Letter 48 of Saint-Cyran

The sickness you speak about in your letter is painful to me. I am afraid that it may be the result of some secret sadness arising from what we ordered this soul. She has perhaps weakened herself from seeing herself separated from confession and communion, two practices which apparently supported her devotion before. If that was it, you must tell her that it is a trick of her enemy that she should not let herself go along with, depriving herself by yielding of the opening by which God will gratify her with his gifts at the right time and the right place. I do not dare believe that this is the cause of her sickness and I take my fear as a misgiving which nevertheless shows the kindly feelings I have for her true welfare. There is nothing I would not do to set her mind straight and to take from her the idea that there might have been another way to guide her. It is not in the usage of saintly practices like confession and communion that consist our principal piety. The day of Pentecost makes us see this. Before the Apostles were imperfect and God did not put them in the true state of perfection and in the fullness of Christian virtue except by giving them the fullness of his grace, from which derived then all the particular acts of virtue which produced finally the conversion of the world. They endured the martyrdom of their bodies by the power of the same divine love that they had received on that day. When God will have given grace to this soul to give her the kindly feeling that it is necessary to have towards him to make useful for her all the other saintly practices of our religion, then we will not delay giving her the usage of confession and communion, that she perhaps desires. But however while waiting for this grace it is necessary that she do peacefully what we have prescribed for her. She herself should condemn before God these aversions that she might possibly have as being inspired in her by an invisible spirit that she ought to hate. The devil will surely hate seeing her enter in such a good way the paths towards her salvation.

   Otherwise, I have nothing to tell you about the practices that we should adopt because of sickness. I have not ordered for this soul for exterior penitence anything except the practices of your religious community joined to the adoration of God. All of that however is not much compared to the patience we should have before God in sickness. For when patience derives from charity and the love of God it is like the fullness which the outside of a house merely covers and without which presence inside everything else, however beautiful it may be, would be nothing. Patience is the perfection in us of God’s work. According to Saint Paul and Jesus Christ it is the consummation of Christian life and according to the Fathers it is the gathering together of all the virtues. In conclusion, please tell this soul that as a 1000 years are before God only one day, a sickness well endured is worth more before God than a great number of good actions done while healthy. There is no penitence at all like that that God himself imposes and that a soul endures with true humility.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill

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Letter 47 of Saint-Cyran

I say nothing here to the Mother Abbess. If it were possible, I would write her every day.

I ask for her prayers more than ever and those of that sister who does penance being blind.  I do not dare to say that I envy her that she is blind because we must flee from evils and only deal with them in a spirit of Christian humility. But it seems to me that being blind is for her a great grace. Sister N. is not less in my memory she being only one heart made up from all the hearts of the community. If I wrote to her and to all your religious community, I would not be able to subtract my heart which lives first and last for all those who belong to God. Just as the heart is in the body, I pass without thinking about it from the affection I owe your religious community to the affection I have for the whole church.

   I am touched by the continuation of the sickness of Sister Anne of the Nativity. But tell her that I send her from the bottom of my heart the thought that if I were in the good disposition that she is in towards God, I would like to die instead of her but like her. There is nothing to fear in this final passage for those whom God has given the grace to live as she has lived. She should not cause herself grief because of her faults but hope that she will be purified of them by the sacrifice of the Mass which cleans and whitens souls that belong to God. I prescribe for her nothing else but her submission to the will of God and that she bear witness of her submission to him by silence, by rest and by humbly suffering from the evils that accompany sickness. However she will suffer with all of us praying for her. According to our faith, peaceful suffering accompanied by silence and waiting for God is the greatest of all prayers. The apostle Saint Paul and Jesus Christ in the gospel prescribe for the faithful nothing more when they are healthy except to do good works and live waiting for the coming of Christ. When we are sick and we have no longer any way to do good works, we must put in their place patience and suffering from our sickness and join to them the same waiting for Christ which is common to the sick and healthy and is inseparable from the faith and charity of a  Christian. That is what I would like someone to tell me often if I were in her place for in that consists our whole consolation, that by sickness we go to Jesus Christ and that Jesus Christ comes to us. I say it with great confidence to all sick persons as I say it to her. I pray that she live at this time more than at any other time in the great hope of Christ. Let her say in her heart to God that she is in her bed for the hope of Israel which is the name which consoled the apostle Saint Paul when he was in chains and uncertain what would happen to him but very certain that the greatest evil that happened to him would be his greatest good.

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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Letter 46 of Saint-Cyran

Mother Superior, I do not know what will be the result of the increase in the sickness of the sister we both sympathize with. God who controls it makes us see by our experience that doctors are often wrong in their judgements. Whatever happens, we have a great reason to console ourselves because she is among those whom we should cry over for one day or for two at most.

   I know some things about her that she told me that make me know she belonged to God before her birth. Whatever declines however great they might have been, even if God had not preserved her from them, they would not have been able to harm her because the plummets of God’s Chosen are incapable of harming them and God derives his own glory from them and they theirs.

   That is enough said to rejoice at her death if it happens.  Even her long sickness is a reason for our consolation as a sign of the unending peace she will have received after her death. For the deathbed where the good are sick for a long time before dying is truly a purgatory that God prolongs in diverse ways according to the remains of sins in us that eternal justice can not allow to go unpunished.

  I can say that I loved her more than I revealed to her and that I was ready to do for her whatever she desired from me. I also shed tears over her and I hope that God will have caused my tears to have been from love and charity and that she will see them and perhaps feel them in the other world. It pleases God to cause souls in heaven to feel the effects of the Communion of the faithful. At the times of the beginning of the church, the faithful then were called Saints because they were truly Saints whereas in our times we become Christians by means of faith only after great difficulties. We are barely able to gain faith by imitating the works of Jesus Christ by which he was the Christ of Christs and the Saint of Saints, by his works and not by faith which was not in him because he was blessed both in his clear vision of God and in his mortal body.

   I pray to God that he purify me in whatever place will please him and if it is in this world it will be for me a favor rather than a severity. It will result greatly from his mercy and little from his justice no matter how great may be the suffering it will please him to send me, whereas in the other world purifications in purgatory are the result only of his justice. That is why purgatory so greatly resembles hell.

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