Laura Aversano - The Light of God: Divine Locutions on Evil, Karma, Reincarnation, and Healing

Dedicated to the Spirits of the Living God, for their merciful work on behalf of all the Lords children.

To my family: Marie, Salvatore, Paul, Carol, and Tina. May the truth come to rest within the stillness of your hearts. May peace be with you always.

And finally, to our Beloved.Thank you, Thank you, Thank you.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My deepest gratitude to God. To my teachers in the world of spirit, you are my solace. My life is dedicated to your mission.

To my family, I know that this work has already brought healing to us as a whole. To Lois Dunnavent, thank you for your strength, love, and support during the writing of this book. Your friendship and your guidance have been invaluable over the years. To Marcia Pollock, your presence, encouragement, love, and support of me have carried me through difficult times. To Dr. John Beaulieu, enough gratitude could never be conveyed from my heart for all the support and guidance you have given me as I matured into my work. Father Joe, I know you are smiling at me from heaven. I thank you and miss you. Richard Grossinger, you rebirthed this book into its next phase. I am grateful our paths crossed when they did. Thank you.

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

By Father Francis Tiso

I am walking with a group of people into the forest near our retreat house in Cantalupo nel Sannio in the Province of Isernia, Italy. The walk is in silence, and we are invited to allow the various species of plants along the way to draw out our attention, pulling our awareness away from the things that encrust the self. To perceive the intricacies of the natural world is not only to catalogue them but also to allow them to work on us, to send us messages. Not only is it about messages and information and aesthetics: there is something else.

A long walk in the countryside or up into the mountains does something to our self-consciousness. Just as a poultice draws an infection out of a wound, the millions of microperceptions that arise in a natural ecosystem draw out the puss of egocentric obsessions. Strangely, we are allowed to forget the ego, propped up as it is by endless loops of worry. They drop away. A perceiver is still there, but the name and form of the perceiver have become subtle, almost gone. Straining to keep moving on our feet, the loss of self meets silence behind our shoulders. Someone, it seems, is there. This silence reassures us, without restoring even a hint of the ego that needs, or thinks it needs, so much attention. Where we are going, together, great and small will blend, and both will disappear. No cataclysm, just going along with things as they are. Truly are.

Our walking companions continue on their way, occasionally pausing for a moment of meditation seated on a moss-covered culvert or on the ramp of an old bridge. We are all here together, but the lacing is of silence and not of chatter. Not even metaphysical talk.

The Light of God takes us into the forest with a million microperceptions that draw out the poisons of our collective past. Words come pouring off the page like bubbles in a sink of dishes. Looking closely, we see rainbow interference patterns, as if to remind us of where we are going. These words do more for us than do the healing species in nature. Somehow, they both pierce and play with our memories, and make mockery of our minds. There is a hammering here, like a sculptor shaping a stone round and round, day after day, wearing it away with blows and cracks. We see a form, a memory, a pattern, which then eludes us. We know we have had that thought, and then we are not so sure. We look for a scheme, the lay of the land. Here there is texture, but no geography. We are not really at home here, and many things are like the fearsome follies of our dreams. The piercing voice works on us that way, each assertion subverting its predecessor, sternly chiding the mind to drop the habit of analysis. These words would be considered locutions to be patiently discerned over a period of years to be sure that flow is coming from the Holy Spirit and not elsewhere.

The voice is one that says something more like Follow me than Understand me. Even in reassuring us that fear is not the way, that same Shepherd voice also informs us of the illusory specters that wrinkle the path. Darkness and light entwine in this forest, and for long stretches the leaf-meal path is not steady beneath our soles.

Like G. M. Hopkins, the Holy Ghost is there with beating breast and bright wings, even when the light goes out in the brown-edged westward traces. For what is between these pages and lines is the life itself, indescribable, unreached by any compass. No dogmatic divining rod will bear this tread deprived of reassuring dromedaries. Throbbing with religious life, the divining rod becomes a kind of luminosity, bending almost to the breaking point in the pull and tug of the weaver whose voice comes through the canebrake, the swaying calamus. In this hidden place where the spring bursts forth, even the beating breast of the divine is at risk; soul and Source blend, and both die away in a final ecstatic echo.

What is this, what is that? Where does this come from? How am I to define these words? Is this a sure guide or a gigantic labyrinth with no center? Each time the warning signs pop up, we are thrown back on our own nature, and the fragility of our memories, our minds, our opinions, our props: not this, not that. Not even these tight-knit pages disclose the secret. If we have already tasted some of the dust of the way, and know that somehow ahead lies a path, that is enough to wend ones way amid bubbles and blossoms. We will meet here old friends, those who loved long ago, those who were draped in robes and carried staves, four and twenty elders and so many more in a long line of dim dawning light. With them, at a certain turn in the road, with mind and body dropping away, someone gets to fly, someone becomes flight itself. The silence at our shoulders lifts up, the earth plane slips away, and strange music seeps closer from the star streams. Listen, my child, to the words of the Teacher, that the eyes of the heart may see the light that deifies.

FATHER FRANCIS TISO
AUGUST 31, 2020

FATHER FRANCIS V. Tiso is a Roman Catholic priest who holds an A.B. in medieval studies from Cornell University, a master of divinity degree from Harvard University, and a doctorate from Columbia University and Union Theological Seminary with a specialization in Buddhist studies. He is the Associate Director of the Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs of the United States Conference for Catholic Bishops, where he serves as liaison to Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, the Sikhs, and traditional religions as well as the Reformed confessions. He is the author of Rainbow Body and Resurrection and Liberation in One Lifetime.

PREFACE

If you have faith in me, I am there. If you do not, I am still there.