THE THREE LIVES OF CHRISTINA THE ASTONISHING (#2)

As Told by the Holy Woman in Her Own Words
A Hundred or So Years after the End of the World

… After losing our mother and father within months of each other, my two sisters and I decided to set up our home after the manner of the new spirit houses that were springing up all over the western lands. We would be beguines, laywomen dedicated to the service of Giver. My older sister Matilda, who professed a strong vocation, had trained with the sisters of our local Giver House. According to the division of labor in our cabin, she prayed and cooked, my younger sister Jocelyn did the housekeeping, and I took care of our sheep and cows in the pasturelands next to our house.

There was never much display of love or tenderness in our family, my parents being mainly caught up in the brute struggle for survival that life on the farm entailed. As the middle daughter, I’m ashamed to say, I often resorted to desperate strategies to gain their attention—turning somersaults, crying at the top of my lungs–and thus had been judged odd and difficult.  After they died, staying outdoors most of the day and even into the night worked a calming influence on me. I came to love solitude and the wilderness. Alone with nature and the animals, I began to receive sweet intimations from that other dimension untouched by the ruin of our world. Sometimes the fields and trees around me seemed to vibrate with invisible energy. Other times they were bathed in uncanny light. I saw tiny white sparks dancing over the heads of my sisters and the animals. I was filled with a joy I couldn’t put into words.

When I tried to tell Matilda about my experiences, she scoffed. She took it as one more instance of attention seeking. And since Matilda was the one with exclusive rights to the task of praying, I learned to keep these visions to myself. But in my heart I felt they were messages to me from the world of Light and Love, that region behind space and time that shapes our earthly reality.

In short order I discovered that everything I believed about the world of Light and Love was true. At the time, however, I knew so little about my own world, about the difference between its small love and the other world’s great Love, that my longing was not as pure as I imagined it to be. Nevertheless I believed with all my heart that the world of Light and Love was calling me to leave this material world and come to it, to rise up to that plane of existence in which I could live every moment in ecstasy.
(to be continued tomorrow)