, psychical and spiritual kind.
These means adapt a person to be entirely fit to fulfill his vocation.
In case of Ordained Sons’ vocation, the first means is achieved by adapting themselves to the Radius of Stability.
The Psalmist says: “Only one thing I asked of the Lord, and this I will ask of Him: to live in the house of the Lord all days of my life”.