Letter 45 of Saint-Cyran

Mother Superior, what I wrote you about the death of your mother is more in my heart than what I expressed in my letter. She was solid in virtue and what appeared weak in her exterior hid her strength within that helped her humble herself and conserve her interior power more securely. A dress does not stop being beautiful and precious although it may have a small stain.The sun sometimes suffers eclipses but they are only exterior appearances and the trees that produce the best fruits do not stop having froth.

   As for what you said about remorse being still with you, it is certain that fathers and mothers take for us the place of God. We owe them a great deal and even those who have fear of God do not always fulfil all the things they owe them.

   I spent enough time in my native region to love my mother much and God gave me the grace to give her a strong witness of my love on important occasions. But although I loved her tenderly I realized after her death that I did not give her everything that I owed her.

   I sometimes begged you and I beg you still not to admit girls so easily either to your religious order or for religious instruction and to consider well beforehand the bottom of their hearts and learn about their previous experience. If you do not hold yourself strictly to that, you can not aspire to put your religious community in the condition God wishes it be in. There are few spirits in our time fit for religion among men and women as well as among girls and I see this every day more and more.

   You do well to recognize the care that God has taken for your temporal and spiritual life. He will always continue to care for you if you maintain a complete dependence on him and do not have any concern for anything else. It is better to die being poor and in dependence on him than to exist being rich in goods and desires outside of his order. For since everyone must die, and even before the end of the world, it is better to die keeping the rules of the Gospel which withdraws us not only from the world but from ourselves in order to make us depend on God alone.

   It is poverty, which I say is not only the true royalty of the soul but the divinity of the soul, to live on earth as if there were only God and we, that is to say, our soul.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill

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Letter 44 of Saint-Cyran

Mother Superior, I rejoiced greatly from the confirmation of your convalescence and from your promise to look after yourself better than you have in the past, going from one penitence to another. Penitence must never decrease in this world but we should often substitute interior penitence for exterior which is only the effect of it.

   You have no reason to fear death nor to give yourself in these difficult circumstances so much grief about whether or not your tears come from concern only for yourself or from true love. The knowledge of this secret belongs only to God. It is an exercise of humility for you to shed tears without wishing to discern the origin of your tears. Only, when we find that we are tearful, we should cast our eyes upon Jesus Christ crucified if we fear too greatly the sight of our own sins. But, by the grace of God, you have no reason to fear that.

  The longing for death is a good thing provided it be also without any large discernment about the causes that produce it. It is enough to cast our eyes on the glory of heaven and on the little rest there is on earth where we are always sinning.

   The fear of an increase in a sickness is also superfluous because everything is in the hands of God. He uses great evils and great sufferings to purify us more here and less in the other world. Properly speaking, death is the great purgatory for those who have lived well in this world.

   The privation of the Mass is always painful for souls and it teaches us that by sickness we enter into a true penitence which separates a sick person for a time from the sacraments of God. God loves more the privation of them in a true penitent than their usage. Since I have not said Mass for some time, I would be truly someone who should be pitied if that were not true. If you are as discouraged as you say, I am as a result very unhappy since, not being as agreeable to God as you, I rely nonetheless greatly on his mercy without being discouraged as little as I can.

   I let him be the judge of what I am and of what I have committed and I keep myself close to the knowledge that I have at present a strong will to serve him. I raise myself up gently when I fall and I find a new courage from my own falls to better serve him. I pass my life each day waiting that he do with me what will please him being content with myself and hoping to die in his grace as little as it may be. For since grace is inseparable from him and his spirit, I will not be less content  because of my small condition in heaven if I reach it than I am because of the condition I have in the world, where I keep myself as happy as a prince although I am so far from this condition.

   This is my answer to your discouragements and to your words of penitence and weakness from a sick person scarcely up from her bed. They are good words in the mouth of someone innocent but they are perhaps wrong and produce weakness in a penitent. I do not condemn anything but it seems to me that there are certain silences that are more humble than certain words which seem perhaps to be more humble. But whoever expresses his sentiments with humility does well whether he is quiet before God or he speaks about himself to men.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill

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Letter 43 of Saint-Cyran

Mother Superior, I confess I had great joy from your convalescence and it would not be such if I had not had great grief from your sickness. Saint Paul teaches that there are sadnesses upon sadnesses that are not bad because they are born from true love which is not true if it is not eternal as is God’s love.

   The advantage they have over the sadnesses of the century, which have for their causes cupidity and a temporal kind of love, is that they are always good and the others are always bad. For cupidity is a source that can produce only evil. Charity on the on the other hand is a good root that produces only good fruits. Real good comes from grace and excludes all evil.

   There is nothing except purity and simplicity in the movements of the Holy Spirit which is eternal love expanding in our hearts when it pleases God to grant us this gift. It is the only love that merits the name. All the other loves of the earth, and even saintliness without God’s love, are not worthy of the name. For God gives nothing to those souls that he loves if he does not give his very self.

   If your health were not the result of God’s bounty we would not be so delighted about it. But we love it for the love of him whom we love and to whom we desire that you may again be able to devote your life.

   Your life is good for several persons and your death is good only for you alone. You must take enjoyment in preferring these several persons to a single person and not love more your salvation than that of the sisters who need you.

   Do not do anything in the future except with a plan regarding proper nourishment to keep your health and do not put any strain on your body more than it can bear. It is often necessary that penitence leave the exterior world in order to take a place within us. It needs sometimes to hide from the eyes of men to show itself to God and his angels who do not rejoice in the Gospel as greatly because of penitence of the body as of the soul, which suits them better.

   Whatever change God causes in the temperament of a good man, it is certain that he can always remain immovable in the service of God and advance in it if he continues to love him. It is a consolation that I take for myself and that I give you in order that you increase all the more your interior charity towards God as you decrease because of weakness your exterior penitence.

   The simple vigilance over your interior life joined to silence, solitude, prayer should be in the future your practice of devotion. Each age has its particular penitence and each virtuous person has the order of his ages arranged very differently from others. Old age is found often in youth and the last period of old age in the first. When you begin to only grow old then you can say you are decrepit and that it is necessary to treat yourself as such.

   All of this is what I discovered in my spirit at this moment to pass along to you as the effect of the happiness I feel to have seen that God granted you health. To conserve it, I feel obligated to help you by giving you these thoughts, which are all the more acceptable as they have no other interests except those of your religious community and of God.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill

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Letter 42 of Saint-Cyran

Mother Superior, without expecting it, I found a little time and a little paper (here in prison we live with a scarcity of everything) to write you. I am overjoyed that you consented to the influence of God and to the advice of persons who belong to him to take upon yourself the duty of Superior.

   If you had been alone on your own, I would not have advised you to do it, but having recognized the great union of charity between you and Madame de Puylaurens, whom you are replacing, and the remains of God’s grace in her and in you, I do not fear that you are going where grace is leading you.

   There are a hundred places in Scripture where God created for his service from two persons one person. As for me, since I know the bliss of such grace because of my union with Monsieur Singlin, I do not believe there is any greater happiness than when someone feels good because of charity. Thus Scripture itself has heightened for me sentences that filled me with the same delight that I have also experienced in pious relationships with others.

   For this reason, please read the letter to M. Singlin that I am enclosing and compare it to yours as if they were only one letter as you and Madame de Puylaurens are only one and the same person. Together you represent the admirable unity of all the faithful on earth who are one and the same body and one and the same spirit in Jesus Christ.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill

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Letter 41 of Saint-Cyran

Mother Superior, I remember the promise  I made to send you some thoughts about the poverty of Jesus Christ. There is a close connection between poverty and death. One serves as a preparation for the other because someone truly poor is always prepared for death having nothing that holds him back. That is why God gave me the grace to join them together and to read each day one sentence about poverty and one about death. This thought is enough to assure you that I think of my promise to you but it was just a quick thought and I will need more time and other circumstances to be able to write more completely on the subject. If God wishes that I accomplish it, he will give me in the future enough freedom to do it.

   I am pleased that N. has yielded herself to your guidance without waiting for mine. She  needs only this simple submission to what you will tell her in the future without waiting for me or for others. We must do what we can for souls without ever becoming discouraged. We should pray for them even more when it seems to us that we should talk to them less. The election of a soul is a marvelous thing that comes completely from God without the chosen soul having contributed anything to its election. And yet it is the unique source, that is as eternal as God, for all the good that appears in a soul during its life.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill

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Letter 40 of Saint-Cyran

My Mother, regarding the poverty where you find yourself, I answer with one word. If you follow it all the way to the end with a humble spirit, it will lead to your advancement and to the glory of God. However, you do not act against the spirit of poverty if to have things necessary for life you use legitimate means without violence and with a never ending dependence on God.

   I will not say more now begging you that this extremity may make you more attentive to call upon God and to be joined to him in complete submission to events that it will be his will to allow. God has made known to me over a long period of time that nothing equals being joined to him, even to the extreme of wishing to be poor, if it please him, as he was poor in this world where he had neither a room nor a bed to rest on in the city of Jerusalem, that he left at night after working there all through the day to sleep on mountains and to pass there his nights praying.

  Let us be his, My Mother, faithfully and constantly, and we will lack nothing, or, if we are without bread, and we endure it happily,  we will see take birth from this scarcity a double abundance of goods both for the body and for the soul.

   As I take care not to go beyond the laws of Christian poverty, I take care also not to forget to take advantage of the least occasions God puts in my hands to provide for the needs of my abbey of Saint-Cyran. For it is to humble myself and to be submissive to God to do it just as it is pride both to concentrate only on my own aims and to do only what I feel like doing.

   As regards some points you make in your letter, take care, My Mother, not to become annoyed by the delay God sometimes takes to correct you and to help you approach nearer and nearer to perfection, that is, to him himself. Do only what is necessary to involve him in your progress by presenting yourself often to him as a beggar and someone poverty-stricken who has always need at every moment of new grace from him to subsist and to walk in his path without falling.

   The whole of our present life is a mixture of good and evil. As long as we are humble in our faults and we bear witness to God by our attention to him and by actions undertaken with the kind of humility that shows that we know and feel that the cause of our faults is in ourselves and that it will stop acting against us only when it is his will to stop it by the power of his grace. If we act in this way, we have no reason to fear that in the end God will not favor what we desire.

   The soul does not rise except by descending and descends while rising. It happens often that the advancements we make in virtue are causes of our falls. On the other hand, our faults are the causes of our advancements according to whether pride or humility mix themselves up in one or the other, which happens often in favor of one part of the mixture because of our corruption or in favor of the other part because of the mercy of God who takes pleasure in raising up the humble and beating down those full of pride.

   Work only to ruin in yourself this deep wound which has remained in you after Baptism and which will cause us always pain while we live in this mortal body. There is always a continual combat in those who are friends of perfection between the pride of sin and the humility of the grace of Jesus Christ, who does invisibly in every just person what he did in the visible combat that he waged against the devil.

   That is why, My Mother, the disapproval of everything, especially of persons, silence, modesty in speech, restraint in our actions, and dependence on the slightest good movements in our hearts hoping they will grow stronger by God’s love are the only means to grow in Christian virtue.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill

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Letter 39 of Saint-Cyran

My mother, your last letter which speaks of your sickness made me eager to let you know that you are not indifferent to me. I could hardly wait for the day of the outgoing mail to arrive and instead of as before not writing you in order to take care of more urgent business, I am leaving now all my other occupations to write you. I will be extremely relieved to learn the consequences of your sickness and whether or not  I have deceived myself in the good hope I have about them.

   But while reading your letter I discovered you fearful about what you are going through and I remembered certain things that you revealed to me before God that cause you pain. I dare to say, to console you and to make you submissive to the will of God on this occasion, that you have no cause to dread anything and you can claim for yourself with humility the promises of the Son of God.

   I will not say anything more to you now for the time is more suitable to speak to God about you than to speak to you about God. I pray that Sister N. trust in God and not fear any more than you to humbly take Holy Communion, for what you write me about her shows that she is sufficiently disposed to this grace from God. I beg her to believe me and do it. I will wait to find in the next mail arrival good news.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill

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Letter 38 of Saint-Cyran

Reverend Mother, do not be astonished by anything, I beg you, and practice the Gospel in this particular matter as in your other practices of religion. It is expressed in a digest  by two commandments, one wishes that all our desires be towards heaven, lay not up treasures upon earth...but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, the other orders us not to look back and to have our view straight before us advancing more and more on our path, no man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of heaven.

   God is so great that he has no need of us nor of our good works to make his plans succeed. For our faults, our hasty and delayed actions, can equally serve him to reach his ends. That is enough to stop all the thoughts and troubles we can have about the past and make us consider only the present time. We must do the best we will be able according to the light we receive from God who laughs to himself at our worries in a way as favorable as the way the prophet, who said he laughed to himself  at the calamities of evil persons, was terrible.

There is no better piety than to keep ourselves in peace and joy in the face of all bad happenings. Then we are in a state similar to that of God who never becomes sad or troubles himself with whatever happens in the world. As he hides himself, according to the psalm, in the middle of storms  and rescues souls by this strategy, believe that he keeps you in sight among the forces of darkness and will disperse them quickly by his light because of the confidence you will have in him.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill
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Letter 37 of Saint-Cyran

It was not by forgetfulness or hardness of heart that I passed over writing to you until now. God knows I wanted to and there are just causes that prevented me. I hope I will be later in a position to make you yourself a judge of these causes.  But when I learned through public talk the extent of your affliction and found myself freed by it of the causes of my silence, I would have believed I was offending the general charity that God obliges me to express to everyone, and the particular charity I have for you, if I did not assure you of the deep feeling that knowledge of your affliction has caused me.

   I do not want to exaggerate it by the magnitude of the circumstances which surround the evil because I would not be doing what I mean to do which is first of all to console you by the part I take in your pain and then by the prayer I make that you return as soon as possible to the regularity of the double profession you make to be a Christian and a woman devoted to religion.

   Never, my reverend Mother, will you happen upon such an occasion to be able to be of such great worth in a short space of time than as in the rest of your life.

   You have in Scripture admirable examples of patience and in your misfortune, if one can so name it, I consider you happy to have a means so great and so unusual to bear witness to Jesus Christ that you love him more than the whole world.

   It is a grace from God that he puts in our hands the means to bear witness to him that during the greatest afflictions he holds the first place in our hearts and that he rules both as a husband and a master submitting to his sovereign power every other affection that is not in sympathy with his.

   I know very well that you have not forgotten what I told you when we used to have conversations about the state of your soul. That compels me to say that I can only admire that it pleased God to afflict you in this way and to add suffering to the happy conduct of your past life. Evils, my Mother, are goods in this world for persons chosen by God. You are judging yourself facing suffering with patience and you are yourself experiencing the judgement of God on you by the inclination now and forever of your heart towards him.

  I do not doubt at all that Jesus Christ demands this inclination from all his spouses. He has promised to each his Kingdom provided that each will despise the greatness of all the kingdoms of this world. We are not far from the enjoyment of those external goods that should be the end of our aspirations and will extinguish in us every memory and every affection born from the flesh, the blood and the sight of his creatures.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill

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Letter 36 of Saint-Cyran

My Mother, after the long intercession you made in your letter for Mother de Chantal, I do not see that I can refuse to receive the letter she wishes to write me. If I do not answer her in the present time, it will be necessary that it be impossible because I will be looking at her in the future before the face of God  with you with me so that it please him to  make her such that she may be able to support the brilliance of his face and appear before him without confusion.

   It is nothing to have left the world by exterior vows, if in the interior we have not left and torn from our heart by long practices of virtue the invisible world which causes us more evil than the one we see with our eyes. For the devil changes as we change and he shuts himself up within us leaving the world as we leave it in order to attack us more forcefully in our solitude. There is nothing more like being a martyr than to destroy by the spirit the body while we live as the Martyrs brought themselves to life in spirit by destroying their body and gave the spirit a life of glory that it did not have at all in the body.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill

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Letter 35 of Saint-Cyran

My Mother, you have retained well enough what you have heard and even if you had retained much less, the principle that remained with you spiritually would be enough. That does not consist in knowing things in detail. That is what often deceives the world which amuses itself picking up a lot of truths. A single truth is enough when we take care to moisten the soul before God by prayer and before men by good works. Be content with what you know. As long as you look to God for each action to draw to yourself new light, you will advance insensibly along his paths and you will be astonished that not having seen yourself grow at each moment, you will feel nonetheless that you have grown by the exercise of this kind of prayer and by good works.
Take care not to pass beyond the degree of your present grace and your gift. There is nothing so dangerous than to wish to leave the path where we are serving God in order to enter upon the path of someone else and to usurp gifts that we have not received by serving God by following the path of another rather than our own. That is to reverse the order of  God who has prescribed for each soul a path to go to him which is as particular as a face we look at is so different that it is  never found equal in two persons. And the uniqueness  we discover in a face is found likewise unique in all the other parts and faculties of the body and the soul from which are born the variety and the difference of our actions. It is true that we do have all of us something in common just as in the conduct of souls there are common and general rules that our faith teaches us and that we must all follow. Give yourself to God, my Mother, communicate often with him in peace and without any effort he will instruct you better in a small amount of time, prepared as you are by the divine seeds he has left in his Church, than all the Doctors of Theology in the University of Paris could in a century. Consider yourself happy to be his for it is a clear lack of gratitude not to have ceaselessly the feeling of his presence in your heart among the forsakenness he has caused for so many souls. And especially give him perpetual thanks in your heart for having delivered you from a brief affliction that was a very great obstacle to your salvation.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill

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Letter 34 of Saint-Cyran

My Reverend Mother, do not concentrate on what could happen to your religious community by the exit of Mademoiselle de Chamesson and do not trouble the peace that should be there by vain fears about the future nor by useless thoughts about the past. For accomplishing this you are no longer permitted to think about the fault you committed by receiving her.

   It is not believable how greatly all religious communities, especially those with girls, deceive themselves by their choice of souls, each boasting about the reasons for their choice, But what the Son of God said to Mary Magdalene about the eternal end is true and should be followed by every means established by God to lead us there, and especially to the main end which is the religious life. We should not look for in the souls who wish to commit themselves to it anything except an interior vocation and we should say to them the words the Son of God spoke to Mary Magdalene, But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her, For if there is not a call from God, it is very difficult that the consequences be good, even when someone persists a fairly long time in the practice of good works.

   As we see that no matter how solid are walls and no matter how beautiful are the furnishings in a house, if the foundation is not good and well established, the house will necessarily fall into ruin. It is the same kind of image the Son of God used in the gospel where he wishes that we build our religious virtue on rock and not on sand to make it immovable against temptations.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill

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Letter 33 of Saint-Cyran

My Reverend Mother, I was very surprised that you wish me to become involved in the matter of admission to your order of the candidate, Mademoiselle de Chamesson, since it seems obvious that you are unaware that I must maintain a state of solitude and silence at this time. But it seems nonetheless that you have foreseen a certain disposition of my spirit that wishes that I speak on the occasion that you have offered me. If you knew me better, you would not have had to write giving me great proof of the charity you offer this girl. By the profession of belief I make as a Christian, she belongs to me more intimately than my own heart and it would never have permitted me to be indifferent where it is a question of a girl’s salvation. I am sure that your heart is involved just as intimately in the matter.

   I dealt with her before God in the discussion I had based on my memory of her treating her in the way I would wish someone treat me if I faced a similar decision. This includes everything I should say to you in detail of the particular cares I took in order to answer by my prayers and my attentiveness what you desire from me.

  One aspect seems to me at present clear. I judge that you should be content to remove the obscurity that your charity towards her brings to the situation. For there is nothing so natural among those who love, especially when the love derives from charity, than to cover over with clouds and darkness the bad conduct of those they love.

   I can not however help you to be content with the main problem. I hope that God will bring to birth a solution from the advice in a letter I will send to you later. Meanwhile you should simply wait a little while and not press her in order to give room for the Holy Spirit to make the changes that are necessary in her soul. The naivety alone with which she laid bare to you the bottom of her heart merits that you do her this favor. Remember what I told you on another occasion about the religious vocation of girls and how to avoid when dealing with them the many dangers and pains they pass through on the path towards devoting their lives to God.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill

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Letter 32 of Saint-Cyran

My Reverend Mother, before I received news from you a few days ago, I had found out about your sickness together with your convalescence. I rejoiced greatly through the spirit that causes me to have a part in all the things which concern the glory of our Master. Among these things I include your health because it seems to me that at the bottom of your soul you are his.  It is this part that takes the place in you of  God’s divine heaven. You serve him by a great variety of good works which are born always from this source.

   I noticed in your letter the arrangement this kind of sickness forces on you for your life in the future. It is the same arrangement that forces me to receive the Body of the Son of God by a viaticum. If we consider the time of holy communion’s institution, we are obliged to take it following the example of the Son of God who took it the evening before his Passion.

   I would like, my Mother, that time would permit me to tell you what a favor God has done for a person giving her back her health provided that she will continue to think about her prior sickness. But as soon as I started into this discourse, the period of time when I was involved in it prevented the determination I had to write you more amply and made me lay down my pen. I beg you to believe that God has given me a complete affection for your service to him and that I am at your disposition as someone who is your very humble and very obedient servant.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill

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Letter 31 of Saint-Cyran.

My Reverend Mother, I ask your pardon for the delay I took in answering you. It was the result of different reasons which all exempt me from any blame with respect to a good religious woman such as yourself because they originated all from the occupation where God has placed me. And you do not wish that I fail God when, because of the order that his charity has prescribed for us, he wishes that I forget you superficially for a time.  In fact, that did not happen since I had you as present in me together with the Spirit of God as if I had  given some more obvious proof of your relationship with God before men. This is how God makes me know by my own experience and by my ways of acting that those he deals with in the most obvious manner and with visible signs of his benevolence are not those he loves the most. For several religious women to whom I wrote after receiving your letter are not more in my memory than you although it may seem that I forgot you.

   This comparison should be enough to assure you that I estimate you among the Elect of God and that it will never be by negligence nor by forgetfulness that I will miss giving you what I owe you by my letters. I greatly distinguish writing them from other duties which consist in services and actions of charity that are more solid. For those kinds of things, I make a profession of bringing to them all the diligence of mine that is possible and to never put off until tomorrow what I can do today.  This means that you can certainly also employ my diligence to whatever end you will judge to be within my power since I am always ready to serve you with the same spirit that I serve God.

   If you are his as his chosen are his and if you have looked to him in the course of time with respect and tried to imitate the eternal love he has for his elect, you are protected from all the apprehensions that natural weakness can give to the strongest in the condition that you find yourself. For the surprise of sickness or death should not be dreadful except for those who do not have anything to do with the eternal attention of God. Everything should be indifferent to you since you were chosen by God, you profess  being a Christian, and you are a religious woman living in a Christian community. These are incomparable favors that God has shown you which he has not shown to three quarters of humanity who are without faith. Neither has he shown it to a great number of souls who live in the church a life that is completely pagan hidden under the veil and name of Christianity. You must never lose the remembrance of these great graces since they stand for the pledges of love that God has granted you eternally.

   There are on earth creatures afflicted by the memory of their offenses who would be willing to die a hundred times to give to God some evidence equivalent to the grief they feel from not having served him with the purity that they owed him. They consider happy the souls who do not have similar deep regrets which are the spiritual sufferings that the need for charity causes penitents and are as unknown as sin even to those who have lived in innocence.

   Rest humbly on this grace that God has given you and for everything else just let it happen. The very favorable treatment he has shown you in the past should give you confidence for the future.

  I wish to warn you about one thing by answering the last point of your letter. To preserve these favors from God and to keep yourself always well prepared for death, you should not have any care for the way men treat you nor for the opposition the enemy instigates against the advancement of your good plans.

  I know that it is the secret passion of all Superiors that the community where they are sent grows visibly in piety and that those who have chosen them for this employment may know that God has blessed their choice and that they see its fruits. But it is enough for me that you have acquired new charity in the judgement of God in the exercise of your responsibilities. Say only with me that while God lives a soul that is his can not become unhappy.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill

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Baseball Metaphysics shows that there are Christian themes hidden in baseball games.

Letter 30 of Saint-Cyran

Mother Marie des Anges, I have always had you within me spiritually during the five years I was in prison and you would not have all the knowledge of me that I desire that you have if you had the slightest thought that I might have been capable of forgetting you. The bonds of our friendship based entirely on charity are your virtue and your solid piety and it is impossible that I separate myself from you any more than from God who is inseparable from Christian virtue. For virtue is nothing except the first ray from God joined to himself which by a remarkable infusion gives us his Spirit with his charity. His charity alone, his divine lovingkindness alone, is along with him our virtue. That is what God inspired me to tell you along with the news of my freedom.,

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill

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Letter 29 of Saint-Cyran

Mother Marie des Anges, I dare to tell you that if God does not breathe in the soul, everything we toss into our souls is useless and perhaps harmful. For in spiritual matters, it is easier to be lax about virtue than to progress towards it. If we do not take advantage of the spiritual food that we receive, it results necessarily that we become more wicked. In bodily sickness, when the sick have not well digested the food they have eaten, they have to be purged with bitter medicines and be forced to follow a long diet. Thus God makes us see visibly in the way we treat weak bodies the way we ought to act towards souls. Because they do not recognize their sickness, they want to eat as if they were healthy. There is however this difference which results only in deceiving us, the fact that we know very well when bodies are sick and we do not know when souls are. There are ten thousands of disguises that cover souls and they always have the power to perform the same external practices whether they are sick or healthy. This condition is worthy of being cried over and I do not see that there should be any charity greater than that given to persons worthy of crying over it.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill

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Letter 28 of Saint-Cyran

Mother Marie des Anges, I have a great deal of trouble telling you how it happened that I put off writing you for so long since my return. For although it is true that I had always been hindered by not having an hour to myself, that however does not seem to me able to provide a sufficient reason that will satisfy you. I should tell you that there was not a day when I did not wish to do it and that you were not also present in my spirit along with everything else that God wanted to be among my affections. But I believe that it pleased him by this long delay to give me proof that I love you by his charity since he took away from me any hurry to write this letter that I owed you after my return. Thus the delay I went through is far from being a sign of my forgetfulness because it serves as a proof that, not having any fierce passion in the permanent memory I have of you, I am able to be certain that the Saints find my affection for you agreable since it is tranquil and strong like theirs. This that I am telling you about my affection is more truthful in the feelings of my heart than in the expression of my words. I believe I should tell you it once and for all so that it gives you a sure way to interpret all the silences that I may use towards you in the future.  I will tell you just one thing regarding the communion that you wish to limit taking on Sundays. When you are more inclined to communion Sundays than the other days when you do not take it, you should not take it on those days. And when you are inclined well enough on the following days preceding Sunday, you can go to communion like on Sunday as long as the spirit of God does not draw you away from it.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill. usoftheworld.com

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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