10: The River of God

10

The River Of God

Letters to Ascended Master

St. Padre Pio,

Thursday, August 11,2011

8: 45 A. M.

Dear Padre,

          Okay, Penny and I thought it over and this morning decided that I should go ahead with a new blog; but Penny wasn’t comfortable with the title that I had chosen for my book of letters to you, so we tried a variety of titles until we came upon one that we both agreed upon: The River Of God, Private Letters to Ascended Master St. Padre Pio. “There,” she said; “now you can have your cake and eat it, too.”

          She said that because I wanted to keep “Ascended Master” in my title, which she didn’t like (she still can’t wrap her head around my relationship with you, but she’s going with it), and she wanted the word “personal” in the title, but we settled on “private” because it’s catchier. What do you think?

          Penny thought the image of a river would catch the reader’s attention, and I agreed because it makes reference to the River of God that you spoke about in my spiritual healing sessions, the image of the Divine Current that flows from God to create life and carry soul back home to God.

          You went into more detail, though. You used the image of one placing a big stone in the River of God, which impeded the flow of the Divine Current in his life, like the huge boulder that I had created with my spiritual conceit that impeded the flow of the Divine Current in my life—hence, my spiritual healing brought about by your sanctifying grace!

          I’ve thanked you already for my spiritual healing, Padre; but I’d like to thank you again because my sessions with you changed my life. Like I said to my friend at her bookstore yesterday, “I feel such an enormous relief since my healing sessions with Padre Pio. You don’t realize how heavy ego can be until you’re relieved of its weight upon your soul. Honest to God, I think ego has to be the most burdensome thing in the world!”

          I wanted to puke at the thought of my pre-Padre Pio life; that’s how disgusted I was with my own spiritual conceit. Had I not been slain by your humility I would still be out there blindly strutting my stuff like the spiritual peacock that I was! This reminds me of the comment made by the Spiritual Traveler Rebazar Tarzs about Jesus strutting his stuff like a peacock—not to compare myself with Jesus, though. God forbid!

          No, all I want to do is show that we are all blind to our own vanity—our own “stone” in the River of God that impedes the flow of the Divine Current of Love in our life, and I’m sure that Jesus had his moments.

That’s what the River of God is, an endless current of Love that flows from God and back to God. Jesus called it the “water of everlasting life,” and as it flows from God it creates and sustains life, and as it flows back to God it awakens and returns soul back home a spiritually self-realized, God conscious soul ready to serve in the Divine Plan of God as you are doing by helping souls on their journey through life.

Padre, how did you know that you would do more to help mankind from Heaven than you were doing in your humble role as a Capuchin monk who said Mass every morning and listened to over one hundred confessions every day, not to mention your personal response to the many letters that people wrote you, when you were allowed to respond that is?

Your superiors, whom you obeyed absolutely because of your vow of obedience, denied you this precious gift of service for a period of time; but I don’t want to get into that here. Suffice to say that I know how much you had to suffer to serve your fellow man, but serve you did; and now you are serving from the Other Side in your capacity as an Ascended Master, and I can’t thank you enough for bringing me together with my spiritual sensitive who channeled you so we could do a book on spiritual healing. And when I asked if we would meet again, you said, “Our work is not yet done, my son.”

Did you “anticipate” this book of letters? I did ask if we would be doing another book with my spiritual sensitive and you said yes, and I even caught a glimpse of the theme of this new project which was inspired by Ecclesiastes; but it never occurred to me to write you a series of letters until a few weeks ago when I was reading on our front deck.

The thought came to me out of the blue, but I know that you planted that seed in my mind, and it didn’t take long to take root because I’ve always wanted to write a book of letters. And just the other night as Penny and I were doing our spiritual contemplation you planted the seed in my mind to create a new blog for my letters and share them with the public before I publish them in book form!

Once again, I had no thought of posting them on a blog site. That idea came to me out of the blue also, and I know you gave it to me; so Penny and I have decided to go ahead with it, and when she comes back from her trip up north where she’s going for her niece’s wedding (and to visit her father), she will create my new blog site for me because I don’t have a clue how to go about it and I can begin posting my letters to you. Are you happy now?

When you’re called to serve, you’re called aren’t you? I almost feel like I felt when I caught my first scent of the Way and had to follow it like the hound of Heaven in Thompson’s poem. I had to go wherever the scent took me, and believe me it took me to places that taught me lessons I will never forget—like that offshoot Christian solar cult teaching brought into the world by a “Child Christ” that did damage to my eyesight! But I can’t bring myself to talk about that now.

Strangely enough however, the thought came to me just yesterday to dig out my old manuscript of the novel that I started to write on my experience with this Christian solar cult teaching that I studied for three years.

I never think about this novel, because the thought of reliving that experience horrifies me. I called it “The Sunworshipper,” but the thought came to me yesterday to write it as the main story in a book of short stories, and it was strong enough for me almost go to the basement and dig up my manuscript; so I guess you just planted the seed for now. But it would make a great story because it would reveal how far one will go to find his way back home to God—like risking one’s eyesight as I did by burning three holes in the retina of my eyes with the solar techniques that this teaching taught to ingest the Logos supposedly imbued with the rays of the sun!

Wow! I still cringe at my experience. I couldn’t write this novel because I couldn’t relive the trauma of that whole experience, especially with my ophthalmologist who was so angry with me for doing those solar techniques that he dismissed me from his examining room and I had to fly down to the eye clinic in Waterloo for the appointment that my brother had arranged for me to find out how much damage I had done to my eyes.

 But how could I explain to the ophthalmologist at the Thunder Bay Clinic the power of the Call of God? I could have asked him to read Thompson’s poem “The Hound of Heaven,” but what good would that have done? Nobody can understand a “hound of heaven” but another “hound of heaven.” “Rise, clasp my Hand, and come!” God commands, and I paid a dear price to be clasped by the Hand of God—as did you, Padre. God, I can’t begin to fathom the pain you suffered for fifty years with the stigmata; but that was your choice. You did ask Jesus how you could serve his mission, and he gave you his five crucifixion wounds, and you embraced la via d’sofferenza so passionately that you said, “I want to inebriate myself with pain.” But why, the reader may ask? Why would one be so foolish to suffer like that? Where’s the logic?

We could tell them, couldn’t we? But I think I’ll wait for another letter when I can delve into the mystery of what you called your “glory” and I came to call “virtue” and Jesus called “treasures in heaven.”

Indeed, the River of God has as many streams as there are souls in God’s Kingdom. As you said, “life is a journey of the self.” But mercifully, every stream will eventually find its way back into the River of God and flow back to the Godhead—eureka!

Didn’t I say at the beginning of this project that my book of letters would find its own theme? Well, it just popped up—the River of God! This theme speaks to everyone, and I do believe that this is going to be the final title to my book of letters to Ascended Master St. Padre Pio!

I remain,

Your faithful companion,

Orest