Letter 69 of Saint-Cyran

   I had no need of the letter that you were kind enough to write me to be reassured of the affection you have for me. Thus I received it as an effect of your charity and not as a compliment. The subject behind why Cardinal Richelieu makes war against me does not just console me but gives  me great confidence. Anyone can hope to be rescued by the grace of God who is attacked only because of how he relates to it. For since it is grace, that is thankfulness, it is impossible that it not return what someone gives it, thanklessness being found only among grace’s enemies, who are called thankless by the Holy Fathers. I know very well that we can give nothing to grace except what we have received from it and that the very services that we pay to it  are new obligations to it that we have because of the virtue that grace makes possible. But that does not in any way prevent that in addition grace remains an obligation for us being an inconceivable marvel of God’s goodness. I pray to him not to allow that this situation slip away from me without picking the fruit that it owes me. I can not doubt that God sent me to prison for a reason, in order to purify me like those plants in the Gospel that God cleans by cutting them to make then more fruitful. I will consider myself only too happy if I can take advantage of my circumstances and if this small test can help purify me of the faults that I committed not by working towards bad but towards good things because of unworthy human inclinations while seeking  a lofty holiness. For as God is not pleased that we take communion if we do not do it in a holy state and with the right perspective, as he demands, so he is not pleased if we act for him if our actions and our works are not as holy in their principle as in their object including all the circumstances deriving from their principle.

   God gave me this thought right at the beginning of this disgrace and I received it as a great grace begging him to imprint it so clearly in my soul that I will never forget it because that is perhaps the only plan he had in this encounter. I know that you will not fail to help me make good usage of it, without which I will be unhappy no matter what resolution and human strength I can bring to bear. I would fear that more than being knocked down and overthrown completely because at least that would not be accompanied by pride which is the thing in the world which God dislikes the most and which is the source of all kinds of vices in individuals and generally in the entire nature of man. I hope that God will deliver me from this misery as I beg him to do it in my heart  and will give me a share of the force of his son who was so strong in his humility and in the lowering of his heart by which he overcame all the persecutions of his enemies and all the forces of hell. Please pray always for me, my mother, and be sure that I will never forget what I owe to your charity and that of those persons about whom you spoke in your letter. I am entirely theirs as I am yours and I desire that they be entirely with God with me, as I desire to be with him myself.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill

The United States of the World, The End of All Beginnings, The Theater of the Impossible, books by Daniel McNeill, are for sale at:

amazon.com/author/graceisall

Letter 68 of Saint-Cyran

   God hides himself a great deal in himself and in souls. Often he is not where he seems to be and he is where he does not appear to be. That is an idea, if I am not mistaken, from the book of Job.

   I find that the desire of the girl is considerable and especially five or six months after she was sent away.  But we must take note of where she gained knowledge of your religious community. I would give her two months to visit you once a week and I would make her speak with Monsieur S. for fifteen or so days. I would order her to present herself to God in church each time she comes and to station herself every day three times before God in her church, at 9 am, noon, and at 5 pm, to speak to him, saying, “My God, I pray you to lead me towards my goal by the intercession of the Holy Mother”, nothing more, and then to kiss the ground. And every time she will see raised up the Body of the Son of God at mass, she will say the same prayer and kiss the ground in the church even before the eyes of everyone. Every time she comes to see you, she will tell you how she spent the week.

   After the two months, you will give her your answer. But take care to do the same thing yourself on her behalf that you will have prescribed for her to assure yourself of the will of God. That is all the answer that I can give you as well as that you should not hurry to receive girls taking no count of what anyone tells you about them until you yourself have experienced the spirit of Jesus Christ. It is difficult in our times to find girls who have a true vocation for religion.

   You can excuse her from kissing the ground if she finds it distasteful. But her aversion will not be a very good sign if doing it causes her pain. If she turns elsewhere to some other community, all the better, it is a sign that God has not destined her to you. We must receive religious persons to the novitiate as in former times great sinners were given public penance to put them to the test and were tested often, sometimes for months. We must not do anything hurriedly for delays are necessary to test souls and discern a calling from God. Jesus Christ taught us that by his example and by the delays he inserted in all his mysteries.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill

The United States of the World, The End of All Beginnings, The Theater of the Impossible, books by Daniel McNeill, are for sale at:

amazon.com/author/graceisall

Letter 67 of Saint-Cyran

       I must tell you once and for all, if I have not already done so, something about my writings. I write down my thoughts when it pleases God to inspire them and time permits it, which happens rarely. It happens even less that I am able to write without interruption. For that reason, I am always in a hurry writing and dictating them. I write only those thoughts that are the least and are as much as my memory can supply me without forcing it.

   I never desire that they be for anyone but when I am moving them out of fear or having a meeting with someone which give me chances to remove them, I prefer sometimes to send them rather than burn them or leave them in my room where they can be discovered.

   I intend them for this one or that one according to the inspiration that God gives me, and often I do not intend them for anyone like the three or four last letters. I do not begin writing them except when God gives me the will to do it and I think of nothing else except to send them to keep them out of danger. I suppose I conserve them in the bottom of my heart to revisit them one day, if I am free, either to correct them or to revive the spirit I had while writing them, if God gives it back to me. However generally speaking, I would be very unhappy living or dead if they were ever seen by anyone and if they would not die forever in the spirits of those to whom I send them just as they are dead in my spirit. I am content, if I was faithful in my writings, to withdraw at the right time and in the right season (that God makes known) the spirit of the seed that God plants secretly in souls who pray to him sincerely and with his spirit.

   I know very well that in the papers I sent you, there were interruptions, the soldier dropping in on me was the cause and sometimes a lack in my memory. For the spirit of my writing is a spirit who goes away and does not return at all.

    I beg you that this one be useful for all the Sisters who have received papers from me and that they believe I have no other intent than to follow the movement that God gives me to give them some proof of my charity towards them by the truth of God. I know I often mix things up and jumble together a lot from my reason and from my own judgment but I trust in my simplicity and in the charity of those who read my thoughts. For this charity does not allow them to judge them badly.

(Translator’s note. Friends of Saint-Cyran in the Jansenist movement took no notice of his desire that his writings be seen by no one. All true Jansenists were devoted to the writings of Saint Augustine who made grace, the active participation of God’s love acting in the soul to give believers the strength to avoid sin, the essential element of his theology and also of the Catholic religion. Saint-Cyran had an extraordinary gift of communicating personally to many people the grace he found in his soul and to make grace come alive in them. Cardinal Richelieu knew of this gift and was certainly jealous of it. But by imprisoning Saint-Cyran and cutting him off from the personal religious communication of grace to others in some unwritten and direct form, he forced his prisoner to express in writings in an imperfect form the grace in his soul. Grace is extremely difficult to express in writings, if not impossible. Ironically Cardinal Richelieu by imprisoning Saint-Cyran for five years and forcing him to write in difficult circumstances released the grace he tried to repress to a larger public than it would ever have reached if restricted to merely personal communication.)

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill

The United States of the World, The End of All Beginnings, The Theater of the Impossible, books by Daniel McNeill, are for sale at:

amazon.com/author/graceisall

Letter 66 of Saint-Cyran

   I admit to you that there is nothing that I like less than to see that people dream so much about miracles. The Son of God made hardly any of them except by force and did not like to make any more after he had made those that were necessary to establish his mission. He loved only speaking divine words and wished that men no longer had concerns for miracles which are only for non-believers.

   The miracles of the new law are the movements of penitence and charity that grace produces in the heart. Other miracles belong to the old law especially when they do not bring with them the grace to change souls and do not go beyond the body and are only for its cure. Do not amuse yourself with miracles and remember the words that Jesus spoke to the Apostles: do not delight in making miracles but rejoice because of the the knowledge that your names are written in heaven. We should strive to make certain in heaven our eternal calling by good works. As Saint Peter writes, “...brethren give diligence to make your calling and election sure”.

   Today is the day of the transfer of the body of Saint Monica from the port of Ostia where she died, seven leagues from Rome, to Rome by Pope Martin nearly 700 years after her death. Saint Augustine did not think of transferring his mother’s body to Africa, which would have been easy by sea, to the city where he was a bishop. No other Pope had the thought up till then of transporting it to the church of Saint Augustine in Rome.

   God gives exterior honors to saints when he wishes. They consider themselves very happy to be in the temple of heaven praising God and honored on earth in the hearts of true Christians which are the true temples of the saints as they are also even of God and of his Holy Spirit.

   I would like to be certain of having the least place in heaven even if here in this world I passed for being the  most wicked man up till the day of judgement.

   Miracles are only for those without faith and virtues for the faithful.

   I have an unspeakable joy because of the great miracle that it pleased God to produce in the soul of this girl. If he had changed the old age of the most decrepit man into a flourishing youthfulness, he would not seem to me to have done anything compared with having led this girl to this end. I have no words to express to you my joy and I have no doubt that if I had a thousand gold pieces to recognize this favor by giving them to the poor would I have done it with a transport of joy. It is to these miracles and not to the others that God wishes that we pay attention.

   If Monsieur her father and Madame her mother are as touched by this grace as I, they will not feel anything from their present pains. Joy will occupy them completely.

   I am even afraid of such great graces because they commit us to a much larger gratitude and compel us to bear witness to it to God by a perpetual desire for his grace.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill

The United States of the World, The End of All Beginnings, The Theater of the Impossible, books by Daniel McNeill, are for sale at:

amazon.com/author/graceisall

 

Letter 65 of Saint-Cyran

   You speak perhaps truthfully when you say that everything that happened was a secret spiritual punishment for the anxieties that you cause yourself about whether everything is going well. We must do everything in peace in order to do it religiously and there is never any peace if we are not decided in our heart to depend on God. Saint Peter wished to walk with Jesus Christ on water. He granted him his wish but when the apostle saw that he was losing himself, he began crying out and worrying himself. The peace of a religious woman is worth more than all her household goods. Recover yourself and forget nothing of what you must do for the regulation of your community. If it happens that everything goes badly, support it and be prepared before God before it happens. If God desires that you live in a state of poverty, it is all for the better. Perhaps by that he desires to make you and all your community rich in the soul. In the end, it is not religious to be anxious about household goods and all the things of this world which all of them together are nothing. If you pray to God as much as you speak and act to make everything go well, probably everything would go better even if things were actually worse. We must live by faith and not by our senses. The Christian life is a life of God and is not only the life of angels and the life of heaven as says Saint Chrysostome in the lessons that we read today in our breviary. The life of the senses is not the life of men but of beasts. The life of reason is still worse than that of the senses because it is a life of vanity, anxiety and continual distraction.That is what I found in my heart to tell you since you called on me about your anxieties related to your household. However when distractions in affairs are not born from anxieties in the spirit, they are less harmful and it is more easy to chase them away. The Son of God having said in Saint Matthieu that it is not in our power to make a white hair black, he meant to tell us that the smallest things depend on him and not on us. We must ask of him that grace to look only to him in the success of things provided that we do

not make any voluntary omissions in things when we must act according to his orders outside of which if we amuse ourselves or promote ourselves we sin and we must ask his pardon because of it.

   I have seen your debts and I am not too frightened because of them. If you are good, withdrawn, silent and entirely with God and not with whomever of the world, God will take care of your community. But in order to make him active there, your justice must be plentiful. It is towards that that I encourage you for the most part as the only way to pay your debts. God will cause you to experience a certain patience in your creditors that can come only from him.

  You do well to live as someone in debt and poor. It is the second way to make God active in helping you.

   I do not like your tears because of your debts. You must not cry for what is good. We must cry for our sins and those of our brothers and work to make our creditors as content as we will be able to make them. God is in heaven seeing prisoners and those in debt. It is enough for you and me that he deigns to look at us.

   This will be a grace that God will grant you after you act as I advise, that is, that he will make you free of this debt. And if you support it with real patience and without grumbling, I am sure he will grant it to you in this world or in the other.

   It is easy to sin performing the good works of God. For we believe we are lazy when we do not see ourselves in some activity. It is certain that whoever acts less, going peacefully from one thing to another and doing the work to which one is presently attached with a movement that derives from a mediocre degree of virtue, does better. For if virtue is only virtue in a mediocrity far from extremities, the actions of virtue should be likewise in a mediocrity removed both from slowness and activity.

   All charity, if it is done well, should cause some pain, either before giving it, giving it or after. That causes me less surprise by N. but what will we do about her since God threw her into our hands? We must pray for her and continue to do for her the best for her that we will be able. Such sufferings are worthwhile penances when charity is part of them. Let’s not lose anything, if possible, of our good works by the bad mood of those in whose favor we do them. For as the Son of God said, it is not we but his spirit which speaks during times of persecution. Therefore it is not those ungrateful and unintelligent people who receive our charity but God in them.

  More than prudence which asks that we pamper this girl and not turn her into a malcontent, these are penances that God offers you. I embrace willingly those who make me suffer more than you might be able to believe, for I hate ingratitude and disparagement more than pain that afflicts the body.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeil

The United States of the World, The End of All Beginnings, The Theater of the Impossible, books by Daniel McNeill, are for sale at:

amazon.com/author/graceisall

 

 

Letter 64 of Saint-Cyran

   What is spoken in the freedom of grace is never bad and we should never be sorry for it. It has its free words and its angers that we should love as much as its silences and its gentleness. You were right to say what you said about those who calmed themselves down. I am a common friend. I can condemn neither these ones nor those others.

   It is certain that solitude embitters the spirit if we we do not keep watch over it, just as also fasting and other mortifications. That is why we must excuse and bear with many souls to whom God has given his main graces.

   It is with grace as it is with nature. We take birth in it first as animals, then reasonably and spiritually. I hope everything will be good next for the person you say is going a little quickly. I no longer count speeds when they take place beyond the world and the annoyances of others cause them. My first thought was to take full responsibility for all of it. It came to me that the Son of God took upon himself responsibility for all of our sins and that in exchange we should take responsibility of everything that can be the cause of any dispute between those of our acquaintance. It is an excellent invention of Jesus Christ and one that seems to me that if I were not in prison I could carry out better than I can by letter.

   We must not do anything which offends the order of divine wisdom. God will  give you the means to accommodate N. and perhaps she will be more content. I keep her in my spirit and I hope that God will be able to make her turn out well, without speaking of others whom we must hope will benefit from his providence. You must unstitch the knot that ties you to N. and not cut it. Charity obliges you.

   I beg you not to become troubled anymore about yourself, that what I told you aids you always. If you fall into the same things, confess them humbly, with a sentiment of your weakness. It is the unique remedy along with seclusion.

   We must act like Christ at the time of the Resurrection. He appears to finish his work and retires instantly.

   If the one who is in such great trouble was not in the place where God ordered her to be to say her office, she would be at peace. This trouble of the spirit is a pure temptation that we must break by believing and not speaking about it more. For me, I am well since I am in prison in the place where God desires me. I am assured by the  very men who hold me here. I leave all the consequences to God. If I had more health, I would perhaps be weaker.

   We must think of bodily debts as of spiritual ones without troubling ourselves. The first are the images of the the second almost in all the circumstances that accompany them in their birth, in their subsistence and in their abolition. I desire greatly that you be able to do without the  world and to teach by your example other religious women how me must make of little value worldly goods. In the necessities of creditors we can have recourse to God although I see by the Gospel that he does not want us to wake him when he is sleeping. But we have faith assuring ourselves that he sees everything and thinks about everything, particularly about the affairs of those who are his and of whom he speaks as Abraham, I am the God of such a man and of such a woman. For me, I feel that those I love have no need to have recourse to me in their necessities when I have been informed beforehand about them. I would have difficulty to prevent myself from believing that they warn me by weakness and by fear. It will be enough on such occasions to have prayers made to God by your religious community which is never proof of weakness when creditors have necessity. For then it it is a double prayer made for the poor. Poverty joined to the obligation we have to a person makes our prayer double before God.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill
The United States of the World, The End of All Beginnings, The Theater of the Impossible, books by Daniel McNeill, are for sale at:
amazon.com/author/graceisall

 

      

Letter 63 of Saint-Cyran

   I am distressed because of your sickness because I do not want you to die yet. I hope that that will not happen and that God will preserve you for his religious community. If you are sick, fear nothing, you have no indication that you belong to any others except God.

   Illnesses are themselves the main penitence for faults we make because of weakness and God sends them to us so we can purge ourselves of them. Great sufferings do more in a little time than other penitences do in many years.

  I care only for those who need you when I fear the success of your illness. For what touches you, regarding God and his sacred will, healthy and sick you have no reason to fear his force. You are his, and everything that has happened bears witness that he loved you before your birth. I am not flattering you but encouraging you with a truth that I try to follow everywhere.

   If we are God’s during life no matter what weakness we have, we cannot be badly off dying.

   I pray to God to console this good Mother who is dying. I recommend her to God every day and I pray to the Saints to do it also, without whose aid our prayers are nothing, like the efforts of little children without efforts of grown-ups who help them.

   I recommend to you this seven-year-old girl whom God gave to me at the same time that he took my niece. He obliged me to take care of her like a pauper. We must bear witness to God by actions proportional in some way to the grace that he has given us that we consider him great and that if we can make happy some person on earth, we should do it with a good heart to recognize the grace that he gave to our little girl who resisted every attempt of her mother to make her leave Port-Royal.

   We must search for every sort of way to practice gratitude. The good earth that receives a  good seeding gives a plowman back a hundredfold who would complain about it with reason as an ungrateful earth if it gave back in season only the same seeding. I beg you with all my heart, you have a part in the work and you will be doubly compensated by God for the trouble you have had to settle and raise well these two little girls, one in heaven, the other on earth. God  asks from you and I do also only that you apply yourself a little to the matter leaving the outcome to providence. For, as Saint Paul says, the Lord knows those who are his and it is  only those that he aids thoroughly and makes succeed. I will pray to him about it, and may he make this gift to your religious community as the first part of a blessing for the whole year as I offered it to him the first day in your name in particular and in the name of Mother. I salute her with the whole community.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill

The United States of the World, The End of All Beginnings, The Theater of the Impossible, books by Daniel McNeill, are for sale at:

amazon.com/author/graceisall

 

  

Letter 62 of Saint-Cyran

   If N. enters the novitiate I beg you to act with her like the prophet who adjusted himself to the body of the child he wished to revive. The duty of a mistress of novices is like that of a priest, to prevent girls from dying in their novitiate and if they are dead in their souls to revive them. To do that is to do the will of God. The Son of God said in the Gospel that he came into the world only to do the will of his father. It will be a considerable thing if you both do his will in different conditions.

   You must resign yourself to suffer with a good heart what you still have not been able to correct two or three times. Prayers are as valuable as corrections. If you pray a little more than you correct for those who do not wish to believe you, you will correct them more easily.

   The only way to correct ourselves from a fault is to humble ourselves because of it and to do it by practicing silence and tolerance with prayers in favor of those we would like to correct. If we are sometimes unsuccessful, we must recognize our failing and stand before God looking at him peacefully as if to show him our wound so that he may cure it. I admit that the fault is less when it comes as a surprise and by encountering some disorder. But we must strengthen ourselves against that in advance and ask God for grace for such occasions. I prepare myself like that for surprises that sometimes happen to me and these precautions are a great help to me when I am subject to them.

   I believe God introduced this person in your religious community only to try the virtue of others. There slips into communities like yours grievous things like heresies in the church so that those who are approved by God may show themselves.

  Do not put any other trouble in your omissions and negligences except to recognize them gently in yourself while amending them. When we do not trouble ourselves about a fault, it is a sign that we are humble and that we do not believe ourselves to be more than what we are.There is a scullery in the church which cleanses us from all the blotches that we acquire every day. Going to church once a week with the solid goal to do better and we come away entirely spotless. Nothing displeases me more than to see that we take too much trouble with our faults. The view alone that we have of them is enough before God in order to prevent that he attribute them to us, For me I act like that when it happens that I commit faults and I believe it would be a greater fault to trouble myself much about them. I look upon them in peace and leave them in my memory in order to consider them with the same humility and the same peaceful spirit when they show themselves to me. And then at the right time and with the conditions God gave me to live under, I wash myself clean of them in his scullery.

   It will be necessary to say if the girl that you await develops well that God will have given her it by great round-about ways. We must admit that God is impenetrable in his judgements and that we must always serve him with fear and trembling and a great humility that does not allow us to be guaranteed anything from ourselves. How could we guarantee anything from another? I would experience a particular joy if he spreads his grace in that soul. You are more obliged than anyone else to behave well if you wish that God grants us the satisfaction that we desire in dealing with her.

   It is remarkable that I have just this instant myself understood clearly that in a series of prayers and requests that I make every morning she is the first. I claim for this my sudden awareness only the effects of the eternal choice of God which have as a source the magnificence of this love that has for its object only the unworthiness of our soul and of our body. So because of that why should I care to lose hope worrying about some sin that has no notable mark and that perhaps I can attribute even to the choice of his will since his love makes it wrong for me to lose hope being a soul unworthy of love.

   It is necessary that your whole community be in prayers every day at certain hours. Beyond that, you should choose two of the best  who may be responsible for this plan at certain hours before the Blessed Sacrament. You must purify your community and live there better if possible than customary in order to draw the grace of God into this soul whom God sends you and confound the evil one who persecutes her. Tradidit illam Deus in manus. It is a sentence from Scripture, God delivered her into their hands.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill

The United States of the World, The End of All Beginnings, The Theater of the Impossible, books by Daniel McNeill, are for sale at:

amazon.com/author/graceisall

Letter 61 of Saint-Cyran

   The Holy Spirit should always purify our souls as he purifies the Angels without there being any faults in them although it is certain that there are always some in us. Scripture compares our good works to dirty things and if that is ever true it is true in our times.

   For my part, I am always ready to condemn myself in all my good works and especially for greediness in the simplest of them. I have the habit of saying every day to God among my prayers this verse from Psalm 119, Incline my heart unto thy testimonies, and not to covetousness so that it may protect me from greediness in all my best actions. I found out recently that Saint Augustine used the verse for the same purpose. Excuses, accusations, complaints and thoughts are fearsome in good works without mentioning other faults that slip into them.

   We must not think about the past. If God judged us by it, we would all be damned. We must always be seeing and taking care of the present as children of eternity.

   I have never so well seen as I have in my solitude that the life of man is war and a perpetual storm. I feel it in my everyday experience, as greatly in matters within as in those without. God desires to force us by it to not hold fast to anything and to make us remember that we are travelers who walk towards their country among the storms and wars of the century.

   It is only charity that rules, as much in each of the faithful as in the whole church. Happy someone who possesses it. He is always watching out for himself and for his friends. He makes from all of them and from their affairs a kind of particular body in honor of the charity of Christ who made from all the faithful and from all the affairs of the faithful one body and one spirit that he has made his own and that he does not distinguish from his own and the one he formed himself for himself in the Virgin by the Holy Spirit.

   I will have particularly in spirit tomorrow the two sick persons with you, the feast day of Saint Augustine which is a favorable day for us who love grace. Grace’s primary truth is that there is no sickness that God does not cause and  that he is both the true doctor and the one who put in the cure of the body the image of the cure of the soul.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill
The United States of the World, The End of All Beginnings, The Theater of the Impossible, books by Daniel McNeill, are for sale at:
amazon.com/author/graceisall

Letter 60 of Saint-Cyran

   We experience daily the difficulty of leading the best men along the path of truth. It is not that I believe books are useless but we must speak about the truth as the Son of God speaks about his flesh, that it profits nothing and that it is the spirit that gives life. And then we must speak of his word and of his divine truth as well as what he said about his flesh because men amuse themselves now as much knowing a lot of truths as receiving a lot of Sacraments but the one and the other are of no profit if we are not predisposed towards grace and we do not make the renouncements necessary to prepare to receive it. Temporal and external goods are the least part of the problem. The main thing is to renounce internal things, our passions, our attachments, our greedy acquisitiveness, the remains of our sins and to take care to hold ourselves away from everything we do against God and to control ourselves all day long so that there be nothing empty, nothing that is not full of God. Then books, truths, Sacraments, preaching and everything else are a profit for a soul, even the sins that the soul falls into by weakness after all these precautions.

   I remember nothing of what I said to you about the practice of holy things. I say things as I find them upon the moment in my spirit without remembering or caring if I said them. I do not take hold of anything except my present feelings which pass away. It is certain that our misery is great and that we are unable to keep ourselves a long time in the thought that God gives us sometimes about holy things. You must however consider yourself happy because of what you are now and recover yourself peacefully from your downfalls.

   There is no greater pride than to wish to be as healthy as those who have not been at all dangerously sick. I count myself among such people. We should not divert ourselves referring to others but to ourselves and consider ourselves happy according to what we are now in reference to what we had been. We should thank God who withdrew us by such a special grace and by means of the truth from a condition where we would have remained insensibly although  continually using the Sacraments.

   All diversities must help us be unmoved and allow us to profit from everything, as much from the bad as the good moods of the world. God does not permit them except for our good. I would love to be able to make someone inherit my knowledge of this. All visible things are not worth looking at. That person is happy who makes himself invisible by becoming solitary. Death is always near us. That is the only thing we should keep visible with a spirit of love for God and for our neighbor.

   We are happy knowing the truth but we are royally happy to make the truth live in us without any break.

The United States of the World, The End of All Beginnings, The Theater of the Impossible, books by Daniel McNeill, are for sale at:

amazon.com/author/graceisall

Letter 59 of Saint-Cyran

   Do not desire at all to be always solitary for you are solitary enough as you are in your religious community at Port-Royal so long as you do speak a little with persons from outside. We have to face the truth that others may be more in innocence and penitence than we.  Spiritual peace in the remembrance of our past faults is a great humility very agreeable to God and very able to satisfy him for our sins but our peace must express itself in conversations with innocents and penitents, admiring the first and supporting the others.

   God has given you proof by the donation that was made to you without you having solicited it that the best way to receive gifts from God is to not wish for them at all. It teaches us that grace which is the gift of God to men (as money is the gift of men to God) is the only thing we should desire and our desire itself, like the strongest prayer, draws it into the soul.

   It seems to me we should take pleasure in dying of hunger rather than asking God for something to nourish our body, or else to ask for food in order to love and to serve still more faithfully the one to whom we owe everything. Whoever serves well should ask for enough to continue but we never serve God well except if we love the poverty of Jesus Christ. On one hand, as a martyr ends and achieves charity during the period of persecution, so on the other hand, it seems to me that to die of hunger is a fitting end during the period of the church at peace.

   I find it good that you make me know your faults by putting them in writing while you have them still in movement within you. They are like those drops of water that are lost in the dryness of the earth where they fall for faults are lost as soon as they fall into a heart set on fire by love from God. Faults cannot exist along with this divine fire and not being great enough to extinguish the fire’s fervor, it happens necessarily that the same fervor consumes them.

   Concerning the faults of my sister N., grace makes short work of her mishaps. We should not ask of her any more than that she follow the regular path of charity which has as many different laws that it itself  makes as there are different persons whom it prevails on to love.

   We are in a time when God measures hearts and tests them all the way to their bottom. Those who are unmoved and without apprehension are not the best people. It is only God who is the judge of the difference who demands of us only a complete submission in the midst of the dreads of our heart. But since it is only he who gives this submission, it is also only he who is able to discern it in us.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill

The United States of the World, The End of All Beginnings, The Theater of the Impossible, books by Daniel McNeill, are for sale at:

amazon.com/author/graceisall

Letter 58 of Saint-Cyran

                                                                      

   I see clearly that God brings forth all the evils in the world as well as everything good. This interior desolation that you feel following relief to your body comes more from God than other evils because it is an interior evil that only can have good motives in God since it follows one of his favors which is not yours in particular but for everyone in your religious community, and for me in particular, who desired it with that kind of desire that God considers good when it comes from charity.

   You must bear much better than you have ever all the interior and exterior evils that he will be pleased to send you in the future since he has given you a proof in public that you are his concern. All the ambition I have in the bottom of my soul, which however I submit to his divine will, is that it may please him to look upon me once in my life in a way so that  simply and without reflection  I can feel in the bottom of my heart that I am his concern.

   Everything else seems nothing to me. If God would create ten thousand worlds and he would give me their government, as he gave Adam the government of Paradise, I should not be consoled by it as I would be by a small feeling that he might give me in significant circumstances that he has received me in his grace and that I belong to him eternally. I say eternally for I do not make any distinction between being in his grace for a certain time and not also being there eternally.

   That is how he treated you in your sickness and that obliges you to take as favors every interior desolation. But it is clear that the desolation you feel and that is fitting after the convalescence of your body is a minor disposition from the joy belonging to the same body and to all the souls of your religious community who have a part in it. For God has a habit accordingly to hide himself when he causes particular favors for those he loves as if he wished to conceal awareness of the good he has caused us. Never does he bear better witness that it is for the soul that he causes the favor and not the body than when he afflicts it and causes it interior desolation.

   I admire sometimes this conduct of God that we could name, so to speak, the humility of God that he adopts in order to teach us this same virtue and not to raise our spirit too high by the bodily graces he causes us. I would not want the grace that gives us the power to imitate him and to moderate the joys we gain by the good works we do, which instantly spoil us, if we do not know how to conceal them as God conceals his in order to teach us to conceal ours. That is why he humiliates himself in some manner as greatly in his divinity and in his graces as he humiliated himself in his humanity on earth in all the good works that he has accomplished here. There you have what I learned in what you wrote me about your interior desolation.

   You see by the operations that go with it and that you have indicated by your letter that it is entirely from God and a kind of purification of the soul which God prefered to accomplish in the soul itself and by this desolation that it feels than by the continuation of the sickness of the body. For it is visible in you and in people like you that never are sicknesses sent for another purpose than to cure the soul and to cleanse it. It is up to all souls to be cleansed by themselves and by interior evils. And God does not stop sicknesses of the body in order to transfer them into interior evils except in favor of those that he favors.

   I am telling you my true feelings. I believe I am speaking the truth and my understanding of it is better than what I can succeed in expressing.  I could go on to a more extensive development if I wished to speak the whole secret that I know only by myself. I know for certain that I do belong among those souls who ought to aspire to those favors and those transfers of evils that God causes from the body into the soul, from exterior sicknesses into interior ailments in their favor.

All the rest of your letter informs me better that I speak the truth both for you and for myself. I am very happy that it is more advantageous for you than for I. For it is enough for me if I belong to God, as I hope, when it is not in a condition as advantageous to me as to another. I do not love at all in a negative way. I am content that another may be more than I before God. I am very happy to know him and to love him a little and it makes little difference that I don’t believe firmly enough in him until I become more certain about what I believe. For I am not able to make myself so miserable that I do not love God and that he does not love me in spite of what I might have been before at another time. Sorry but the lack of paper here in prison does not allow me to add anything more except that I feel joy because of your double health.

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

Letter 57 of Saint-Cyran

It is not in my power to be involved right now in anything, still less in preaching or in anything else, because I have a continual distraction. I learned today that it is not enough to have power: if I should have it, I would still need a new grace to produce the effect. The Son of God was born from the tomb with glory and with the power to give glory to all bodies by his Body. But he will produce the effect of his glory only at the day of Judgement. This makes us see that moments of grace are now in his hand. He said himself that such moments were in the hand of his Father who gave them to him with everything else as payment for his cross. If he wishes to relieve me on Holy Friday of my other business and allows me to come to see you, I will see what I will have to give and I will try to find it in a source which I can draw from by being with you. Naturally, you can draw from that source without any need that I speak to you. So there is all I can promise you, which is nothing, as being nothing myself, and having need of you yourself in order to be able to give you anything. I am writing en route to go to say Mass where I will offer to God your house and your desire that he make you daughters of the Passion. For you have such a great devotion to the Holy Sacrament which is an invisible Passion in the same Body that suffered visibly for our salvation. The difference is that there his blood was spread upon the earth and here it is spread in our souls which ought to be for that reason similar to heaven which received the Body of God on the day of the Ascension.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill
The United States of the World, The End of All Beginnings, The Theater of the Impossible, books by Daniel McNeill, are for sale at:
amazon.com/author/graceisall

Letter 56 of Saint-Cyran

Reverend Mother, I find myself today with some willingness to come to you to speak about the Cross (Note: It is the third of May, the day of the Discovery of the Holy Cross). I leave it to God to determine for me on the spot or at some time if it will be in public or before the group that I spoke to last time. The reverence that I owe God keeps me in a state of suspension when it is a question of speaking about him and I am also affected by the opinion I have of myself and of those who listen to my words. For the preaching of the word of God is all the more a sacrament  different from other sacraments because its effect is less infallible. Since It depends more on us and on our dispositions than on others, we ought to take great care to prepare for it humbly and to have present no other discernments than those we have about other sacraments when we receive them or have received them.

I ask from your charity particular prayers for that business that we now know a great success. We must pray that God direct it not with the providence which takes place in the evils that he permits but the providence which directs and produces the effects that he has divinely ordained. For it is not believable how few actions there are even in the souls who serve God that we may say are done by his will. It is a subject that should humble us.  

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill

The United States of the World, The End of All Beginnings, The Theater of the Impossible, Baseball Metaphysics, books by Daniel McNeill, are for sale at:

amazon.com/author/graceisall