Trial do not come to put us down, but to be overcome

One of the most frequent queries in this journal receives is trial and atonement, though different in its causes, it also has an important educational value.

Trial, as the reader will know, are challenges, tests, opportunities for acquiring experience, difficulties that have nothing to do with misunderstandings or mistakes in the past. Wealth, beauty, abundant table, easy life, as well as poverty, ugliness, hard life, are trial.

Your existence is closely linked to the need that the spirits have to move towards the goal that God has marked out for us all, that is perfection.

Spiritualism teaches that spirits do not occupy the same category for good and that everyone improves themselves through the different degrees of spirit-hierarchy. 

This improvement is accomplished through reincarnation. The corporeal existence is therefore a proof that they have to undergo repeated until they have attained moral perfection.

In Part 2, chapter II of his book, Heaven Hell, Kardec entered an important statement about what the trial actually represents in our lives. The testimony was given by the Spirit of Paula, who was Countess in her last incarnation. Beautiful, rich, young woman, and illustrious lineage, Paula - who died at age 36 - was also a perfect model of intellectual and moral qualities.

Here is part of the message signed by that Spirit:

"During many previous existences, I had passed through working trials of labor and of poverty that I had voluntarily chosen in order to strengthen and purify my soul; I had had the happiness of emerging victorious from those trials, but I had still one more trial undergo – the most perilous of all – that of earthly fortune and happiness without any mixture of grief or disappointment. There was my danger. Before subjecting myself to this severest of all trials, I desired to be strong enough to avoid all danger of succumbing to its temptations.  God took account of my good intentions and granted me the needed help in carrying them out. A great many spirits, seduced by appearances, hasten to choose the dangerous test of earthly prosperity; too weak and inexperienced, to withstand its dangers, they are vanquished by temptations of the lot they have unwisely chosen. Workers! I have lived in your ranks; I, the noble lady, have earned my bread, like you, with the sweat of my brow. I have borne all kinds of privation and suffered from all the inclemency of the weather; and it is those sufferings that developed the virile strength of my soul; without them, I should probably have failed under my last trial, and that failure would have thrown me back a long way. Like me, you will all of you, in your turn, have to undergo the trial of worldly prosperity, but do not ne in haste to ask for it, lest you should attempt it too soon; and you who are rich, remember, at all times, that the true imperishable fortune is not upon the Earth, and understand in what way you can earn the blessing of the Most High." 

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The atonement has different causes, as the result of faults committed by the Spirit at various times, the actual existence of them and most in previous existences.

According to the spiritist’s teachings, atonement is accomplished during the corporeal existence through the difficulties and vicissitudes to which the spirit is submitted and in the spiritual life, the suffering inherent in the moral state of inferiority of the Spirit. So in that way that the bad rich, for atonement, is likely to have to beg and see yourself among all the hardships of poverty; the proud, with all the humiliations; who abuse authority and treats with contempt and hardness their subordinates will be forced to obey a superior harsher than he was.

In accordance with what we learned in the spiritual doctrine, we know that God never hurries atonement and only requires the Spirit, which by their inferiority or ill-will, is not able to understand what would be more useful, and even when this fact is really useful for purification and progress.

When a spirit faces and overcomes adversity, it can be due to a test or the result of atonement, he goes a little further into the path of evolution, while assimilating the lessons arising there from.

The school exams give us a good picture about the value of the trial that life offers us. If the student does well and achieves the desired note, it rises to the next level until after some time then he completed the process and receives the certificate or diploma certifying the completion of the course.

We understand, therefore, that God does not create the tests to knock us down, but to overcome and assimilated them, and it has nothing to do with punishment or penalty, because such words do not belong in the vocabulary of God.