Developing Spirit

Who is this army? What have the members of this research unit learned? Here are some summary findings.

The army recognizes a more than normal struggle with flesh, assumed early from youth. We are all trying to overcome an attachment to the taste of intoxication, carnal excitement of numerous stunted sorts – the vice of lust.

We have been led to a radical dependence on grace, in view of a weakness that repeats itself with distressing mystery. We have been drawn deep into the bosom of the Church, in order to flee the demonic.

This redeemable creature, both afflicted and devoutly Christian, would seem least expectable – even anathema. But we are only poor sinners.

We have known well Paul’s unremoved thorn, Mary Magdalene’s seven spirits and Lucrezia Bellini’s martyrdom of partial possession. We pray to a litany of converted prostitutes and former ‘women of sin’: Mary of Egypt, Margaret of Cortona, Angela of Foligno, Thais, Pelagia, Afera… and the martyrs of violation… Agatha, Agnes, Cecilia, Maria Goretti, Jamie Schmidt… (…and the male saint of redeemed chastity St. Augustine) pray for us.

‘Sexual misconfiguration recovery group’ is a difficult apostolate, practically invisible, never mentioned or identified by anyone. The heathen culture finds its tenets to be horrifying and insane. The unwounded might conclude the same for opposite reasons. Still, we want to leave the leper colony of stupidity, the vexatious land of involuntary vice, forever.

We are ever called to conversion, a marvelously grueling process. Success hinges on the ability to act, love, serve, sacrifice and persevere, thus replacing addiction, compulsion, obsession, and finally self.

Jesus is our Doctor. Yet all re-encounters with temptation, test the heart about previous deliverance. We are shown our ancient root defect, which stirs a tenacity - that inexplicably remains - to seek and find enough force of internal desire to gain rectitude in our faculty.

On the question: do we just live a certain limitation or do we seek true acquirable freedom? the answer is ALWAYS seek freedom. Faith and hope are the only human limitations. Complete transformation, total healing by God is always possible. Its quest is endlessly uninterruptible in the face of any “terminal” struggle.

We mainly know that freedom depends on three things: desire for freedom, begging God for freedom, waiting for freedom. None of these can happen without humility, advanced patience, and courageous endurance.

To keep praying is central. Making maximum allowable use of the Catholic sacraments, is essential. Getting in a room with others who have the same or related condition, is inescapable. In world and family, replacing evil with good, which though hard, always returns the absolute greatest of possible gains.

But we very often humanly pick the slower road because we somehow refuse to imagine that it is hard to stop committing sin, that it is costly.

Preempting the first motions of seduction and lust is most crucial of all. Stop the fantasy way before you get to the uncontrollable chemical gate. It is done by giving ungodly desire to Jesus immediately, and-sometimes-or by changing your situation or state, quickly redirecting ourself to doing something else.

Indeed, the flesh has often seemed more than weak. But Jesus: “You who speak of glands, and fill your mouths speaking of hypophysis or of the pineal gland, and place in it the seat of life, taken not in the time in which you live but in the days that preceded and that will follow your present life, must know that your true gland, the one that makes you the eternal possessors of Life, is your spirit. The more it develops, the more you will possess divine lights and will evolve from men to gods, to immortal gods, and so, without contravening God’s desire, His order concerning the tree of Life, you will obtain the possession of this Life, exactly as God wants you to possess it, because on your behalf He created it eternal and bright, a beatific embrace with His eternity that absorbs you in Itself and communicates Its properties to you.”

Poem of the Man-God Vol 5: Ch 602: 589-590

Spirit reigns supreme. The more spiritual-new we become the less carnal-old we remain. Whereas Moses was prevented from entering the promised land of freedom, we by Christ are not prevented! God has no limitations. Weak humans of poor or impatient or insufficient faith, are the only ‘limitation’.

Ask of Jesus all things always, for who can exhaust the Infinite Who knows and can give more than can even be humanly conceived. Beware your own mind which the Tempter will mislead into false knowledge and premature conclusions about recovery progress and stability. It’s never over, ever, which is the worst possible news for the Evil One. This is the true meaning of courage!

Luisa Piccarreta & Jesus: As I was in my usual state, I was thinking about the most humiliating steps that Our Lord suffered, and I would feel horror within myself; but then I would say to myself: ‘Lord, forgive those who renew for You these sorrowful steps, because too great is the weakness that man contains.’ At that moment blessed Jesus came for just a little and told me: “My daughter, that which is said to be human weakness, most of the time is lack of vigilance and of attention from one who is leader – that is, from parents and superiors. In fact, when a creature is watched over and checked, and is not given the freedom she wants, not receiving its nourishment, the weakness is destroyed by itself, while yielding to one’s weakness is nourishment to becoming worse in that weakness.” Then He added: “Ah, my daughter, just as the soul becomes impregnated with virtue like a dry sponge becomes soaked with water – that is, with light, with beauty, with grace, with love - in the same way, sin and the weaknesses that one yields to, impregnate the soul just like a sponge becomes soaked with mud – that is, with darkness, with ugliness, and even with hatred against God.”

December 29, 1904 Volume 6, Book of Heaven

Yes, the sexual faculty of chronic sinners, stretched over decades, seems misconfigured in some impermeable way. But that is a half-truth and thus a lie. Faith says something new and since God did not create puppets and does not traffic in ‘close enough for’ love but real love, the creature can give His creator something which the Creator cannot give Himself: a yes to grace, a yes to cooperate with Divine Will, a yes to struggle manfully to oppose what is false, a yes to work out our salvation. That dogged, doubt-terminating desire, in a time set by Heaven, will finally topple the weak flesh and secure the triumph of angelfication. Amen.

Jesus, I trust in You! Jesus, I trust in You.! Jesus, I trust in You!