Where are you on the path: Purgative Way → Inner Purification → Spiritual Age 10
What happens in the soul?
The soul begins to discover that even a person, a situation or an emotion can internally occupy the place that only corresponds to God.
Then begins a particularly delicate purification: learning to love without possessing, relating without being enslaved, and deeply valuing people without absolutizing them.
It’s not about loving less. It is about loving in a more free and orderly way.
The action of the Good Lord
God illuminates those attachments that the soul often could not recognize on its own.
Little by little it shows where love has mixed with dependence, possession or disordered need.
By touching those inner roots, grace begins to free the heart.
How does the soul respond?
Learn to let go of what binds the heart.
Continue loving, caring and accompanying, but begin to do so with greater inner freedom.
In this process humility also grows, because the soul discovers that it cannot produce this freedom by itself and needs grace more and more.
The prayer
Meditative prayer continues to deepen and reaches great intimacy here.
The Word allows us to illuminate affections, recognize attachments and bring before the Good Lord what is difficult to deliver.
The soul also learns to place its loves before God and allow Him to order them.
We are still in meditative prayer; we have not reached mental prayer.
Signs that may accompany this age
• Greater freedom in relationships.
• Ability to love without possessing.
• Reduction of emotional dependencies.
• Ability to let go of what binds the heart.
• Growing humility.
• Greater dependence on grace.
A phrase to remember
“Love without slavery.”
Where does it lead
Here ends an extraordinarily profound process. Inner purification has not been limited to changing habits: it has begun to change the heart, acting on the inner roots of many behaviors. Passive Purification now begins.