Course XLV - Teaching 12: Enemies of Perfection

Ordination is a magnetic field of high spiritual potentials, but not Supreme Realization that one just reaches within.
So, negative elements also enter the House of Community. Since low stimulating elements cannot enter there, little negative elements penetrate and delay enormously the achievement of perfection, exhaust the best vocational fibers and sometimes even spoil sanctifying efforts of a whole life.
Every state has its characteristic dangers and defects; and often one tends to certain defects in Community, which should be known and fought.
We can sum up the enemies of an Ordained Soul into three main defects, namely: disagreement, backbiting and scruples.
An Ordained Son is obliged by his Vow of Renunciation to become “a nothing”: a Divine nothing. This lofty ideal, encouraged by a true vocation, acquires such a power that even leads an aspirant to take his Holy Vows, but later, an entire series of gradual factors retaliate in his soul by trying to impose their will.
Renunciation entails a strenuous, hard and continuous fight. It is the most difficult and especial work that man may realize on earth. When a soul, basically respectful and surrendered, gives up fulfilling this divine purpose of being nothing, personality is activated again.
Lohengrin’s story ever repeats: the chaste Else, image of a surrendered soul, whose desires still are holy, leans out of the balcony, and at once Gutruna, a dethroned usurper, who still is unvanquished, tries to tempt her, “Who is he? Ask his name”, to stir up her disagreement.
If he is not totally faithful to his duty and internally gives up doing something, at once his intuitive part is dissatisfied, and this dissatisfaction comes into being in the soul. If he is not self-sacrificed, highly obedient, purity-oriented, faithful to any duty and constant prayer, he feels disappointed. Happy that soul in disagreement with itself; may the Divine Mother impede that a fine pride leads the Son to be dissatisfied with everything and with those media that She granted to him for his perfection.
Saint Therese said rightly: “May God protect us from a dissatisfied nun!”.
Because dissatisfied souls do harm themselves and the entire Community.
The enemy possesses very subtle arguments and complaints, and her first insinuation is that the Son cannot reach perfection, and blames this failure on Superiors, not on him: they do not understand or appraise him, or on the Community that is devoted rather to work than to prayer, or vice versa, on this or on that.
And this Son uses to be dissatisfied, which becomes a constant enemy that immobilizes any force and saddens his spiritual life by wasting a precious time in vain.
Certain souls realize on time this evil and seek in themselves the cause of their dissatisfaction, and fight against their inefficient Renunciation, which constantly is the cause.
How sad is to see a soul that is truly called to Ordination, a faithful, saintly and good soul that does not achieve its purpose because Renunciation is to become nothing, not suddenly –one achieves this through Holy Vows– but effectively through daily surrender of all that a soul possesses externally or internally!
A soul stubbornly and entirely ignoring Renunciation suffers from a constant nervous tension and continuously runs after external things for a reiterated relief that becomes backbiting. This soul refuses to be guilty of its own evil and needs to blame others for this. One can observe, and even experience confirms this, how a Son that is negligent in his Vows puts other souls on his own level and seeks accomplices of his evil by means of backbiting. Backbiting does not start in a direct way; the poor Son seeks in secret other comprehensive soul, certain particular friend that hears his intimate confidences, and later releases his own evil through backbiting against Regulation, Superiors, other Sons or everything.
If certain soul has fallen, even very partially in this so great evil, correct it and claim in a loud voice to the Divine Mother, “Clean me of the sacrilege of backbiting!”.
Other souls, more simple but equally unable to Renounce totally, do not accuse of their evils those people round them and those media of life granted to them, but to hidden shadows and imaginary phantoms. Neither karma, nor wicked spirits, nor bad influences can do anything against a soul totally surrendered, with fidelity and constancy, to the Divine Mother.
Those poor souls are scared and victims of doubts, temptations and scruples of any kind. Constantly they believe that they did wrong, that they did not fulfill properly their Observance, that their Community looks at them in askance, and that they are good for nothing. If they pray, think that their prayer does not please the Divine Mother; if they work, think that their work is improperly made; if they speak, believe that they have offended; and if they keep silent, feel humiliated.
Scruples and fears are a sad evil. But if the Son saintly decides to examine and seek in himself which part of his soul refuses to surrender, and delivers it at once to the Divine Mother like an offering, then fears and doubts will disappear immediately at if this were a miracle.
The Divine Mother has chosen his Sons for the sublime vocation of Renunciation; many offer themselves through Holy Vows, but not all are able to fulfill them in a perfect way, and this is so because they want to keep a drop of personality.
When a Son feels dissatisfied, sad, aggressive, backbiting, fearful and doubtful, he must be immediately grateful the Divine Mother because this denotes that he did not deliver something, that he is keeping something, that he does not honor his Vows of perfection, and that all this is a clear warning and exact indicator of his progress or stagnation in the Spiritual Path.
Defects are like little bells that just warn the soul: “Still you are not the nothing, the divine nothing”.