SPIRITUAL NOTES

THE MATERIAL WORK


Work is an indisputable social necessity, and the Mystic must slowly head here towards an interior state of being which is very difficult to reach. It consists of being indifferent to the results of one's efforts. It is necessary to understand that Heaven never asked you to be successful, but only to imagine, to prepare, to work.

So, all is in the act, and the whole reward comes from it, if it is pure. I give you this aim, it will be necessary to approach it every day a little bit more. Therefore I draw your attention on general failure. - When you will have combined everything at your best, struggled for many months, and that all will collapse at the precise moment when you were going to collect the desired price, you should never let you go to discouragement, nor forget to thank GOD that, He, in His omniscience, judged this setback as being better for you. That is the Mystical Law, the most important Christian Law that I have to point out to you in this paragraph aimed to material work.

This Law will also apply to intellectual work.

The second important notice I want to give you, is that in general, and always for the apprentice Soldier of JESUS, what he does specifically is what is best for him. - Where he is, is where the Master wants him to be. My friends, as you have the interior certainty that not only JESUS exists, but that He is there, close to you, that He is watching that nothing may happen to you without His permission, you should, while thinking at that, arrive at the firm belief that what I tell you here is true. As a consequence, do not voluntarily change your situation or profession. Do not escape from a bad boss or from bad friends. Look only for an improvement of your lot when all outside circumstances let you distinctly know GOD'S will. - Besides, opening your eyes, praying, observing your or others' past life, will show you how much this notice is right, and how many times, when looking for the best, you found the worse.

Do never forget this. In all circumstances, examine the things coldly, and pray.

It is still in the every day work that you will be able to find the opportunity to ask for this marvellous transmutation, of which I spoke here above. - Heaven agrees to change all your manual or cerebral activity into a supernatural strength that remains your property, so that not one of your fatigues, not a line of your work will be lost. This thought, united to the frequent interior vision of JESUS in His terrestrial Father's shop, and the considerable effort that all His Friends achieved, must sustain you in your work and even confer to it a constant charm that will surely decrease its bitterness or fatigue. Thus be united with your Master during work, and all works of your hands or your brain will be blessed and fertile.

The links with friends also require a little attention. There you will need a lot of charity, prudence and patience. The best would be to feel mercy, affection for them. By love you would know them thoroughly and you would know how to take them according to their character. - But, I know, this is difficult. - At least, have all the possible kindliness with your subordinates and your equals, all the necessary deference towards your superiors and your chiefs, even though you think « they don't deserve it ». This, too, is difficult; however you will arrive at it, when calling at you the forces and the light of the Master.

As to your beliefs, and what could already be revealed to you of the Mysteries, Silence sole is appropriate in an atheistic environ-ment, enemy of all mysticism, or even in a neutral one. If someone, by his attitude in front of the mockeries or the blasphemies, by his own words sometimes, does show some attraction towards the mystical ideas, this would be a clear work for you, but even in this case, a lot of precautions would be necessary to speak to him in private. Your only predication, nine times out of ten, will be your example.

THE SPIRITUAL WORK

I told you that, for you, thanks to prayer and to a marvellous grant due to the Goodness of the Master, material and spiritual work became unified in practice. However, this last one has to be studied especially, and requires some useful notices.

First of all, and outside of this small essay, you should naturally guide yourself on the direct words of Christ and His teachings conserved in the Gospel. You all possess this book, and I don't have to tell you that it is therein that you must look for your instructions while adapting them. But here are some thoughts that will be useful to you.

At first, your spiritual work should be the object of an attentive preparation: 1° It is necessary to know yourself; 2° Examine the obstacles coming from the world, the family, the friends; 3° Look how to overcome them; 4° Study the best manner for you to get along with other men; 5° We shall see the possible spiritual activities, according to the different situations of each of you.

To understand oneself, to clearly see one's shortcomings and to fight them, to know where one is on the path and what one can get from one's intelligence or one's heart, these are the primordial things. One cannot arrive there alone. It is necessary to pray and often ask for light. A good way is to examine your tastes and your tendencies and to organize your time as much as possible, in order to act to the contrary.

Is it a big pleasure for you to remain at home, inactive? Then force yourself to leave and to act. - Are you complicate and arguing? Simplify yourself and keep silence. - Do you like a certain activity of the body, some noise ? Force yourselves to an intellec-tual study and a writing work. - In one word, after having discerned your tendencies and your tastes, try, not to destroy them, but to balance them. Thus, you will know yourself as deeply as possible. Once this first effort accomplished, interrogate yourself on pride, selfishness, anger and on the main known shortcomings. See if you feel ready for a sacrifice of yourself, if you are prepared to dedicate your life, not in search of personal happiness, but to the reduction of other men's sufferings. Prepare yourself to this service and without impatience. Such is your first spiritual duty.

The second consists in realizing correctly the obstacles that you are going to meet in your family, in your social environment, among your friends, etc. There is a law without exception: Each time that a more advanced soul comes down to incarnate herself in a terrestrial family, it is isolated, misunderstood and sometimes despised.

When we give ourselves completely to Christ and to God, it is very rare that we shall not find the maximum of obstacles in our family, in our social environment and in our entourage that even we should not judge. So, how should we go about it ? First of all, do understand the importance of silence; then, do know that no one is a prophet in his house, and that almost always the Apostolate will there be forbidden to you. Then, you will find that the antipathies, hates, mockeries, will be an excellent way for you to exercise yourself in order to reach the indispensable Christian virtues. Finally, let's not forget that a spiritual act accomplished with the maximum of difficulties, is also the most fertile and purest one. As to our entourage, our friends, this is less difficult since we do not live in common with them. Besides, it is again silence and discretion, constant kindliness and good example, that may serve us with them.

In summary, those among you who will find big obstacles in their family, should know that they are there by the express will of their Master, in order for them to do there a work of harmonization, and that their patience, their faith, their charity will develop there like a seed placed in a land that suits them best.

Now let's examine your behaviour towards those you would like to lead to Christ. There especially you will meet very different cases and innumerable obstacles. The main law to observe, at least in the beginning of your spiritual activities, is to make rarely the first advances. Preach as an example more than with words, and wait until you are questioned, unless you feel distinctly that one is ready to listen to you and to understand you. But, at this moment, do speak with the greatest prudence to this soul.

Reveal her the truth only little by little; you would risk to disturb her, and even to stop her for a long time, when letting her look at a too bright light. Then, you will need patience as big as your prudence, and an indulgence of every moment. Make use with this neophyte of the same means that have served yourself, adapting them to him. Finally, always look to be guided, ask your friends for their lights, let them help you.

Now, I would like to give you some notices under an easy form to remember. Exercise yourself every day to forget you, remember that from morning till evening your spiritual work must be unceasing. In the street, in public cars, do not let yourself driven by your grieves and ordeals; forget them. Study the poor human figures, often contorted by pain or bad feelings. Learn to recognize the secret reasons. If in yourself you feel love for the creatures because they suffer, you will be quickly helped to discover the motives of their sadness. You will then pray, and sometimes, marvellous mystery, you will distinctly see the features relaxing and the looks humanizing themselves. - Therefore be attentive. Don't forget that one day you may make a decisive meeting, receiving a celestial gleam, because you will have crossed a Child of the Sky, and to not recognize it would be regrettable.

Let your main effort be to forget yourself for the others. You will see that it is one of the keys of happiness. - Don't make nor say anything useless; avoid discussions; take the habit to speak by affirmation. - With regard to Faith, consider Christ and His commands in all. You are apprentice servants; thus have the looks of your soul always fixed on your Master, in order not to make a gesture, nor to speak a word, that He may not approve.

Listen attentively to the complaints of the suffering, but before comforting them or throwing light on them, wait until you feel in yourself the true brotherly mercy and do not answer before having prayed.

Several times per day, place your own will in God's Will. Accustom yourself to unite them, in the bad as in the good fortune. That's the most important.

These few notices apply to all. We shall now look for the particular works that are included in the aims of our "Entente Amicale" (Friendly Entente), and see what those will be able to do, whose material work takes all hours.

It is necessary that you understand well: our ministry can and should be exercised at all times and according to the different events of our day. The sole fact to forget our hardships and to be in prayer is already by itself an excellent work. Those amongst our friends who have time will do well to organize their day methodically, to prepare their visits to the sick and poor, to establish a list of their charitable activities and to stay moreover ready to intervene every time that an opportunity will be there.

For the others, those whose whole time is taken by material work, they should know that their always active desire to ask Christ for an attenuation of the general suffering constitutes already a good part of their spiritual work, but provided that this desire is true, non artificial, and that they pray.

Then there is, as I told you before, the street, the trams, the buses, the subway. There, they have, two or even often four times a day, some moments that can give them the opportunity of a good work. To forget one's hardships or worries and to exercise oneself to discern the needs of one's neighbours and to pray. This excellent exercise applies to all, and especially to those of our friends who are too much occupied to make visits. Should you attend in the street or elsewhere to a beginning of a dispute, should you have the impression that hate, bad council, or merely anger is hanging over a group of human beings, ask for the arrival of the Angel of Peace; very often it will be granted to you. If someone feels unwell before you, and if several people are attentive to him in order to conduct him to a pharmacist, remember that you are not a physician, nor a magnetizer, keep yourself apart and ask the Master that one of His Angels may come to heal the sick person. Intervene only directly if you are alone with him. Act in any case in the same way; abstain yourself to advise some remedies. Pray and impose hands only if it may be useful to your sick person; if, for example, he cannot understand the action of the Prayer. By these few examples, the friends may realize that, in spite of their occupations, they are still capable of a real and fruitful spiritual work. And then, everything happens by period, Heaven asks us almost exclusively for such or such material activity. But there will always come a moment when, after a long preparation, we are called to dedicate all our time to the sick and to those who suffer.


JESUS AND YOU

Little by little, this result will be obtained and you will become more and more conscious of the divine Presence and the Mysterious and Grand Being, who manifests it up to the deepest of your terrestrial matter: The one that the Gospel names JESUS has begun to take over your heart and to give it the knowledge of His real Identity; then, without your feeling it, His action on you won little by little up to your mental, which so purified, simplified itself. Your conscience also has considerably extended; a corner of the veil rose and a little of what the Gospel calls Heaven, the Kingdom, the Centre, appeared to you.

All you are or will one day be conscious of the operated marvel, of the incredible change that occurred in yourselves. But, the more you understand the immensity of Jesus, the more your smallness will appear in light, and the more you will descend into the abyss without bottom of humility,.
Christ, it's Life itself, creative, unfathomable, unknowable, absolutely impossible to reach, if it wouldn't descend towards us. It is the Verb, this Word that was God and was in God; it is Eternal Life, simple, immense, always similar to Itself; bearing in itself the germ of everything possible, renewing itself constantly as It gives itself.

Therefore Jesus is all, and we are nothing. But, by a marvellous miracle of love, He comes, He calls us, He invites us to look at Him, to desire Him, to understand Him until the time we, voluntarily, shall answer Him. Thus His relations with us are those of the Sun and the seed in the gloomy and frozen earth. It is the Father's Law that we must answer ourselves. He does not want to force us, He wants to get us by our own means. As soon as we believe in His Divinity, be well aware of it, the Union has begun. And this blessed moment, if we want it, will even come quickly when He will tell us: « Now you are Mine forever ». As you all, my friends, believe in Him, and even more, as you gave yourselves voluntarily, it is thus necessary for you to live in order to achieve His Will, to follow Him with all your strengths, to prepare you to this beautiful role of Harvesters that He reserves for you.

Our Masters didn't hesitate to certify that one can arrive at a sufficient Union with Christ so that He deigns to listen to our demands and to answer. It is incredible, but it's His Love that makes this possible. Here, however, is a revelation on this topic that has been given to me and that will make this mystery more comprehensible. I give it to you. When meditating on it, you will feel encouraged to make all the necessary to reach the goal. Here it is: since the beginning of the Creation, all has been said, all has been made, between the Verb and each of His creatures. On a mysterious Book will be written in a Lightning time everything He wants to reveal to each of us, so that the expression « to speak to Jesus and to receive the answers » is equivalent to the progressive possibility for our soul and for our heart to get little by little the knowledge of the Divine Words, written down in the Book of Life.

The day will come when, our Unity being reconstituted, our conscience, operating in a regenerated Body and capable to live in the Kingdom, will have a complete knowledge of this Book. This will then be the total reintegration of the Being into Heaven, into Christ. So you will understand a little better how such a thing is possible and what marvellous promises it reserves.

There will thus come a moment when we can begin to achieve this. It is there that the Master intervenes and it is Him Who could tell you the day when it will be given you to start.

A second fact that occurs between Jesus and you, is that in dream, in some states of concentration first, then later in the waking state, you will see a more or less net picture of Christ. This vision should never be desired nor sought-after. When it occurs, it is sometimes our Master who, in the serious cases, takes Christ's shape; sometimes, an Angel, tangible sign of one of Jesus' Blessings. Do remember this well: in this moment you must strongly declare that you don't want to receive anything but from Heaven. If the vision persists, pray and thank. Besides, on our path and in the beginning, this favour is rare.

By your life of prayer and action the work of union continues at every minute, every second, day and night. Every day, without being aware, and even maybe more in the dark hours when all seems lost, every day you will come a little bit closer, and you will feel this closeness above all by your resignation to pain, also above all by the deeper feeling of your real smallness, and the definitive abandonment of the destructive reasoning. You will also feel it by the easier and more fertile Prayer, and, tangible result, by the coming down into you of a delicious sensation of peace and serenity. The Spiritual Sacraments will help you a lot, but time has not come to speak too overtly to you about this. I will content myself with informing you that the deep dreams, in which you will see yourselves dived in a lake of fire, brought by the Angels to some temples, may be considered by you as corresponding to the beginning of this action of Heaven on your different Bodies.

CONCLUSION

Be therefore certain that Jesus, either by the Spiritual Sacraments, either by the sittings, either by a direct grant, constantly sustains our soul, our heart, our physical organisms, our intuition, our brain. He raises us and forgives us every time that we fell. He eases and moderates the fire of our sufferings in proportions that we will only understand later. He really comforts us, and if in our tears we would more often turn to Him, if we threw ourselves immediately in His arms, on His helpful heart, ah, how much would our pains decrease, how quick would resignation change itself in joy ! Do this, my friends, it is the best advice contained in these pages. It summarizes them all.

May your Hope, your absolute certainty to unite yourself to the One who said of Himself: « I am the Way, the Truth and Life» increase every day in you. Be certain that you will meet Him, be certain that one only of His smiles will make you forget everything, be certain that He Himself will clothe you with the last Sacraments and the White Robe, which will open you all the doors of all the Spiritual Countries. Be also certain of the future existence of the Celestial Jerusalem. These rubies, these emeralds, these topazes of the Apocalypse are not symbols to interpret, but mere real living realities, and surely, some day, the eyes of your soul will open up and contemplate with delight, in some places of our France, the marvellous seats where God's Kingdom slowly constructs itself. And you will say again: «Our Father, Thy Kingdom come... ». And you will then understand the necessity to cement these dazzling stones with the help of a special cement: our human Will united to the Universal Celestial Will of God.

Therefore take courage, every time you will read these promises. They are not from me, my friends, you know from whom they are, and you will have confidence. May these few pages maintain you, and when I shall no more be physically with you, render your Path more easy and the task less hard.
This will be my reward, if I have been successful.

Lestiac - Paris, August - December 1928.
G. PHANEG