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4. Intensely drawn to God, Jeanne pleads, “Speak to me.” She is completely focused on her
one desire: to know and do the will of God. . She wants nothing else, so if it is God’s will that
she leave the Cistercian monastery she will embrace it in total peace.
5. “If it is because of my shortcomings… and not your will…,” then she is prepared to make
penance. But, what is the will of God?
6. The fnal struggle. As in the early years of her life, Jeanne remembers “the confusion
brought on by heresy,” “the vanities of the world…,” represented by an unsettling stormy
sky. These have been obstacles in her quest for a profound encounter with God; and in the
end, the long awaited peace fnally found in the Monastery is closed off to her. But there
is yet another call. This is suggested by a small ray of light in the Monastery bell tower
shown in the early hours of the morning, announcing the coming dawn, evoking a new call.
At the other end in front of her, a tiny road faintly appears over the city that awaits her and
is yet enveloped in the night. The road gradually and mysteriously opens up to a peaceful
luminous sky. It lies above all the struggles, but she does not see it… “Where shall I look
for you?”
7. The hour of serenity and peace is here; she no longer struggles; she no longer questions.
“As long as God is in her heart,” she cares not the place where God will lead her. Finding
herself, once again, completely in God’s hands, she is ready to hear God’s bidding.
The Monastery fades, the city of Bordeaux lights up.
8. Thedwellingof theHoly Spirit. In this textweare told four times that Jeanne “remembers.”
The frst three times she remembers her struggles: what she has done (2.3), what she has
not known, what she has failed to do (6) to carry out the will of God. On this occasion she
no longer remember her personal efforts in giving herself to God, but rather what God
has done in giving Himself to her when in her youth God flled her yearning heart with a
burning desire to belong to Him, revealing this thought:
“My daughter, take care not to allow this sacred fame, which I have lit in your heart, to be
extinguished and which now guides you with great fervor in my service.”
In the center of this fame God reveals to her “that far from abandoning her, God has great
plans for His Greater Honor and Glory and for the salvation of many.”
9. With ever growing clarity God will continue to enlighten her on the mission entrusted
her. As was the case with Saint Teresa of Avila, whom she dearly loved and of whom she
often thought, in this initial vision the Lord shows her a great number of souls, apathetic
and without a guide, in grave danger of condemnation; at this instant she “understands
that it is she who must extend her hand to them.” But how? And surely, she is not to do it
alone.
10. The response comes in the text that follows. Jeanne listens; her spirit and her heart
are solely and dynamically open to the lights revealed on the emerging path.
God instructs her, and she lets herself be instructed: seeking advice and assistance, an
Order dedicated to the education of young people, under the protection and in imitation of