Do you wish to live one life in common with God? Do you wish to be supremely happy, to be constantly over brimming with joy and peace? God loves us so much that it always was His intention that we live with the gift of the Divine Will, that is, that we live one life in common with Him, like Adam.
Do you wish to live one life in common with God? Do you wish to be supremely happy,
to be constantly over brimming with joy and peace, to possess God as the Saints in Heaven do; to perform divine acts continuously rather than human ones? Do you want to start living the life of Heaven right here on Earth? In other words, do you earnestly want the gift of the Divine Will?
Gift of the Divine Will: Living one life with God
Well, if you do, I’ve got good news for you! God loves us so much that it always was His intention that we live with the gift of the Divine Will, that is, that we live one life in common with Him right from the beginning. When He created Adam and Eve, He placed them in the Garden of Paradise, where they lived supremely happy. They reigned over Creation as little kings. They possessed sanctifying grace and the preternatural gifts of infused knowledge; freedom from every kind of physical evil, such as sorrow, sickness, injury, or death; freedom from concupiscence and sin. They didn’t have to study or learn knowledge. They knew everything about the natural world they lived in. They did not even need clothes as they were clothed in garments of light.
Gift of the Divine Will: True Presence of God in Souls
As great as these gifts were, they were given an even greater one, the gift of the Divine Will, which is the crown jewel of all the gifts. This gift of the Divine Will consists of the sharing with God His own Life, through an exchange and fusing of wills: we give our will to Him, and He gives us His Divine Will as the principal actor in all our acts.
By letting God operate in all our acts, He lives and reigns in the soul as truly as He does in the Holy Eucharist. We are not speaking here of the mystical presence of God in the soul by grace, as He is in everyone who is in the state of grace; rather we’re talking of the actual, true and permanent presence of God in our souls.
Now, you may ask, what is the Divine Will? Well, it is pure Life, the vital principle which governs the light, love, and all the attributes of God Himself. It is the fountain of all grace and blessings.
One divine act of infinite merit
Getting back to Adam and Eve, they lived one life in common with God. All their acts were performed in His holy Will, which made these acts perfect; and these acts gave perfect love, glory, adoration, praise and thanksgiving to their Maker. In fact, even the smallest acts, such as an eye blink, were greater, more meritorious, and gave God more glory than all the human acts combined from the beginning of the world until its end.
Adam fails God’s test
God, however, really wants to know if we truly love Him, so he asks of us a test: to give up acting with our human will. To Adam and Eve, it was not to eat of the fruit of one tree in the Garden of Paradise, and they failed miserably in this test. As a punishment, they not only lost the gift of His Divine Will, but all the other preternatural gifts. Adam lost his garment of light, his mind became obscured, and he became subject to various evil passions, and remained permanently wounded in his human nature. He could no longer perform divine acts, and he spent the rest of his life weeping over his sad fate.
God’s plan to restore gift of the Divine Will
God, however, had a plan to restore this gift of the Divine Will to man. First, He decreed that His Son, the new Adam, would take flesh, live, suffer and die to redeem man from this original sin. This was accomplished through the cooperation of the new Eve, the Virgin Mary. But man had to merit this grace, and so it took the prayers, good works, and longings for the coming of the Messiah, by the patriarchs, prophets, and all the holy men and women, four thousand years to bring this about.
Luisa as first in the Divine Will
Almost six thousand years after the creation of man, God decreed that the time for another new era of grace was dawning; that it was time to restore to man the gift of gifts, that of His Divine Will. Just as He chose to accomplish the Redemption through His Mother, the Virgin Mary, this time He chose another virgin, Luisa Piccarreta, to whom God gave this supreme gift of the Divine Will while she was only 24 years old, in 1889. Through Luisa, God wants to give this gift of the Divine Will to all who wish to receive it.
Just exactly how do we acquire this gift of the Divine Will? Well, Jesus spoke to Luisa on a regular basis for many years, dictating to her 36 volumes of writings on everything concerning His Divine Will, and the knowledge on how to live in this Divine Will thrice holy.
A firm decision in the Divine Will
In these volumes, Jesus explains that one must first desire the gift of the Divine Will with all our heart, seek to acquire the necessary knowledge by reading, studying, meditating on Luisa 36 volumes; and then make a firm decision to live only in the Divine Will, and to no longer give life to our human will.
Prevenient and Actual Acts
How does one do this? First, on arising, one must make the Prevenient Act, in which 1) one must enter into Jesus 2)transform oneself into Him 3) take all that we find in Him (Now you can find in Jesus the divine version of your life suspended in Him. Take it, make it one's own and offer it with Jesus to the Father. You can do this repeatedly, not only for one's own life, but also repeatedly with everyone’s life); and then make the general intention of placing all one's acts of the day in the Divine Will, through the hands of the Virgin Mary and Luisa. Then, throughout the day, one must try to place all one's Actual Acts into the sea of His Divine Will.
Rounds in the Divine Will
One of the most effective ways of living in the Divine Will is to correspond to God in love for all that He created for love of us—which constitutes the first obligation of the creature — and which is the most pleasing to God, is the making of the Rounds of the soul in the Divine Will. This is a prayer that consists in visiting all the works of Creation and Redemption in order to gather together and make one's own all the love and divine qualities placed in each work and return them to God as acts of love, adoration, praise, reparation, recognition, and thanksgiving, while at the same time imploring that His Kingdom come, His Divine Will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven.
This form of prayer is also called the Rounds of the Creation, Redemption, and Sanctification, and is said on a chaplet in which 24 meditations on this subject are said, accompanied by an Our Father, Hail Mary, and Glory Be, for each meditation. After each meditation, one also recites the aspiration, “Descend, O Supreme Will, and come to reign upon the Earth!” and “Pray for us, Queen of the Divine Will, so that the Divine Will reigns on Earth as it does in Heaven.”
Gift first given on loan
Each act that we place widens the circle of light in our soul, and moves us closer to acquiring the gift on a permanent basis. At first, God only gives the gift on loan, that is, in each act that we do He gives the gift only for that particular act, and takes it back until the next act that we place in the Divine Will. When we have performed a certain number of divine acts that He has pre-established, and He thinks that He can trust us with this gift, He then gives it to us permanently.
Divine Acts in the Divine Will
Then all our acts become divine acts. How is this possible? Well, Jesus told Luisa, that while He was on Earth, He lived each and every one of our lives, and redid our acts divinely, so that as we place our human act in His Divine Will, He bilocates His divine act into our human act, and so divinizes each act placed in His Divine Will. This divine act enters into the sphere of eternity, and will continue to give God perfect love, glory, adoration, praise and thanksgiving throughout eternity, and also will do good to all on Earth. Thus God’s goal in the creation of man is fulfilled: that man live in the place, order, and purpose, for which he was created, that he live in His Divine Will.
