The Prevenient Act and the Actual Act

 I was asked if the morning invocations that we pray are the prevenient act as described in Vol 14.  Just to make sure everyone knows what I'm referring to, these are the Invocations to the Divine Will which we are encouraged to pray every morning in order to call the Divine Will to act and live in us:

 We are nothing, God is Everything; we love You, Father; Oh Divine Will, continue:

• thinking in our minds;
• flowing in our blood;
• seeing in our eyes;
• hearing in our ears;
• talking in our voices;
• breathing in our breathing;
• beating in our hearts;
• moving in our movements;
• suffering in our suffering, and since our souls are united to You, let us be your living crucifixes offered in sacrifice for Father's glory;
• praying in us, and then by offering this prayer to yourself as ours it will be as if everyone had prayed and will give Father the glory that we should all give Him.

Now the reading that she was referring to is this:

The prevenient act and the actual act. 

 I was thinking to myself:  “If one act done in His Will is so great, how many of them, alas, do I let escape!’  And my sweet Jesus, moving in my interior, told me:  “My daughter, there is the prevenient act and the actual act.  The prevenient act is when the soul, at the first rising of the day, fixes her will in Mine, and decides and confirms that she wants to live and operate only in my Volition.  She anticipates all of her acts and makes them all flow in my Will.  With the prevenient will, my Sun rises, my Life remains duplicated in all of her acts, as though in one single act; and this makes up for the actual act.  However, the prevenient act can be shaded - obscured by the human ways, by one’s own will, by self-esteem, by negligence and other things, which are like clouds before the sun, that render its light less vivid on the face of the earth.

On the other hand, the actual act is not subject to clouds; on the contrary, it has the virtue of dispelling the clouds, if there are any, and it makes many more suns rise, in which my Life is duplicated, with such vividness of light and heat as to form as many new suns, one more beautiful than the other.  However, both of them are necessary:  the prevenient act gives the hand, disposes and forms the plane for the actual act; the actual act preserves and expands the plane of the prevenient.”

Vol 14, May 27, 1922

So the dictionary definition of prevenient is:

prevenient

[ pri-veen-yuh nt ]

adjective

coming before; antecedent.

anticipatory.

So basically, yes.  The invocations to the Divine Will, which the Community recommends that we do in the morning, act as a prevenient act.  That is stating that it is our intention, to do all of our acts conscious and unconscious in the unity of the Divine Will.  This sets the stage for all the actual acts to follow.  It does not replace the constancy of repeating throughout the day our desire to live in the Divine Will in each different act that we do, but both lend the hand to the other.  In other words, actions speak louder than words...but both are needed.  Words- meaning the initial intention in the morning and Actions- meaning the calling of the Divine Will into each subsequent act throughout the day in the present moment in which they are occurring.

In addition to this, this prevenient act that we do is a repetition of Jesus' blessing over all of us to call back into us his image and likeness as God first established in Creation.  So as we're doing the Invocations we can do a double round by recalling and uniting ourselves and all creatures with the first act of the Creation of Man.  And this is repeated and continued throughout the day and can be united in the Divine Will in every sign of the cross, blessing, the sacraments, themselves, and even our every "sigh" echos the "sigh" of God's Heart to see his creature restored.

 “My daughter, I bless you from the Heart in your soul and body - may my blessing be the confirmation of Our likeness in you. My blessing confirms in you what the Divinity did in the creation of man – that is, Our likeness. You must know that during the course of my mortal life, in everything I did, I always blessed. It was the first act of Creation that I called back over the creatures, and in order to confirm it, in blessing I invoked the Father, the Word and the Holy Spirit. The very Sacraments are animated by these blessings and invocations. So, while calling the likeness to the Creator within souls, my blessing calls also the life of my Divine Will, that It may return as in the beginning of Creation to reign in souls, because my Will alone has the virtue of painting in them, vividly, the likeness of the One who created them, of making it known and of preserving it with its divine live colors.

See then, what blessing means: confirmation of Our creative work, because the work We do once is so filled with wisdom, with sublimity and with beauty, that We love to repeat it always. And if Our blessing is nothing other than the sigh of Our Heart to see Our image restored in the creatures, as well as the repetition of Our confirmation of what We want to do, the sign of the Cross that the Church teaches to the faithful is nothing other than impetrating Our likeness on the part of creatures; and so, echoing Our blessing, they repeat: ‘In the name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.’ Therefore, without knowing it, the Church and all the faithful harmonize with the eternal Creator, and all want the same thing: God, by blessing and pronouncing the words, ‘Father, Son and Holy Spirit’, wants to give His likeness; the creatures impetrate it by making the sign of the Cross, pronouncing the same words.” 

Vol 24, July 29, 1928