Mother Agnes, I was delighted to receive your letter which confirmed the news of your convalescence. As greatly as God forbids us to desire anything from the world and from anything that belongs to time, he just as greatly wishes that we rejoice at the recovery of health of those who belong to him. For these we can rejoice and our joy is truly an action of God’s charity by means of which alone we love them. You must take care of yourself better in the future since God wishes that you continue to serve him at his Abbey of Port-Royal and has established you there to direct it as someone sent back to it from the gates of the other world. You can speak to him as did David, thou liftest me up from the gates of death that I may show forth all thy praise in the gates of the daughter of Zion. You must now make a transition from one virtue to a second. You can not be the primary example in your religious community of the mortification of the body as you were when sick. You now must be to others a spiritual example, a very difficult and praiseworthy quality that really belongs only to superior souls and is truly a reward for the other virtue of mortification. Those like you who have come back from so far and whom God has given the grace to edify a religious community by facing death so peacefully are exempt from many things to which they are not disposed by their frailty. That is why you will take care of yourself better. You will make a great practice of humility and together with it you will be full of mercy towards members of your community who need you. In exchange for this spirituality, rule yourself within and give yourself to silence, to patience, to prayers from your heart that come from desires, moans and separation from those outside of you. These are penitences that God demands from you because your weakness projects you beyond your actual age to the discipline of those whom old age exempts from many things. There is what I believed I had to tell you in the state of weakness that I now find myself which teaches me by the experience it gives me of the way the weak should conduct themselves.
I recognize in your deceased sister whom you mention everything you said about her. The inclination I had towards her prevented me from giving her evidence of it because I saw that she was too affectionate towards me in her feelings because of the grace God had given her by means of me. I believe not responding to her was greatly useful to her to purge her soul of all her faults. I do not doubt at all that God was merciful to her by satisfying the things she hungered and thirsted for by leading her to the divine sources of truth and charity. Some leave this world earlier, others later, but the death that ends their life is equally for all the beginning of their eternity. Happy those who have passed a part of life like she with an experience of the truth and the grace that God gave them. I know how rare it is to find such souls and in this time they are almost not found at all. I would regret it more if I did not know that God rules everything and that life is his, if I must so speak, more than every other thing. He dominates the length and shortness of our ages as the only master of time, which he has reserved for himself alone and that he has not put into the hand of any creature of the earth to govern. Even though I am not perhaps ready to appear soon before him, I offer him nonetheless my life at every hour and I would not be surprised at whatever way it might please him to take it from me. I have absolutely no greater respect to pay him than to agree to it. I will not stop praying for your deceased sister for all my life as I desire that those who love me pray for me for all of their life.
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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