It is not to be religious; it is to be Christian.

It is not to have a belief; it's to live a sincere faith.

It's not to have a special religion; it's to bear a large responsibility.

It is not to overcome one another, but to overcome yourself.

It is not to construct stone temples; it's to transform the heart into an eternal temple.

Being a Spiritist is not just accepting reincarnation; it is understanding it as a manifestation of the Divine Justice and as the natural path to perfection.

It is not just communicating with spirits, because everyone indistinctly communicates without even being aware; it's communicating with the good spirits so that you can improve and help others to improve.

Being a Spiritist isn't just consuming spiritual literature for knowledge and culture, it is transforming the books, the messages into live  lessons for your personal changes. To be without having lived, is like to say without having done.

Being a Spiritist is not burying yourself in a Spiritist center,  running away from the world so you are not tempted; it is living with all the outside situations, without altercating yourself, like a Spiritist, like a Christian. The conscious Spiritist is a Spiritist in the temple, at home, on the street, in traffic, in line, on the phone, alone, or in the middle of a crowd, in happiness, in pain, in health or in sickness.

To be a Spiritist is not to be different; it is to be exactly the same as everybody else, because everyone is the same before God; it is not to show that you are good, but to prove to yourself that you can make an effort to be good, because being good should be a natural state of the conscious man. Not being good is abnormal.

Being a Spiritist does not cure anyone; it contributes so that a person can work on their self cure. It is not making a sick person dependent on supposed powers that others might have. It is to teach others to trust God's powers and to trust their own powers, which depend on their sincere and persisting willpower.

Being a Spiritist is not to find comfort in receiving; it is to comfort yourself with donating, because with the natural laws of life, "it is much more adventurous to give then to receive".

It is not to wait for God to come down to where we are; it is for us to rise to his encounter, raising ourselves morally and trying to improve always.

This is what being a Spiritist means.

With Jesus' blessing, our Master.

From the book: Aprendendo a Lidar Com as Crises, by Wanderley Pereira

Translation by Shannon Myers, Aug/2014