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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