Miguel de Molinos: The Spiritual Guide (Classics of Western Spirituality) by Robert P. Baird

Author:Robert P. Baird [Baird, Robert P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Paulist Press
Published: 2011-10-11T03:38:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

Introduction and Advice to Confessors and Spiritual Guides

28. The highest and most fruitful ministry is that of the confessor and spiritual director. If you do not practice this ministry successfully, you can cause the most grievous injuries.

29. For such a great ministry it is proper to choose a patron who is holy over one who is inclined to devotion.

30. The first and most secure counsel for a spiritual director is to try to attain interior and continuous recollection. By means of that recollection he will succeed in all the practices and responsibilities of his own state and vocation, especially in the confessional. For God enlightens and works through the interiorly recollected soul that performs these exterior and necessary exercises.

31. You should not give counsels to interior souls. You should instead gently and prudently remove the impediments that hinder the influence of God. It will be necessary, however, to instruct them with that holy counsel, secretum meum mihi.14 Many souls think that all confessors are capable of interior matters. But, besides being deceived, such a soul will suffer great harm in speaking with confessors who are not prepared. The Lord may have put the soul on the interior path, but the confessor will not know this because he lacks experience. His charges will be stopped in their ascent to contemplation instead of being helped to fly, as he sends them to meditate by force-even though they cannot-on that which only bewilders and ruins them. While God wants them to walk toward contemplation, they seek meditation because they know no other path.

To bear fruit you should not seek souls to guide; it is important that they come to you. And you must not admit all who come, especially women, because they do not usually come with a competent disposition. A good way to bear fruit is to not make yourself a master or try to look like one.

The confessor should use the name daughter as little as necessary, because it is very dangerous. The epithet is intimate, and God is a jealous God.

34. The confessor should allow himself few occupations outside of the confessional, because God does not want him as a broker of business deals. If it were possible, he should not be seen except in the confessional.

35. The confessor should not let himself be a godfather or executor even once in his life, because these roles bring many inquietudes to the soul, all of which are opposed to the perfection of such a high ministry.

36. The confessor or spiritual guide should never visit his spiritual daughters, not even in the case of sickness, unless he has been called by the sick woman herself.

37. If the confessor maintains interior and exterior seclusion, his words (even though he does not know it) will be burning coals that will inflame souls.

38. A confessor's reproaches should be gentle in the confessional and stern in the pulpit. In the pulpit he should be a furious lion and in the confessional he should clothe himself in the mildness of a lamb.

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