Letter 22 of Saint-Cyran.

My Mother, I learned the state of your health and I know the difficulty you have without the strength you had before. Only those who have experienced infirmities can judge them. If you believe me, you will let yourself be treated as someone infirm and in your frailty you will not attach yourself so strongly to exterior works of piety. It seems to me that there is not any man who has more inclination than I to all the works of religion. There are none of them that I would not have wished to do and yet, although I hear three masses Sundays when I can, I was not at all troubled when my infirmities forced me to spend several Sundays without hearing any.

   I have said that there is not any firm reason and necessity to join exterior and interior piety and I plan to write my ideas about the subject when God will give me the grace to do it. But meanwhile for the present nothing ought to prevent us from supporting with patience being deprived of the exterior exercise of piety. When God deprives us  of it, we should bear witness as a result that we are attached only to his spirit. Surely we are obliged to believe according to the gospel that the church on earth is the kingdom of God. As a result it is necessary to believe that it happens occasionally that believers are blessed and that God sometimes exempts them from all other duties except those of his love. If our infirmities reach the point that we be exempt from reading and vocal prayer, the love within us will be all the more pure and heavenly since it will be joined with the prayer that comes out of silence which is closer to prayer in heaven which consists only in a pure praising.

   Having recovered your health against all hope, you must take care of it better than before as a new gift from God. He could not involve you better in taking care of it than by showing that he wishes that you live still for the good of his abbey. Your life in the future will be only as a good example when you should do nothing else than live and change the actions of penitence into those of interior virtues which gleam into the eyes of God and are the real fruits of penitence. When fruits begin to appear on trees, we do not take any longer the trouble to cultivate, prune and fertilize them, which are  three things that mark the works of penitence.  Then God alone takes care of trees to conserve and mature the fruits on them by his warmth and by the secret influences of his sun which is Jesus Christ. It is to him that you should unite yourself more closely than before by exercises that are entirely interior by considering him more in his glory than in his cross. You will find in him the same virtues to imitate and the same example of subjugation that he gave to his Father while he lived with us but in him more perfect and more excellent and in their ultimate perfection. It is the image of this fidelity that he wishes that you hold yourself to in the future. He will furnish you beyond fasting and other stern practices that your body can no longer support the means to honor him more perfectly. I beg you to act in this way and to bear in mind that a body reduced in strength is similar to a body used up by old age. It is imprudent and indiscreet to demand from it  the same exercises of virtue as when it was young. If I had a Superior over me as you have now a Superior over you, I would take pains to obey only him. I am experiencing here in prison the disadvantage there is in not having anything like that which  sometimes makes it difficult to know what I should do to do my best. I ask for your prayers here on earth as I would ask them from you if you had gone to heaven.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill.

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