Sense the Shift

The ticket remains in envelope on bedside table.  It was last night's performance of a well-known singer/songwriter who converted several years ago to Catholicism.  Awhile back I thought it a worthy splurge, to celebrate the anniversary of the espousal of my soul.

But a shift is occurring, and yesterday's memory of a sort of sad story, one of many from the on-going, temporal Catholic world stacked beside the vivid recall of the miraculous details surrounding the espousal of my soul 26 years ago.  

The call to silence and solitude evolves.  I knew to remain here, not go there to a place filled with people watching someone breathe, sing, live.  Rather, the Beloved was alone with me and I with the Beloved last evening. We breathed and sang and lived.  He spoke to me in thought flashes.  I watered trees and blueberry bushes, and listened.  I marveled in the soul shift unfolding.

The teaching is in sharing and encouraging.  Living person encounters are few.  A phone call may be a repeat lesson, offered with love to the other, knowing the real lesson must come from that person's inner desire for God, over time, with much practice.

As for me, He is shifting my soul.  He is cleansing the memories.  He tells me my spiritual childhood of sweetness and naivete was given, now gone, but for the memory.  Then things happened fresh and thrilling, unexpected delights following mysterious clues left in the spiritual treasure hunt.

It is necessary for the soul to outgrow childhood but not cease seeking that beauty of innocence and purity, of that sweet delight in the Beloved.  The soul must be taught the reality of the sufferings of the temporal, of the imperfections of our temporal beings interacting in temporal ways in the temporal world, including the temporal within His Church, the Body of Christ.

The soul learns in this way, and commits to love from the stance of the Beloved: a love to learn to love, and to love to suffer with and in the Beloved.

Now the shift is out of the memories, out of the necessary indoctrination of the imperfections, and into the aging, timeless soul, removed from the loss of spiritual childhood, remote from the distractions in the temporal Body.  But very much aware, and loving, yet growing young again in love in the Beloved, far away and yet here, watering.

My soul belongs to the Timeless One.  There could be a sadness to having lost the sweetness of first consolations of early wooing, but no.   Love and commitment to Christ and His Body precedes the pain of the soul's birth mission: realized and suffered.  Release the memories of the painful labor, the delivery.  Rear the soul through time in the temporal aspects, but let them go.  He is theirs to watch and keep, not yours, not in a tangible sense now.

Retire into His mercy and love.  Allow the removal.  It is necessary for the next phase of growth, of love, of spirit in His Spirit, heart of His Heart.  Be free to love now, the Beloved, and all the more in Him, spiritually, and remote yet more present than ever, His Body.

The other is over now.  He has been signalling me for a few years, off and on, sometimes with stark spiritual messages, other times with unfolding situations.  The Beloved gives me time as gift, and now I grasp this shift.  I do.  I'm with Him fully now on why and what.  How and when are His.