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The imposing collection of fifteen volumes which is Life of Love constitutes a mystical testament that is something completely new in the Church. But for that matter, God, in dispensing His graces, while renewing the demands He makes in return, has constantly varied them according to the nature of the times. And who can deny that our times are the most charged, the most extraordinary, the most tragically awe-inspiring in the annals of history? (...) And, in fact, it can be seen in many spheres or domains of the spiritual, supernatural or mystical life, how our era abounds in those men and women in whom have come to full flowering the virtues and graces of the greatest saints of other times. (...)
Of such is Life of Love; a life like other lives externally, the same afflictions, but within, what light, and, above all, what mystery!
For we are faced here with not only a holy life, a cell of purity in the corrupted body of society and that is not altogether a rarity but with a mystery.
As is more or less normal with those whom God has chosen in order to confide to them, one day, a mission, Marie-Paule, from her childhood, was the object of supernatural graces. The souls of such children are simple enough to receive simply that which God generously gives, and to enjoy in a very natural way that in which they do not distinguish any supernatural favor.
Life of Love begins, then, with an outpouring of the Love of God. But God would not be long in manifesting to the young girl, become young wife, that the love which He exacts in turn from privileged souls is that love with which He, as the Son of man, loved men; sacrifice, suffering, death. In a word, it is the configuration in contradiction and derision as Jesus was a sign of contradiction (Lk. 2:34), and an object of derision (Mt. 27:29). (...)
This then is the life of configuration which will be imposed but imposed because first accepted upon her who will be constrained to live and, at the same time, to write this life of Love. The indication was given to her, very early, in the effusion of graces received during adolescence. Later, during her darkest hour of dereliction, the order to write it will be given, this time, formally by the Church through the authority of a priest, her spiritual director.
Why this demand, and why such constraint? Because this Life one day will be the Witness. (...) The grandeur of this Life is a function of the enormity of the times. We know that these times are utterly unique; and this Life has something of the unique. (...)
Now, the secret of Life of Love is a mystery bound up with the mystery of the Co-Redemption.
The mystery of the Co-Redemption that is the end. The configuration that is the way. And she whom God had committed to this difficult way went forward along it in the darkness. She had to retrace the path walked by Jesus in his Passion; she had to re-live, in the commonplace way of life, that which the Savior suffered in the realization of the Redemption with, to be sure, that immeasurable distance that lies between the Creator and the creature, between Him who is the Image and her who is the Resemblance.
Marie-Paule knew that; but she did not understand it. Like Mary who, as the Immaculate Conception, knew in her heart that which she did not understand in her mind with its human limitations. They, (Joseph and Mary), did not understand! (Lk 2:50).
Raoul Auclair
(Excerpts from the Preface to the first volume of Life of Love)
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© 1998 - MARIE-PAULE, VIE DAMOUR INC., Quebec, Canada