Where are you on the path: Purgative Way → Inner Purification → Spiritual Age 9
What happens in the soul?
The soul begins to reconcile with its own history.
Painful memories, wounds and suffering that for years could have seemed meaningless events are beginning to be seen in a different way.
What happened is not denied nor is it claimed that what caused harm was good. You begin to discover that God was also present there and that the soul can redeem what you experienced.
The action of the Good Lord
God illuminates memories that still need to be healed.
The emotions associated with them begin to be purified and the past can be progressively contemplated from Providence.
What was previously just a wound can begin to integrate into a larger story.
How does the soul respond?
First the soul acknowledges the soul’s history without denying it.
You may still experience sadness, but it progressively stops being destructive. Then the soul learns to offer the soul’s past to the Good Lord.
Little by little the soul begins to understand and finally finds inner rest.
The prayer
Meditative prayer reaches even greater depth.
The Word now illuminates history itself. The soul can bring specific events of its life before God, contemplate them from faith and allow Him to show what still needs to be healed.
Prayer thus begins to also become a place of reconciliation with what has been experienced.
Signs that may accompany this age
• Ability to look at one’s own history without denying it.
• Painful memories that begin to lose their destructive force.
• Progressive understanding of one’s own suffering.
• Ability to deliver the past to God.
• Memory healing.
• Indoor rest.
A phrase to remember
“the Good Lord was also there.”
Where does it lead
After goods, the world and history itself, there is still something very deep to organize: the affections of the heart.