Josefina Chacín Ducharne
A Life Surrendered to the Divine Will.
Josefina Chacín Ducharne, the slave of the Lord, was born of Venezuelan parents on the Island of Trinidad on March 22, 1920, the first of twelve children. As a baby she was brought to Venezuela by her parents and was reared on a farm in a remote region devoid of any school or church. At the age of seventeen, she moved with her family to Caracas. In neither place did she receive any formal schooling or religious formation. Nature and family life were her teacher and the voice of conscience her spiritual guide. At the age of twenty-seven, when her father died, she assumed the responsibility of providing for the needs of her mother and siblings. Due to her natural skillfulness and intelligence, she started a candy factory, becoming one of Venezuela’s first and most successful business women of the time.
At the age of thirty-four, she had an unexpected transforming experience, which she herself describes, at different moments, as follows: «On Sunday, the 22nd of August of the year 1954, the Lord manifested Himself to me as the Being Who “IS”; it was an explosion of LOVE, LIGHT, WISDOM and GOODNESS that took place in the inmost depths of my being, letting me know who He is and who I am: the ALL and the nothingness….» «I have no words to express what this “experience” consisted in…. At that moment, the only thing I understood was that THAT was All and I was nothing; I saw myself as if I had been a huge block of ice which in an instant, upon contact with THAT, became a drop of water, and I understood that everything I was attributing to myself was the work of THAT, and without THAT, I was nothing….» «It was what totally changed my life, and from then on I have desired nothing else but to fulfill His Divine Will….»
«This coming-to-consciousness of the All and the nothingness, which I consider the fruit of the effort of all Humanity, is “the Message” addressed to all the human beings who are disposed to recognize their “nothingness” and to make way for the ALL, the Being, in themselves….» «The repercussion that this experience had in me was a change of values, a change of life…. I no longer felt any attraction for parties or other social gatherings, until finally I had to leave behind everything in order to dedicate myself only to obeying the “force” that was manifesting within me as a “voice” which was very difficult for me to disobey because it manifested itself as a will superior to my own. It was not that I saw anything wrong in the values that I was leaving behind, but, in relation to what I had received, they were now transcended, because they no longer satisfied me as they did before….» «I began to withdraw from my contact with the external world in which I was then living and to identify myself more and more with the inner Force that I recognized as a Voice that was orienting me in all the acts of my life; it was something very intimate and personal, which at the time I did not feel to transmit to other souls….»
Subsequently she came to see the profound unity of her primal experience with the living reality and consciousness of Jesus Christ: «…I had a vivid experience, recognizing in him [Jesus] the same reality of my first experience; in this way I could recognize in man, in the human nature, THAT which IS, Whom today I call the Being, and Who is to manifest Himself in every human being.» As a child she had been baptized by her parents in the Catholic Church. But it was only after her first experience that she began to practice the Catholic faith with great fervor and total dedication: «When I moved to the city, religion had no meaning for me; it was only after the year 1954 that I began to practice the religion, and I did so in a deep way and with a true conviction for twenty years up to the year 1974, when the sacraments and religious rituals were transcended for the worship of God in Spirit and in truth. I believe that this is the goal of all religions.»
Following an internal impulse, which she felt to be the Will of God, she traveled many times to different countries in America, Europe, and the Middle East, residing for some time at important focal points of spirituality, such as Fatima, Avila, Assisi, San Giovanni Rotondo, etc., and, more frequently, in Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Many of her writings that arose during this period of time express her inner inspirations and intuitions in connection with the spirituality of each place and with the persons with whom she entered into contact. In the year 1963, during a retreat with a small group of people, she was surprised by an inner voice, which made her understand that she had the mission to transmit to others what she had been receiving: «…this Voice, which I now call the Lord, to my surprise as well as to the surprise of those in attendance, manifested Himself in the presence of all, letting them know that this was a MESSAGE for all humanity, and that I had to transmit it to the persons whom He Himself would put in my life…»
In the middle 70’s, several families, attracted by her life example, expressed the desire to live together with her in community in order to put into practice the ideal of life of the Message. They agreed to buy a farm for this purpose on the outskirts of Caracas, later on called “Farm Home The Pilgrims.” With time many other people and families joined them, not only from Venezuela but also from other countries: Mexico, United States, Italy, the Holy Land… As the community grew, other places in Venezuela, as well as in foreign countries, have been dedicated to the same purpose. The guiding principles of the community that spontaneously arose around Josefina Chacín Ducharne were, from the very beginning, the total exclusion of any juridical and religious institutionalization and the conscious avoidance of all kinds of proselytism.
Their ideal of life can be resumed in the following way: fidelity to one’s own conscience and respect for the freedom and conscience of others, as well as the effort to center one’s life on the Will of God, after the example of Jesus Christ, renouncing all forms of egoism. In the bosom of the community Josefina was the loving mother that fully dedicated herself to the needs of her spiritual children, young and old, from their deepest inner yearnings to their smallest daily concerns. She had the special gift of translating the most profound doctrinal teachings into practical and simple forms of life. The radiance of her outstanding personality and the wisdom of her teaching and spiritual guidance touched the lives of many people, even beyond the limits of the community, through personal contacts and an extensive correspondence.
Her last twenty-five years were marked by increasing sufferings, which she accepted with patience and courage as part of her self-offering to the Divine Will, considering them as a gift of God that helped her to embody the Message, which she felt she had to transmit more with her life than with her words. Notwithstanding her constant sufferings and the continuous care of the many people who sought her out, she displayed a great fruitful activity in writing many other books as further insights and elucidations about the Message. On January 4, 2007, at the age of eighty-six, she was called to her eternal rest in the Lord, leaving behind an example of total consistency between her words and her life, ever faithful to what she believed to be her mission of unconditional surrender to the Divine Will. She lived to the very end the consciousness of her “nothingness in relation to the All” that had emerged in her from her primal experience.
Francis Elmo