Course XVII - Teaching 9: Prayer and Vows

You talk, you think and you feel always in dualistic terms, and life is unity. You should not understand this unity as only one thing, but as an organic totality, indivisible and simple in itself, and composed as attribute.
A soul is not simple; so, prayer is just an act to the soul; but prayer is its strength, its power and its divine chance –its extinction as a soul.
In the same way, Vows are something outside being, until their achievement as spontaneous expression of a supernatural being.
So, you conquer your Vows by your spiritual efforts and personal death –death in the sense of a mystical extinction in the Divine.
Prayer leads a soul to an ideally divine state, and Vows are a real and permanent expression of this realization.
Certainly, from a human viewpoint, a Vow is a contingent expression, but at the same time an eternal act of identification with your own spiritual truth.
Ascetic prayer leads necessarily to achieve gradually your offering through Vows, but these Vows not only are a unique expression of a true spiritual being. Otherwise, Vows might not be a simple and divine act; they would be just an attitude.
Here we refer to Vow in its divine and supernatural sense.
If Vows were not a necessary expression of the spirit, they would not liberate your being, and would be bondage. So, through a limitation imposed by a Vow, the soul has a field of divine possibilities.
In fact, in a supernatural sense, we can speak just of “The Vow” –of the supernatural alliance between man and God. But a gradual approximation of man to the Divine Mother is humanly necessary.
Just one thing exists as Vow: the divine seal on the soul –a simple and eternal connection between God and man.
A Vow, as achievement of a spiritual vocation, is a free act of the soul; in fact, it is not an act of choice, but an act of acceptance.
The Divine Mother calls Her souls; they can say just one thing: yes or not.
When the Son takes his first Vow, he cannot know it entirely as to its mystical depth, but he knows that “he is” through this Vow. It is an intuitive perception of the truth about his vocation by offering his Renunciation.
Vows “are”. They are his unique reality by being a divine possibility of the soul.
So, prayer is a path of self-recognition through Vows. Recognition through Vows is spiritual identification with the transcendental value of these Vows.
In this way, what a Vow means loses its human limitations and acquires immeasurable vastness. Vows include entirely doctrine and path, teachings and mystique of extinction (silence), identification (fidelity), responsibility (obedience), participation (renunciation) and presence (holocaust).
Vows must be object of prayer, because they condense all spiritual treasures of the Son.