Mother Agnes, I do not know what condition you are in but I dare say that I hope for an equal consolation from either of two possibilities although one is sensible to our human feelings and everyone can share in it as well as myself. The other belongs only to those who love you with the charity of God which leads to an even more grand consolation. If my life was not already committed to God through my sins (he knows each of them), through his mysteries and particularly the mystery of his Passion, through each of the marvelous things he brought about during my life for the good of his church, through each of the favors he granted me (I merited them merely by inwardly dying for him), through each of those persons that I loved for him as the result of his charity and that I often gave to him spiritually in order to conserve them, if my life, I say, was not committed to him in so many ways and if I did not wish to remain grateful to him for the life he gave me, I would willingly offer it to him so that he might preserve you still for the visible government of the Abbey of Port-Royal.
Against my expectation, God gave me the grace today to carry the pall in the procession of the Holy Sacrament. Since I was thinking I would not be able to do it because of my weakness, I beg you in your weakness to thank God for giving me the strength to do it in the way the sick can do it, which is by suffering more cheerfully their evil through love of God after hearing what those treating their sickness told them about it. I hope I will have been heard in the prayers I made to him giving me assurance that he will hear those that you will make to him for me, if he wishes that you be with him rather than with us. There are few people to whom I would have spoken with this assurance considering the condition you are in. But I say it with such certainty that even if I had not had the feeling of the lovingkindness of charity that I have towards you I might have been driven by longing to say it anyway. All your prayers should be in the expectation not only of the coming of Jesus Christ, for that is the main prayer of all Christians, but also of the appearance of his holy will. In it I wish to join myself with you in order to take part in that great vow that includes all the others and is the first demand that he wanted us to make to him for ourselves. Other than that, I can only speak humanly of your sickness as a man who seeks your health. It is past two o’clock. I am back from church and in such great joy for having been able to carry the pall that my joy alone can moderate the grief I feel in the bottom of my soul that you are perhaps going to 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:
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