Sympathetic union of souls.

– You have told me several times that we would be reunited never to be separated again. How can this come about? Do not the reincarnations, even those that follow upon those of Earth, always separate us for a longer or shorter time?

Answer. – I told you so: God permits those who love one another sincerely and have known how to suffer with resignation in order to expiate their faults, to reunite, first in the world of Spirits, where they progress together, in order to obtain incarnations in the higher worlds. They may, then, if they ask for it with fervor, leave the spirit worlds at the same time, reincarnate in the same places and, through a chain of foreseen circumstances, reunite by the ties that most suit their hearts.

Some will have asked to be the father or mother of a spirit who was sympathetic to them and will feel happy to guide him along the good path, surrounding him with the tender cares of family and friendship. Others will have asked the grace of being united by matrimony and of seeing many years of happiness and love flow by. I refer to marriage understood in the sense of the intimate union of two beings who no longer wish to be separated. However, such as it is understood on Earth, marriage is not known in the higher worlds. In those places of happiness, of liberty and of joy, the ties are of flowers and of love; and do not believe that, for this reason, they are any less durable. The heart alone speaks and guides in those unions so sweet. Free and happy unions, marriage of souls before God, behold the law of love of the higher worlds! And the privileged beings of those blessed regions, feeling themselves more strongly bound by such sentiments than are the men of Earth, who often scorn the most sacred commitments, do not offer the deplorable spectacle of unions ceaselessly disturbed by the influence of vices, of inferior passions, of inconstancy, of envy, of injustice, of aversion, of all those horrible inclinations that lead to evil, to perjury and to the violation of the most solemn oaths. Well then! those marriages blessed by God, those unions so affectionate are the reward of those who, having loved one another profoundly in suffering, ask the Lord, just and good, to continue to love one another in higher worlds, without, however, fearing a near and painful separation. What is there in this that is not easy to understand and to admit? Could not God, who loves all His children, have created, for those who had made themselves worthy of it, a happiness as perfect as the trials had been cruel? What could He grant more in conformity with the sincere desire of every loving heart? Of all the rewards promised to men, is there anything resembling this thought, this hope, I might say, this certainty: to be united to the beloved beings for eternity?

Believe me, dear daughter, our secret aspirations, that mysterious but irresistible need to love, to love long, to love always, were not placed by God in our hearts except because the promise of the future allowed us those sweet hopes. God will not make us experience the pains of disappointment. Our hearts want happiness and palpitate only for pure affections. The reward could only be the perfect realization of our dreams of love. Just as, poor suffering Spirits destined for trial, it was necessary for us to ask and, at times, even to choose the cruelest expiations, so too we choose, as happy and regenerated Spirits, in the new life destined to purify us still more, the sum of felicities granted to the advanced spirit. You have here, beloved daughter, a summary exposition of the future felicities. We will often have occasion to return to this pleasant subject. You must understand how much the prospect of that future makes me happy and how sweet it is for me to confide my hopes to you!

– Do we recognize one another in those new and happy existences?

Answer. – If we did not recognize one another, would the happiness be complete? Doubtless it would be happiness, for in those privileged worlds all beings are destined to be happy. But would this be the perfection of happiness for those who, abruptly separated in the fairest period of life, ask God to be united in His bosom? Would it be the realization of our dreams and of our hopes? No; you think as I do. If a veil were cast over the past, there would not be the supreme happiness, the ineffable joy of seeing one another again after the sorrows of absence and of separation; there would not be, or at least we would be ignorant of, that antiquity of affection that draws the ties still tighter. Just as on your Earth two childhood friends like to meet one another in the world, in society, and seek one another much more than if their relations dated only from a few days back, so too the Spirits who have merited the inestimable favor of being united in the higher worlds are doubly happy and grateful to God for that new encounter, which corresponds to their dearest aspirations. The worlds placed above the Earth on the scale of perfection are showered with all the favors that can contribute to the perfect happiness of the beings who inhabit them; the past is not hidden from them, because the remembrance of their former sufferings, of their errors, redeemed at the cost of many ills, and the remembrance, still more vivid, of their sincere affections, makes them find this new life a thousand times sweeter and protects them against faults to which, perhaps, they might be dragged by some remnants of weakness. For men those worlds are the terrestrial paradise, destined to lead them to the divine paradise.

Observation – We would be utterly mistaken as to the meaning of this communication if we saw in it a criticism of the laws that govern marriage and a sanction of ephemeral, extra-official unions. As regards laws, the only immutable ones are the divine laws, whereas human laws, having to be appropriate to customs, to usages, to climates and to the degree of civilization, are essentially mutable; it would be deplorable were it not so, and were the peoples of the nineteenth century bound to the same rules that governed our fathers. Thus, if the laws have changed from them to us, since we have not arrived at perfection, they must change from us to our descendants. At the moment it is made, every law has its reason for being and its utility; but it may happen that, being good today, it is no longer so tomorrow. In the state of our customs, of our social requirements, marriage needs to be regulated by law, and the proof that this law is not absolute is that it is not the same for all civilized countries. It is, therefore, permissible to think that in the higher worlds, where there are not the same material interests to safeguard, where evil does not exist, that is, where the evil Spirits are excluded from incarnation, where, consequently, the unions result from sympathy and not from calculation, the conditions must be different. But that which is good for them might be very bad for us. Besides, it must be taken into account that the Spirits dematerialize as they rise and purify themselves. Only in the inferior ranks is incarnation material. For the superior Spirits there is no longer material incarnation and, consequently, there is no procreation, for this takes place through the body and not through the Spirit. A pure affection is, then, the sole object of the union and, for this reason, contrary to what occurs on Earth, it does not require official sanction.