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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