Marie Antoinette de Geuser was a young girl who had a very clear vocation to the religious life and an undeniable vocation to the Carmelite Order, but she died without being able to follow out her desires. She took this magnificent resolution: "I will keep myself aloof from myself."
In his book The Glory of the Spiritual Nuptials, Ruysbroeck has taken for his theme the words of the Spouse to the Virgins: Behold the Bridegroom cometh, go forth to meet Him; in each chapter he reiterates this call making it more and more insistent.
From the soul whom He has chosen, God pushes away all familiar supports, even the dearest; He wants it to be detached and to belong to Him alone. Soon it is within the soul itself that detachment is pursued. The word of God is living and effectual, remarks the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, it is more piercing than any two-edged sword and reaching into the division of the soul, and the spirit, of the joints also and the marrow and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. (Hebrew iv, 12.)
This it is that spiritual authors describe when they demand that there be nothing but God alone in the depths of the soul. Magnificent solitude! It holds God alone. Tragic solitude, that is to say--a complete crumbling down absolutely, definitely, of all that is not God.
Absolutely! Nothing, absolutely nothing else!
Definitely! That is forever. And that is why Consummata in order to express her irrefutable Consummatum est wrote: "I will keep myself aloof from myself." To which she added further "I will keep self, dead."
On that condition will the living God dwell in me in His plenitude.
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Adapted from Meditations for Religious
by Father Raoul Plus, S.J. (© 1939, Frederick Pustet Co.)
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