Letter 85 of Saint-Cyran (part one)

     

                                 DRYNESS IN PRAYERS

    Since it’s the first day of a new year, you had good reason to use a time so favorable to write to me. For there is a particular blessing on this day that is the feast of the name of Jesus (and it’s also the feast of the holy Circumcision of the lord which I’ll write about in another letter). On this day you ought to remember that there is an exceptional attribute to the name of Jesus which is that the simple pronunciation of his name causes a veritable movement of faith that brings about, according to Saint Paul, the same salvation of our souls that his passion and suffering on the cross brought about for all. Jesus says that his body does not put life in our souls except by means of his spirit. We have only to put our soul in possession of God’s grace which is the same thing as his spirit, and the least of things can be of as much service to us as the greatest. The name of Jesus which is nothing but two syllables that pass by quickly can produce his life in us like his holy body when we consume it in the sacrament of holy communion.

    Don’t give way in your spirit to a lot of questions about this. Be simple in spirit as you read what I say and admire the abundance of the grace of God in souls which are his by the participation of his spirit.

    I say that now in order to prepare you for the answer I will give to what you wrote me about dryness in your prayers. For if one word, Jesus, that the tongue forms has so great an effect on a soul that it increases divine life and grace and the sense of being saved, what will a prayer even more interior bring about formed in the bottom of the soul?

   If the dryness was consent to bad thoughts or to a design to do evil it would in reality prevent the effect and the efficacy of the prayer because it would chase from the soul the spirit of God. But while his spirit is there it is not in the power of dryness and all interior sufferings to cause you any hurt or to turn away the influence of God in the soul in the middle of the prayer. On the contrary, because there is nothing that God considers so greatly as sufferings, and all the more those of the spirit than those of the body, when the soul embraces them with humility and accepts them while renouncing every feeling of pleasure, prayers are so much better to the degree that they are dryer and more painful. For then they approach more closely those of Jesus Christ who never prayed except with an interior sorrow like that he had on the day of his passion.  Work only to do nothing voluntarily which may grieve the spirit of God in you. 

    Don’t do anything except with the precise obedience as did the Son of God in the least thing he did during the thirty years that he obeyed his father. His father had ruled him precisely right up to the least blink of an eye before he was born and counted his actions as exactly as he counted the hairs on his head. You must hope that God’s spirit will remain as unchangeable in you as it remained in him. If you possess the spirit of God in that way, it follows that your prayers made with dryness, even if this dryness might last throughout your prayers, are as agreeable to God and as useful to your soul as if they were made otherwise. It even follows  that the smallest interior remarks that you speak to God coming from your heart united to him, and because of his desire, although you do not feel it at all, that you implore him sincerely, faithfully, humbly, carefully are as effective as all the movements that you could have had in your prayers full of spiritual taste and pleasure. 

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill

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Letter 84 of Saint-Cyran

     You did well to not think extensively about my letter. All the thoughts that you would have been able to have would have been beyond mine. For I thought only to make you give me back a legitimate excuse for the silence I maintained towards you. My silence seemed all the more reasonable because you wrote me two letters before which seemed to me more than enough writing to soothe all the remorse you had about things in your past. But it turned out that your two letters were not enough to get the result that I was after and that is why I was silent. When in these matters I can’t make those that I instruct keep silent, my habit is to be silent myself first for their benefit. You see, if you are always bringing up things from the past it means you want to make it as though the things that have happened had not happened. Even God would not do that. The only way to destroy them in our soul and before God and to make them live in oblivion as if they had never been is to live as Christians practicing Christian virtues. It is only by virtue of the most excellent penitences that we destroy the remains of sin and restore the soul to innocence. Without them I would be troubled and speak about my sins as do you. But I protect myself well from thinking of my sins once I have confessed them.  I don’t want them to have even a small part of my spirit in God’s presence. I know that he does not like that we remember our sins once we have confessed them according to his commands and have tried by means of virtue and penitence to destroy them. All  your life in your religious community is a penance. It is what should give you joy by not letting a moment pass that you do not use for the destruction of sin, although I know of course that you do not do it as perfectly as is necessary. What Christians do only during Lent in the world you do always in your religious community. That is why you wear a veil and love the vows you have made. Thank God for his grace and pray that he give me the grace to love the truth right up to my death.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill

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Letter 83 of Saint-Cyran

     The same day that you wrote me I was thinking of you, and I can truthfully say that you were in my thoughts often at other times. For I know well what God has given me and I take care not to give it up ever, since the Son of God said that he takes care of those whom his father gave him and that he will not lose any of them ever. You have been well for a long time. You have only to walk and advance always along the path where God has put you, which is that of penitence and religion, without remembering even once the past and without turning your head back. In Saint Luke, the Son of God forbids looking back to those in particular who have put their hand on the plow to work the land. You would never have believed that  the only reason for the silence that I maintained towards you was that you may judge by it that the confessions of sins which are made at an inappropriate time and well after the time when they were committed probably don’t please God since they diverge so far from the prompt actions of those who try to live punctually by his rules. We must close our eyes to sins by one single confession and open them for the rest of our lives to penance and to the practice of virtues. By means of these exercises, we must not remember any longer what we were before. Apart from that, we should acknowledge that God led you to remember me and to write me at the time of the death of the little child, my niece. Your letter was very agreeable and consoled me. For although I praised God for such an extraordinary grace, the experience of sadness at her death doesn’t merit being called sad except at the very moment when she passed from this world to the other, where she is full of life and of admiration for having escaped such great dangers. 

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill

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religious thinker  reveal the authentic path to God and freedom.

Letter 82 of Saint-Cyran

 It is true that the time of Lent is a time of grace and that those who know how to live by faith can not find any time more appropriate in order to please God. For the whole church joins together over all the earth and separates itself from all the objects of the senses and concupiscence in order to purge itself by a general penitence from all the evils she committed all along the year. If she did not make up one single body in whose composition enter the least and the most imperfect of the faithful, both the guilty and the innocent, we would have to say that the greatest benefit would be only for those who would have fasted more: but just as we see in the bodies of sick men that the smallest and most feeble parts feel first the goodness of cures, so likewise the most feeble and the most listless members of the church often find that towards the approach of Easter they are more fortified and stronger participants in the effects of Lent. Only we must  enter the period with a good will and take part in it with as much strength as we are able for after that God makes the allotment of the fruit that derives from it as it pleases him without our being permitted to take the trouble to examine or think whether our portion is small or great. For in this way God does not count the penitence of each one separately compared with those of his brothers but receives it in common. That should end all the complaints of the sick and disabled who need only hold themselves fast to the body of the church, and do spiritually everything that they can not do otherwise, in order to participate in all her works and her goodness. This is so true that those in this holy time who best use the strengths of their strong bodies and are capable of supporting the pains of fasting can only benefit from them in proportion to the spirit and the good will they had while bringing them about. For God does not see anything of the creatures who are outside of himself except in himself. He also doesn’t see and consider anything of our exterior good works except according to the good state at the bottom of our heart. That state is sometimes like trees in winter full of heat within without being able to produce anything on the outside. God loves more this loss of fruit which stems only from exterior obstacles considering that men who value only what moves their senses love only the flowers and the fruits that sensuality produces.

    There is the state in which you ought to be during Lent in order to manage it in a more excellent way than those who manage it who fast better than you. This is the advantage Christians have over Jews, to be able to fast and to please God and to be able to please God without fasting by nothing other than their union with the church, a union  not only as members with their bodies but as something much more interior like the union children once conceived have with their mothers who do not know how to take anything good from the outside except the vital fluid that comes from it to them and perhaps better to them than to their mother herself although she may have worked to get what may nourish her, as the doctors say, and as the thinness she bears on her face while pregnant makes  obvious to us. This union of faithful souls with the penitent church is all the more marvelous as it is inseparable from the other state created by good will in the soul. This will would have been enough for the Jews to be pleasing to God, without going through the rigors of penitence, if the time to gain the will had arrived when it was necessarily joined with the time of the birth in the world of the man-God. We live in this time because of God’ mercy which we should value more than we do for in Christ’s coming lies all our advantage and is the greatest consolation that almighty God could give us. Accordingly, if we desire other consolations, we become by this wish more ungrateful than the first angel in heaven and the first man in paradise. Don’t trouble yourself then about anything else. It’s enough that you live in silence and peace in the church of Jesus Christ and in the corner that you chose to adore him in religious solitude. In that consists your great penitence which lasts the whole year and benefits you because of your first choice whether you work or not. For whereas outside of the church, the greatest actions of virtue and austerity are worth nothing, on the contrary in the church the slightest desires are worth as much as the greatest works and penitences. All the virtues count only by the degree of the good will that grace forms so that the invocation alone of the name of Jesus and the words, “my father, my father”, repeated with the faith of children, can save us, as the apostle says, and what is more admirable the sighs of the soul can be enough for us. And I dare to say with great truth directed by the word of God that the peace of the soul alone and the silence of the spirit can make us blessedly happy. For when the soul enters such a state  as the result of good grace, she must not leave without causing herself harm and violating her happiness  if God himself does not withdraw her from it by some particular command, like the one he gave to the wife resting in her cell in the Song of Songs who gets angry obeying God. You have only to cut off all the anxieties that come from the memory of your sins in order to enjoy the happy life of a christian and a religious woman. For if  anyone thinks about things in the past, the greatest saints so thinking would also be unhappy. All of that sin from the past is drowned in the blood of Jesus Christ that you do not value enough when you think again of so many things in the past. What he asks of you to make your powerlessness powerful and your partly voluntary partly necessary hardships  be of great worth is that it will please you to offer them to him as the effects of your sickness at the beginning of Lent without doing anything else except closing your eyes. For what he asks from you now is the peaceful tolerance of your sickness and the awareness of your faults that slip themselves into your mind because of your weakness and the tricks of your enemy. The means to overcome them is that you confess them and be sweetly sad to not be able to bring about total justice just as Jesus Christ was not able. If God sends you death, the passage from this world to the other, which is the greatest penitence of the soul, will carry away every blemish and will make you appear before God as if you had never sinned. Because you received death with the gracefulness of charity, which asks from us that we do  everything God has asked of us, and as the last effect of your sickness, which is in fact a favor since  lying in a merciful state it makes you pay what you owe to divine justice by delivering you in advance of the condition where we in good health pay a stiff spiritual price to satisfy it. After receiving this letter you must do without holy communion throughout Lent except for Sundays. For if you live in peace bearing your sickness in silence and with patience in the church and in your religious community,  you have found what is necessary to be nourished with the grace of God during this voluntary fasting and this abstinence from the body of Jesus Christ. What you asked me to clarify at the beginning of your letter is no more than a minor misgiving. I want you to do without everything except the peace and the joy that you ought to have by the grace of God that destined you to be a religious woman after having made you a christian. That will certainly make you happy if you believe me.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill

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In this book, two Christian religious thinkers and one Jewish

religious thinker  reveal the authentic path to God and

freedom.

Letter 81 of Saint-Cyran

I received your letter  to P.R. yesterday. I intended to answer it at the first moment I had. Everything has been used up in favorable matters up to this minute as I write to you between eleven and twelve. I emphasize this for you in order to let you know that I wanted to please you because you are sick, afflicted and conscientious, although so as not to conceal anything from you, It would have been not at all necessary to respond to your difficulty if you had been willing to believe me and to remember what I have often told you. For the good will that is in the bottom of your soul should consume this fault which is not great in you because it is entangled with ignorance and simplicity. Remember that according to the gospel our parents are our enemies and their progress in the goods of the world is usually their ruin. There are two rules that should guide you in the future in relations with them. You have done the main thing having recognized the fault, having humiliated yourself, having carried it before God and having done penitence for it by the pain you had writing a letter being sick in order to expose the fault to a director. In my opinion the fire from heaven has already consumed it and it will be enough to say  in two words to the first confessor: I accuse myself of...etc. and that in the interest of my mother whom I renounced by my religious vow. But if it happens that no confessor is available today or tomorrow, don’t look for one and don’t be afraid to take holy communion. Finally, I do admire how it’s possible that being very sane in your soul, you look for exterior support to sustain it. In Religion, we must use everything exterior like the clubs of sane and cheery men who carry them not out of weakness but because of excessive power to use them however they please. I am not going to take it upon myself to tell you anything more because from now on you are able, if you wish to remember everything that I have told you, to relieve yourself in your pain. Only get rid of any voluntary misgivings or anxieties and if any arrive that you can’t keep away, support them. There is nothing that purifies the soul more than the peaceful suffering of interior pains. The way to not have any more is to despise them when you have them and to not believe that their cure consists in telling them to a confessor. The soul may be made ready by cures. In the final analysis pains should be the servants of the soul. You have a particular cure in your sickness which exempts you from using any others. Happily everything gets lost in this world in a humble patience as in the other in charity. Anyone being sick who looks to do the good works he did being sane acts like someone who would be plunged in the glory and joy of heaven and would look to experience the same goods and suffer the same evils as those experience and suffer  who are still on earth. I want you to be at peace if you can not be joyful. You would have peace if your temperament did not oppose it much more than the sicknesses of your soul and of your body. I think less highly of your complaints and your apprehensions because I know where they originate and that we must relate them more to the disposition of the body than to that of the soul which is good and only needs patience and grace in order to increase in grace. In a period of need and famine, the soul could do without all exterior bread while it possesses an interior with a love that it carries to God.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill

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Letter 80 of Saint-Cyran

I have always carried you in my heart since the Reverend Mother and Monsieur Singlin gave me knowledge of you. I have felt some of your pain and I would have wished to do everything possible for your relief. If prayers are the greatest testimony to our affection and our charity, God knows that I take care often to offer them to him for all your religious community and for you more than anyone else in particular.

   Do not be wearied at all to be persecuted by an enemy who persecuted the Son of God and Saint Paul to the point of making him desire to be delivered from him by continual prayers. We lose ourselves often in the harbour and save ourselves sometimes in storms and perils. For God says by the voice of his Prophet that he hides himself in a storm in order to watch over us and and to assist us from this secret place.

   If you were anywhere else than in your saintly house I would fear for you. But those who are in such places and lead such a life are surrounded by mountains which are angels and these mountains are surrounded by a higher mountain, Jesus Christ, who supports them. While you are in such a place, don’t fear anything if you are subjected there to God under those who govern you in his name.

   I know very well why your enemy persecutes you. It consoles me and assures me that God is for you and against him. I say it to you with some confidence in the mercy of God. Do not fail to go to mass both before and after whatever happens to you. In fact do the opposite, go there again with the firm purpose to be more attached to it than you were before. You would give way to temptation if you were not to go there and you would yield to the devil who tempts you only to prevent you from going there.

  Three days ago someone who was tempted felt his temptation diminishing going to holy communion and that the enemy no longer was causing him impure tendencies. Since I knew his temperament, I told him that he should not for that particular reason go to communion more often than was his habit. For the devil himself wanted to play in this way with holy communion and withdraw when he would have received it in order to make him go to communion once more when it would please him. We must keep to rules more certain than those  when going to Mass and communion. Without taking communion he was delivered from this temptation just as I hope that without failing to go to Mass every day, God will give you true peace which does not always consist of that self-evident tranquility we demand.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill

The United States of the World, The Theater of the Impossible, The End of All Beginnings,Baseball Metaphysics, books and e-books by Daniel McNeill, are for sale at: amazon.com/author/graceisall

Dostoevsky held on stubbornly to only what a free examination of what was human in himself revealed. Lev Shestov wrote, “To enter the world of the human soul in order to subordinate it to the laws that exist for the outside world means to voluntarily renounce in advance the right to see everything there and accept everything". In "The Brothers Karamazov" , Dostoevsky revealed that God himself demands that man be free. Nicholas Berdyaev wrote, “In true humanity not only is the nature of man revealed but God Himself is revealed also." Three great thinkers reveal the authentic path to freedom.

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Letter 79 of Saint-Cyran

It is true that I had a great deal to do with the seclusion of Jeanne de Chantal who is now with God. In her last trip from Paris, God made a connection between her and me which was remarkable given my circumstances, which I will not describe here since they are so complicated. But it is that which makes the wound more acute. You will be able to learn otherwise how everything went and it is enough to tell you that I found in her everything I would ask in a true religious woman and principally with respect to temporal goodness, to the love we owe to the poor, to the work we do with our hands every day, to the minimal dealings we should have with men, and to the simplicity  of the ornaments for the Altar and the Church.

   I am very certain that there is nothing about which I was not in agreement with her from the most important up to the least in everything that can be useful in order to establish well a Religious Community in the Spirit of the Gospel, against which almost everyone is opposed.

   I have to say for your consolation only that it is certain that she is among those souls for whom we can pray with assurance that the prayer will be to their profit or among those for whom it is not necessary to pray, because death is their final purgatory and purifies in them all the blemishes and the unnoticeable stains of the soul that the most just are guilty of while they live in the world. Here everything we see, what we taste, what we feel has an infection which remains in it from the first sin of Adam and Eve which can infect the soul if God does not keep us from it by his grace.

   I hope I will be in the company of those that she will look at in heaven in the mirror which represents all things by its infinite light. We  must be silent to bear witness that we no longer treat her as we treated her in this world and that we bring to her the same reverence that we owe to heavenly things, things that no one on earth speaks about except stammering. You have only to remember her to keep yourself always in a renewed energy for the service of God.

   If those who govern in your houses are not like her in all things, I am not astonished by it at all because there is still less continuity and succession in the sequence of grace than there is in nature. We rarely see that the good qualities of mothers pass with the same perfection to their children.

   Nothing makes us see better that the holiness of grace is a completely free gift that depends wholly on the will of God. We should always keep those who possess it humble and make them admire continually that God has enriched them with it rather than others, without pretending that this grace should be communicated to others who will come from them by a natural or spiritual generation. We must leave the disposition of it wholly to God who interrupts very often the course of his graces in this world in order to make them better known and admired, as much by those who have received them as by others who can have knowledge of them without possessing them. This is very far from the perception of those who believe that the acquisition and the increase of God’s graces depend mostly on our spiritual activities and who hold to the principle that they must maintain their self-esteem and their reputation at any price whatever.

Daniel McNeill

The United States of the World, The Theater of the Impossible, The End of All Beginnings, Baseball Metaphysics, books and e-books by Daniel McNeill, are for sale at: amazon.com/author/graceisall
Baseball Metaphysics finds indirect expressions of Christianity in baseball games

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