THE MYSTICAL DEATH

PART 5

Relating to your own life what you have studied is difficult. You don't really understand what you have read till it becomes part of your life. One of the reasons it is almost impossible to determine THE NEXT MYSTICAL STATE is because the next mystical state is determined BY how WE ACT TODAY; BY HOW WE RESPOND TO THE GRACES GIVEN NOW. For instance, God may CALL to contemplation, yet the soul does not respond in the proper way and doesn't receive it. To be more specific, God waits for your move. If you don't move right, God doesn't give you the graces never GIVES TO THE, UNDESERVING or never casts PEARLS BEFORE SWINE. (There are those who think God gives without cause. That has to be properly interpreted. God DOES wait for a cause which is PROPER DISPOSITION. If you have not the disposition, the grace would be wasted.

So YOUR DISPOSITION is a cause. And the most proper ways of attaining the right disposition is through suffering in love and prayer.) How are these suffering states different from psychoneurotic or even psychotic states? How do we differentiate between these and mental illness? It is simple: LOVE. All our progress here depends on the degree of love. The more you love, the farther in progress you go, the more you suffer. Question the MOTIVES of the sufferer. What was the CAUSE of the suffering? Was the sufferer trying to attain God's love, trying to bestow God's love? Is the sufferer trying to fulfill her obligations of life, especially all the religious/moral obligations?

Love motivation is the acid test. Love is everything in the spiritual life. To love everything goes, from love everything has come. We are made for love. Love :moves us, is our goal, for God is love. Every step of progress in the spiritual life is a step in love. In the end we are judged by the amount of love within the soul, and this degree of charity determines our eternal Beatitude.I am astounded as to how love and pain go together. From the time I entered the unitive state it seems one never happened without the other. Sometimes the love/gift was infused first, giving great elation. This may have been in the form of virtues or mental charisms. But following it was always the pit! Why the gift, then the pit? As I stated earlier, I-had received the gift of contemplation and that began the final journey down, in or within. You can call it up, down,, ascent, descent, introversion or whatever, because it is no physical places. It is in the soul/ mind. It is a place/state where God is, and gyrating toward it, reaching it, attaining it, BECOMING it cannot be measured in Physical terms.

This is the journey of spiritual poverty, of removal of all obstacles, of denuding ourselves, of being undeceived or totally cleansed, and melting into or becoming that place in the soul where is God, and God in the highest form. Let me backtrack to the betrothal where my unitive pains started. I count the pains before that as less significant, although they were awful enough to think of suicide. How do you compare normal but suicidal to the abnormal pain that comes later in dark night and stigmata? I think the AFFECTIVITY of the pain is the same, but later you suffer as a Christ-person instead of a normal person. MUCH STRONGER, YOU ARE CAPABLE OF SURVIVAL. Now you can ENDURE what you could not before, making possible the exposure of - genetic material, unregenerated parts, locked in silence. PAIN and its primitive reaction; rage, hate, envy, malice, etc. are flushed out. Unitive means deep; it means going beyond the earth ego; for Christ's Kingdom is not (of this world. In order to ENTER His Kingdom He must lead us INTO IT through pain. It is painful because it is a ripping through, a forced entrance! into states deeper than normal. It is like an OPERATION - opening the body up and working on it. I can think of actors digging deep into themselves, exposing buried emotions, primitive ones, and suffering greatly. Situations which bare us down to the bone, expose our inner anxieties and wants, are painfully Sometimes we cry from this emotional exposure. Mysticism is like that.

Don't forget that all suffer even animals and reprobates. But does their suffering go deep? In the animal, there is not the sensitivity that a human has and as far as reprobates, they 14AKE themselves like animals; they HARDEN themselves or become INSENSITIVE like animals - thereby losing their souls. People who do not make progress lose by steeling themselves against pain; what God calls "hard of heart. Then it- is difficult for God to ENTER our hardened hearts. A sensitive heart is Malleable and sensitive to pain and love no you want to feel love, live in Dove? Then you've GOT TO TAKE PAIN! THAT'S WHY MYSTICS SUFFER. The opposite of that is OPPOSITION TO LOVE/PAIN It takes pain to be a whole person, deeply, totally OPENED. Those who close themselves off become half persons and dead graves. They create a hell for themselves to which they are precipitated at the time of death, although at has already been created (their own niche in hell) and chosen during their life.

This is exactly what mystics want to avoid. We are lovers who seek to bear our pains now and bear them well, to force entry into the deepest levels, cleanse them and make ourselves whole in God. We seek union with God now and in eternity NO MATTER WHAT THE COST. When I woke up out of the mystical death and was resurrected I felt a new energy which had been gone for months My BODY was not yet completely revitalized or adjusted to new life, for the mystical process is spirit over mind over matter, the body being touched last. I had been in a spiritual coma for months, and I was not steady when I woke up. But what I did have was a sudden jolt of energy which totally transformed me.For a while I felt happiness. I had eight months of mystical peace and fulfillment. The marriage was February 15. Sometime in Au gust (I wish I had written the date! But I never thought I would receive what I prayed for!) I began praying for the divine stigmata of the interior kind. I received it on October the 8th, 1982, and that ended my mystical repose. From then I suffered a state of hell and purgatory I never dreamed about, and it is taking YEARS to recover from. Now I remember the dark night in a bittersweet, nostalgic way, and the time of contemplation between marriage and stigmata as my halcyon days.

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