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

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