Introduction
Georgette Faniel was a reserved woman who did not easily confide herself. Plus, she did not like to write. Father Gamache, her first spiritual director knew this. He ask her just the same to write down her experience with God on a daily basis in order to better understand her and guide her. From 1950 to 1999, she writes her spiritual notes totalizing about 2000 pages. She writes on separate sheets or small notebooks. The frequency of her writings varies. There are months and years during which she writes a lot, and others not at all. Her numerous hospitalizations and illnesses explain these absences.
We do not have the first texts of Mimi from 1950 to 1952. Father Gamache destroyed them, Why? We can only guess. Was he afraid for himself or his protégé that someone would find them and misinterpret them or use them for other reasons? Did Mimi mention certain aspects of the mystical life of her director in her first writings, when he wanted her spiritual life to remain hidden? One thing is sure, in 1953, the writings of Mimi will be preserved. They begin on the 20th of February 1953 with these words:
“Today, my Beloved came to me with so much love. I felt once more how great and infinite is His mercy. With the permission of my director, I made a general review, that is, an inventory of my life, of my poor little life. Following the example of Jesus, my director received me so paternally, with so much understanding, that it is with confidence that I opened a little the secret door of my soul. This made me very happy!”
The spiritual notes of Mimi that go from 1953 to 1956, are the most abundant ones. Jesus is forming his little spouse by consoling her, encouraging her, correcting her and purifying her. For the reader, it is an exercise in humility, for we feel quite distant from this intimacy of Mimi with Jesus. From 1960 to 1962, she stops writing her spiritual notes. She resumes in 1963 and 1964 and these will be prosperous years. There are some very beautiful pages on the love of God and the sufferings of Jesus, the nostalgia of heaven and pure faith, the role of the Holy Spirit in the soul and in the Church. The year 1999 will mark the end of her spiritual notes. During wonderful pages, she meditates on the experience of the presence of the Beloved within her and in the world.
In reading Mimi’s notes, we discover someone in love who simply wants to please Jesus, her Beloved. She doesn’t speak to him, she chats with him. Her conversation often becomes a prayer during which her heart can freely express itself. Jesus asks her to offer up what she is experiencing, to open her heart to her director without hiding anything, to trust, to accept not to understand everything, to continue to write even if it is distasteful to her.
We notice that in time a progression of the gift of her life to God and to humanity, the depth of her mystical union with Christ her Spouse, the purity of her constant prayer, the importance of the Father, the maternal presence of Mary. Her biographical points of reference here and there are as many markers to better decifer her spiritual journey. We follow her in her configuration to Jesus crucified. She shares the words of the Father, of Jesus, of Mary that she hears in the secret regions of her heart. She asks her Beloved for explanations, at times with humor. She expresses her fears and her doubts, her love and her repentance, her struggles with the devil. She discovers progressively that suffering united to that of Jesus is not a punishment but comprises a sense of purification and redemption.
(Excerpt from Jacques Gauthier, Georgette Faniel, Le don total, Novalis, 2018, 256 pages).
