The coolness of his room is where Theophile the Elder welcomed Abel in order to evoke the memories they share.
Abel – And I could not find it! Today I understood we shouldn’t look for anything but just surrender to God in a natural way.
The Elder – So, have you found peace today?
Abel – Only partially. I’d rather say that it is peace, which at times finds me! Old age and sickness offered me what I was looking for through chosen and voluntary renunciation. Today, the world is naturally moving away from me. I have no strength left for fighting whatever worries me. I’m now indifferent to practically anything; or, shall we say, I can’t see the world anymore.
– That is “Renouncing ourselves in silence and, in God’s Presence, doing nothing and listening”, Theophile commented, quoting Jeanne Guyon.
Abel – I have no merits, life and age having caused me to be unable to do anything anymore. I spend a lot of time sleeping, out of boredom. I meditate, out of necessity, and also because I am in search of such a comfortable inner silence.
The Elder – Jeanne Guyon says that surrender and nakedness have a liberating effect, contrary to spiritual efforts and to working on oneself. Teresa of Avila would also say, ” For a while, let yourself be met by God and thus be touched by Grace and inhabited by Love.”
Abel – It’s so true! Merit and humility won’t necessarily work there, but grace will. It works all by itself and whenever its time has come. You just have to get ready for it and look to it with confidence.
The Elder – All that beauty lies in the fact you have already seen one thousand full moons in your life. Hence that dose of inner wisdom, the lot of confidence, etc.
Abel – That surely results from my instinctive detachment from all that had been so important for me; I loved nature more than anything else and today I can only have a glimpse of it from the window of my bedroom. I haven’t even got enough strength to put some food in the birds’ perches. Their songs will still enchant me, though, and I am still able to identify a bird that is singing. Formerly, I loved DIY. I could make things and mend them, restore old objects and have them regain their glow of yesteryear. I would spend hours in my workshop, even forgetting about eating.
The Elder – You’ve always believed work had its value, whatever the domain it concerned.
Abel – As a matter of fact, I started with referring to the gospels, where they claim you should fear being lazy or idle. But these last few years I have also lost that aspiration for studying. I have kept a few books about spirituality, but I have reconsidered knowledge. It remains important to me, but only as an ancillary activity. For years, I looked for answers in spiritual books, but most of the time what I could find there only amounted to nice theories – relatively persuasive ones – or fine beliefs, which never fully satisfied my aspiration. I remain suspicious of all the doctrines men create for reasons of comfort. I tried to stay away from institutions, whether they are social or religious ones, because I wanted to be free from any dogma.
The Elder – Yes, and then?
Abel – Nothing at all. Finally, it came to nothing.
The Elder – Or it came to that ‘Nothing’ from which everything comes.
Abel (laughing):
– So, you are calling for senescence as a means to realize God, aren’t you?
Both accomplices parted, laughing heartily, after having arranged for another one of the lovely exchanges they had been having for years. Abel had to rest, as he easily got tired but he did enjoy a visit from his life-long friend Theophile.
They met again, but only a few weeks later, Abel having been unwell for some time.
Abel – I’m sorry I have to stay in bed when you come to visit me, but I still have to rest during the day.
Theophile reassured him:
– Resting is important, as you know. “When grace flows down, there is nothing left to do but rest and slowly absorb it”, Jeanne Guyon used to say. And I know you like her as much as I do.
– Then I must absorb a lot of it, since I spend so much time in bed! For the Grace of God, the old man said jokingly, as he was so happy to share again his friend’s warm company.
The Elder – The atmosphere and the vibration in your room show that you are often in His Presence. Love and sweetness: that’s what I feel when I am with you.
Abel – Do you! And yet, some of my old grudges still exist, as vivid as ever. They sometimes reappear in my consciousness and show me there is still work to be done.
The Elder – Where do they come from?
Abel – They concern some persons who did not behave properly in the past.
The Elder – And you’ve not forgiven them, have you?
Abel – I can’t.
The Elder – Have they changed?
Abel – I don’t know. I did not want to know.
The Elder – You’d better eliminate your karmic debt load before you leave. To explore spiritual dimensions, after leaving our bodies, we’d better travel light. That is something your soul knows, and it is the reason why you are still down here for a while.
Abel – I try hard to live in the present, but the past will still resurface.
The Elder – The secret is that you must let the Divine softly lead your self, patiently, and that you must let It go wherever and however It wants to go.
Abel – But I still manage to fully surrender to the inner Presence.
The Elder – Forget the self to remember the Divine…
Abel – I don’t even know how I do it. It just happens…
The Elder – By the Grace of God!
Abel – I have not done anything particular to receive that Grace. I am a very ordinary person.
The Elder – You have just surrendered to God. Seeing you couldn’t do anything by yourself, you have left room for Him. That was important.
Abel – I claim no credit for that.
The Elder – Who is talking about credit? Grace follows no rule. It just flows down, when and where it wants to flow.
Abel – But why should it flow down on me?
The Elder – We are all the children of God; He has endowed us with a soul, with a heart that will guide us up to Him. We shall all have ‘our’ opportunity. God has unlimited time and He is timeless. His scope of action is limitless, is eternal. He knows that sooner or later we shall all come back to Him.
Abel – I have always thought that Love had to be deserved.
The Elder – Certainly not. We just have to expose our self to the Presence within the heart. To expose is too strong a word, as it implies that we are expecting something from the Divine, as if it were a right we should claim, a sort of reward. Suppose saying you had a right to breathe oxygen! How ridiculous! Love is the oxygen the soul needs. The soul could not exist without love.
Abel – It always comes back to ‘not-doing’, something age is trying to teach me.
The Elder – Remember Teresa of Lisieux used to say, “It’s by doing nothing that I can realize how much the Presence loves me.”
Abel – That is precisely what I am discovering. I let the Presence just love, within me and around me. Thus life, with all its difficulties and torments, has become much more tolerable. What I should have learnt through meditation, old age taught it to me. Babuji would say indeed that ‘to meditate is dying to one’s self, dying before your death and while you are still alive.” At the time, I thought it looked like a Japanese ‘koan’. Today, I just live it.
The Elder – It’s all about being ‘reborn to oneself’, out of pure love. The self must die for the Self to be born. It’s like the caterpillar developing into a butterfly. Seeing a soul unfolding within a being is sheer beauty.
Abel – Birth cannot be without any pain!
The Elder – That pain marks out the passage from life to Life. When the newborn baby takes its first breath, it cries because it is painful. It has had to pass from an aquatic world into an aerial environment. Every birth has its own turbulent history, but we are always invisibly assisted by beings of light and, if we are lucky enough, by the midwives of the soul our spiritual guides are. They accompany us in our quest to the Ultimate and they help us whenever we have to face obstacles. They are at our service, so far as we let them be so.
Abel – They are models, too. I have always been looking for models and I rarely found them. However hard they could try to help us through our initiations, these are sometimes hard to cross and the pain is not easily overcome.
The Elder – I agree, but for the soul, the time it takes stands for a fraction of the usual time and the pain is a positive one.
Abel – What I find difficult to bear is the agony that comes before that ‘little death’.
The Elder – And the rebirth that comes with it! Each passage, each stage is upsetting. These stages, which are called ‘initiations’, will come only when the person and his or her soul are ready. Initiations are coded. It may take thousands of years before you reach that stage.
Abel – Do you mean many lifetimes?
The Elder – Yes, of course.
Abel – Why should it take so long?
The Elder – God has entrusted human beings with total freedom so that they may be co-creators, together with Him. He could not possibly place constraints on an embodied soul. Therefore, the soul can choose its path and the path length.
Our two friends went on evoking some of the beautiful spiritual meetings they had shared during the forty years they had spent together. Then Abel was absorbed within the heart of his own self, forgetting his friend, who then withdrew discreetly from the luminous space thus created.
Theophile the Elder
An excerpt from Dialogs with Theophile the Elder
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