The second direction that Conchita puts in her little work on the relationship between the spiritual director and the directee is to get the directee to want to give ones self totally to Jesus.

We can put this in different ways but if we look at it concretely the Lord has to deal with us and our life in the culture tends to make us Charlie and Susie Bubbles. Where our life is centered around ourselves and nothing penetrates our bubble. Then we manage to receive grace and we begin to orient ourselves toward God and toward the other.

But Van Kamm says that usually in a culture the spirituality then is more an ego spirituality, that is, there= s a lot of mixture of doing God= s things my way. So we need purification. So the Lord in his goodness and wanting to make us more alive, spiritually, moves us to be purified from our attachments, from any particular kind of territory where the Lord is not allowed to come into our life by us. So it= s some things that we may not even be aware of that the Lord himself has to show us.

For instance, you may be very subtly very attached to opinion that people have of you. So you really don't realize it. You= re really trying to help people, you= re very out going, etc., but the real motivation is that you want people to think well of you. So the Lord will do something so that you discover this and you begin to be purified from it so that your love is pure. Since this is a lifetime process there is no end in which God can invade more and more of our being. So the real important thing is that we have to pay attention to where the Lord is invading our being. This is right out of Chapter 7 of the Rule where St. Benedict says, A it= s the Lord who places the next rung on our ladder.@ So the Lord is active in each person= s life and he is moving us to climb the ladder of humility and puts the next rung there, the point is do we pay attention to it? Because usually that means a certain amount of the cross and our approach to the cross is either fear, rejection, or avoidance, so we don= t allow ourselves to be purified and therefore grow spiritually into deeper union.

So the first rule then, which she does connect with this, is that you have to ask yourself how the Lord is purifying me at this point in my life. And pay attention to it and open ourselves so that our Lord may come in. Because that= s what the Lord wants to do. He wants to invade our being so that when we die the Lord can have full possession of us and we can enjoy heaven fully. It= s a very important step.

But she does one more thing, she says, it= s good to take on the hour, because the Lord taught her this, on the hour to make an offering of yourself with Jesus to the Father for grace, for yourself, for world, for the church, for whatever other intentions, on the hour. What does that do when you do that seriously when you really with a disposition of peace and trust? It makes you think of offering yourself and giving yourself to God= s always. So if you do this faithfully and with a certain amount of spiritual presence then your developing yourself to the mode of being open to and following the inspirations of the Holy Spirit. She says in the statement that if you do this eventually this will come.

So it= s important for us then to realize that this is what the Lord is asking of us. In the Rule its also there. One of the instruments of good works is that we= re supposed to grow in desiring eternal life with all spiritual thirst. Well in order to do that it means your desire has to awaken and your desire awakens to the degree that you allow the Lord to purify your motives and makes you move from attachments to attaching yourself more to Jesus and thereby allowing you to follow the Spirit and discover that the Lord really is trying to transform your life and therefore you have not only peace but you have a greater desire to fulfill everything that God wants.