2: A Man Of Hope

2

A Man Of Hope

 

Letters to Ascended Master

St. Padre Pio,

Thursday, July 21, 2011

9: 30 A. M.

Dear Padre,

          Padre Pio, Man of Hope, by Renzo Allegri was my favorite of the ten books that I have read on your life so far, which I devoured with voracious curiosity after I met you through my spiritual sensitive—because I wanted to know everything I could about you; and although you were the same person that came through in the biographies of your life (and in your own letters and Padre Pio miracle stories, of which there were more than enough to choke an incredulous horse), you came through with the spiritual freedom of someone who had transcended the inflexible doctrine of your Roman Catholic religion—despite how you defended the false Christian premises that I so vocally threw at you in my spiritual healing sessions as a challenge to the faith that you lived and died for.

          But what I loved about how you defended the doctrine of your Roman Catholic faith (which was the bane of my youth), even though you now knew that some of the tenets were false—like the doctrine of one life, for example; eternal damnation, and the forgiveness of sins, which I will bring up in other letters—was the way you managed to get me to shift my own inflexible perspective and appreciate the spiritual goodness of the religion that I turned on in one of my past lives that surfaced in my past-life regressions five years ago.

          Not that I didn’t appreciate Christ’s teaching, not at all; I would not have found my true self without Jesus Christ’s teaching. It’s what Christianity has done with Christ’s teaching of the Way that I raged at. But let’s not dwell on that today. I want to pay homage to you in this letter, because the more I heard what you had to say in my spiritual healing sessions, and the more I studied your life the more humbled I was by your unbelievable commitment to la via di sofferenza—the way of suffering.

          You pleaded with your lord and savior to assist him in his mission, and Jesus invited you to participate in his passion by granting you the stigmata, the five wounds that he suffered during his crucifixion, which came to define your life.  Renzo Allegri wrote: “he had endured incredibly enormous suffering, accusations, slanders, trials, and condemnations than one can imagine” (Padre Pio, Man of Hope p. 5), and the more I read about your life, the more I came to believe this—and that’s when your passionate commitment to Jesus Christ’s mission began to break through the walls of my own spiritual conceit and devastate the vanity that kept me from making further progress on my journey home to God!

          “When people write about Padre Pio,” wrote Renzo Allegri, “they tend to dwell on the penitential aspect of his life, thereby giving a somewhat dark and medieval tinge to his personality. But this is not really the case. Padre Pio was, and is a man of hope” (p. 6).

          This is how you came through in my spiritual healing sessions—not dark and penitential (although, I felt shades of this quality in your character)—with a lightness of spiritual freedom and clarity that blew me away! I couldn’t believe how contemporary and New Age you were in your spiritual perspective. In fact, I soon realized just how far ahead of the life curve you were, and this induced such excitement that I couldn’t wait for my next spiritual healing session with you!

          So, Padre; let me thank you in this letter for healing me of the vanity that kept me stuck in the River of God, because once your healing grace devastated my spiritual conceit I began to ride the currents to new and exciting possibilities—to the point, as you revealed, where I actually transcended my own voice and the voice of my spiritual community!

          I wrote about this in Healing with Padre Pio; but I confess, I haven’t written the last chapter yet (“The Vanity of All Spiritual Paths”). I have to let the manuscript sit and simmer for a few months before I read it through and bring my novel to closure. For now, I want you to know that I sense that this epistolary project has already begun to take form. Be it ever so subtle, the form is taking shape, and I know it won’t be long before the dominant theme sprouts like a seed fully formed, and I can’t wait to see what fruit it bears!

          On a more personal note, I’d like to say that I have steeled myself to take on the household tasks that I’ve been putting off for—how long now, two, three, five years?—but I haven’t quite gone that far yet to actually commit myself to do them. I do however feel that you have planted the thought of doing “one small household responsibility to begin with,” which would begin breaking the hold that my little procrastinating self has on me; so I’ll see what I can do.

I can’t promise when, but I will entice myself by promising to not write you again until I do at least one household responsibility—which should be interesting!

I remain,

Your fellow companion,

Orest

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Next Sunday, Nov. 6/11, watch for Letter No. 3: "As Providence Would Have It." 

1: At Your Behest

1

 At Your Behest

 

 

Letters to Ascended Master

St. Padre Pio,

Wednesday, July 20, 2011

3: 40 P.M.                                                                                      

Dear Padre,

         

          I was sitting on the front deck waiting for Penny to come home from work this afternoon (I had just prepared a vegetarian pizza for the oven when she pulled into the yard) reading the new spiritual musing I had just written when the thought came to me—and very strongly, I might add, which led me to suspect that it was you who inspired it—to write you a series of letters.

          Since I’ve always wanted to write a book of letters, I relished the idea of writing to an Ascended Master, especially since we’ve already established a relationship with my novel Healing With Padre Pio.

True, our relationship is couched in fiction, which I had to do for a variety of reasons; but that doesn’t negate the reality of our experience. For me, you were very real when my spiritual sensitive channeled you; but this is different, because letter writing opens a window on one’s soul in a much deeper way.

Letter writing doesn’t give one the latitude of fiction, but it is so much more intimate and personal, which is what I want this book of letters to be; something like your letters to your Spiritual Directors (Secrets Of A Soul), which I loved because you were so revealing, so vulnerable, and so on fire with the Holy Flame of God, but I would like my letters to be more in the spirit of someone who has found his own way back home to God and would like to share his journey with an Ascended Master who now serves life from the Other Side.

          I have no set agenda with this project, other than the fact that writing you will fuel the Holy Flame of God in my life—because it’s to the nature of the creative spirit to set one’s soul ablaze with inspiration; so I don’t know where this is going to take me. It may not go anywhere, but the thought alone is enough to fill my heart with new wonder, because I know from our last project how you worked your miracles in my life. As with all of my books, I know that this book of letters will also find its own way; and I know that it will attract its own material just as all my books do, and I look forward to the surprises.

            I should mention in this, my first letter to you, whom I consider to be more than a mere Catholic Saint (mere!), but an Ascended Spiritual Master, that my letters will be addressed to a Christian Saint who has transcended his Roman Catholic religion and speaks with a consciousness of all knowing and all seeing, as you revealed to me in one of my healing sessions. Which means that I am free to speak my mind about the spiritual life with you, regardless of your earthly religion, and mine—which happened to be Roman Catholicism also before I went on my quest for my true self.

          I’m on a new spiritual path now, which I’ve been on for the past thirty-some years, and which I may reveal down the road; but for now, suffice to say that I have always taken my wisdom where I find it, and in you Padre I have found a vein of pure spiritual gold!

So, with your blessing (I know that you’ve already given me the nod), I’m going to embark upon this project—if not for personal growth, for the rich literary experience that it will give me, and my readers. You did say to me at the end of my spiritual healing sessions, “Our work is not yet done, my son.” So, I’m rolling up my sleeves…

I remain your humble—I wrote the word “student,” but no sooner did I write it and I felt you snatch the word away and replace it with the word “companion.” “Spiritual companion,” you insist. I’m comfortable with that, despite what some of my readers may think. Until the next time,

In Spirit,

Your fellow companion, 

Orest

Next Sunday,  October 30/11, Letter No. 2: A Man Of Hope

INTRODUCTION to Letters To Ascended Master St. Padre Pio

  INTRODUCTION

          Padre Pio is a modern Roman Catholic Saint. Pope John Paul 11 canonized him on June 16, 2002. He is known as the “Healing Saint,” because so many miracles have been attributed to him. I can attest to the miracle of his sanctifying grace, which I have written about in my novel Healing with Padre Pio that was inspired by a series of monthly spiritual healing sessions that I had with a very gifted spiritual sensitive who channeled St. Padre Pio for me from the months of August 2010 to May 2011.

          Of course, there will be those that doubt whether it was St. Padre Pio who came through in my sessions, but I know that this venerable Saint of Humility, as I came to call him, slew my vanity and gave me a spiritual healing, and I have no doubt that it was the humble Capuchin monk Francesco Forgione from Pietrelcina, Italy who became the “man of hope and prayer” and Ascended Master St. Padre Pio.

You see, I was a very angry Roman Catholic who left the Holy Mother Church, and I needed a Roman Catholic Saint to heal my anger at Christianity; that’s why my spiritual guide introduced me to St. Padre Pio, because only a Roman Catholic Saint who had suffered the wounds of Jesus Christ could understand the deep wounds that the Roman Catholic Church had inflicted upon my soul.

I was young when I left the Church. I could not suffer the claustrophobia of my faith and had to find the spiritual freedom that I hungered for; so I became a spiritual seeker. I found reincarnation, which introduced me to the perennial philosophy of life, known simply as the Way; and I pursued my studies of the Way wherever my search took me.

Strangely enough, the Way brought me right back to the teachings of Jesus, which I saw in a different light now; and I studied the Way of Christ for years until I found the spiritual path best suited to my new state of consciousness.

I lived my path for over thirty years, but I came to a spiritual impasse that I could not break through, and my spiritual guide saw fit to introduce me to Ascended Master St. Padre Pio through the spiritual sensitive who gave me a complimentary spiritual healing. I pursued my spiritual healing and wrote a novel called Healing with Padre Pio; and now I have written the Good Saint a series of letters that he would like me to share with you.

Bear in mind however, that I did not write these private letters from the perspective of a Roman Catholic to a Roman Catholic Saint, but as a former Roman Catholic who has realized his own spiritual view on life born of my life-long quest for answers to the questions: where do we come from? Who are we? And where are we going? And I wrote my letters not to a Roman Catholic Saint as such, but to an Ascended Spiritual Master who revealed to me that he has the consciousness of all knowing and all seeing.

When I asked him in my last spiritual healing session if he would like to work with me on another book, because I so enjoyed our relationship for my literary project Healing with Padre Pio, he replied, “Our work is not yet done, my son.”

Our “work” is bridging two diametrically opposed worldviews that impede the flow of the River of God, the way of Christian faith, and the way of gnosis: Christianity’s worldview that made Padre Pio an Ascended Spiritual Master by suffering la via di sofferenza—the dogmatic belief in one life and one savior; and the gnostic worldview of karma and reincarnation that awakened me to my true self, Soul.

 I invite you to join me in my epistolary journey with Padre Pio, the venerable Saint of Humility who declared that he would serve man more from heaven than on earth; and as you travel with me on this journey of self-discovery, you will experience Padre Pio as I did, an “unsalted piece of macaroni” seasoned by the holy wounds of Jesus Christ and his unbounded love for God whose spiritual wisdom transcends Christianity and embraces the whole world. He is truly a wonderful traveling companion!

Next Sunday, October 23/11  Watch for Letter No. 1: At Your Behest

A Saint For The Whole World.

 

“I can be of more use to you in heaven than I have been on earth.

I belong to everyone; everyone will say Padre Pio is mine. I can refuse no one, since the Good Lord has never refused my humble requests.”

 

PADRE PIO: THE TRUE STORY

 C. Bernard Ruffin