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
The United States of the World, The End of All Beginnings, The Theater of the Impossible, books by Daniel McNeill, are for sale at:
amazon.com/author/graceisall
amazon.com/author/graceisall
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