Course XI - Teaching 10: The Superior as a Guide of the Soul

Those Sons who start the Path, and above all, if they are young men that still have to define their lives, do not know their vocation.
A Superior is greatly responsible for the vocational issue. He has to observe rightly those Sons starting the spiritual path in order to know if they have true vocation and which their vocation is.
This can be possible when the Superior leads his Sons to recognize that necessarily they have to remain quietly and attentively expectant, in their place and position assigned by the Providence, since the true vocation can manifest itself by this only mean.
Young men feel called to fulfill a mission, and these inner states, instead of being true vocations, become a natural predisposition of age, environment and individual aspirations. Vocation manifests itself gradually. Its manifestation is abrupt only in some extraordinary cases.
Most times, a gradual vocational call manifests itself on three grades:
The first is the vocational call in the adolescent; is the first manifestation or feeling of individuality in the individual being.
A young man has name and surname, and knows which terrestrial point he belongs to, but this is an entirely outer experience since once his intelligence starts its activities, also starts asking the first fundamental questions: why did I come to this world?, who am I?, which is my true name? These questions become the imperative need of the soul to have his spiritual identity card.
When this need of identification becomes acute or is in crisis, then an inevitable confrontation of the adolescent with his family takes place, against compulsory methods and against his social community.
It is a power emanated in this young man, forcing him to identify with something that makes him to feel independent.
This revolt ever misunderstood by adults, this fight of young powers of the soul against hardened mental waves of the ones who already formed, acquires a vocational aspect through idealization. It emerges through the adhesion of this unruly Son to a new idea or current despised by old conservative people.
Sometimes this vocation of the youth is not an ideal: it is a simple whim that becomes a mania and a way for the youth to wear out energies: dance, entertainment, walks, sports, even games.
The smart Superior will notice how this process comprises all young people, this vocational revolt by which they adhere to something that they feel to be their ideal or purpose, and it will not change radically this state of the soul –the soul shall get used to stay there, still, attentive, expectant.
Later the Superior will try to put in this soul a new attraction center so that here, in this new center, the soul discharges its expansion, but as a center of his own conquest and not as something granted by others.
It is then when the second vocational call, the true call, takes place.
Free of impediments coming from his repressed personality and in a field of action where the adolescent expands and lives by himself, he is born, or it is as if he was born to a new life.
It is here where he feels his call. The fullness of life is in his hands, his mind is tranquil and his heart in calm; he feels what he is and knows what he wants to become and if he is able to achieve it.
It is an intimate call of his being, a wish to create: creating something as intimate expression of his being to attain happiness.
It is here that a Superior has to lead his Son with iron hand for the emergence from fantasies the image that has to determine the entire life of this young man. Later he can succeed or fail, but this true and real call will ever be like his North, and if apparently he fails, he shall make use of his failure to stand up again and follow his path in life.
When the Son knows what he wants and his true worth, then the true call, the spiritual call, the liberation call shall attain his heart.
The Superior has to expect closely this hour of God and lead the Son with iron hand through the only spiritual path.
It is equally wrong to accelerate or delay this mood in the Son.
It is this vocational call that leads to a true spiritual life manifested in the soul once the latter recognizes itself and measures its own possibilities and the Son sees how transient and vain the things of the world are.
This is an intimate need of attaining the true expansion, of making of the spiritual aspect the center of his soul, from which all other things derive.
Sometimes this intimate expansion state cannot be under control, and the soul can wander in a dream of unreality if it has been misguided.
The Superior is the one who watches this mood, this crucial moment.