Letter 52 of Saint-Cyran

   I am pleased that you speak only of a cold and a headache for N. It is a sign that she will not die from her sickness. What remains for her now is just penitence since what penitence death gave her was too rude. You have needs to use her for which are penitential only for her, although on the other hand her works and taking care of her health are good for her and for others.

   I wish that Sister N and I were poor in spirit: we would be overly rich before God. For when poverty is extreme and resembles the Sacraments, which are exterior and interior, it is truly Christian and makes us equal to the men made new by Jesus Christ. Otherwise she is either angelic or Hebraic and neither the one nor the other condition belongs to us because the time of one has past and the time of the other has not yet come.

   Saint Cyprien does not want Christians to believe they have lost anything when their vines freeze and their harvests fail. If we were good Christians, we would believe we had not lost anything as the result of our law suits. We should know how to anticipate them in order not to begin them and if they are forced on us to support their loss. Just one suit can become a source of passions. A good of this world is such a small thing before God and a great cause of disorder among men. We cannot say whether we win or lose, in view of the judgement of God, by losing a legal action.

   We must suffer with patience the disorders that we cannot prevent. It seems to me that God has a reason for everything and that he gives us excessive amounts of grace because he does not want to put us to a test in everything. For he is the one who puts men in prison and troubles their businesses. I saw this again yesterday in four or five examples from Scripture.

   Please tell Mademoiselle N that I beg her to trust herself to God so that he may humiliate her by his grace in her heart to the point of making her equal to simple and small people. It is to them alone that he promised the intelligence of his truths and the infusion of his love, without which the plan she has will not succeed for her very well.

I will ask this also from God for her and I would like to be agreable enough to God to obtain from him this grace.

   I recommend to you this new widow that God has made fall into your hands so that she may share in your charity. I beg you also that you be more diligent than you have been up till now towards my sister N. You should visit with her more than the others even if it will only be from time to time. We have to pray a great deal for her and have great pity for those whom God seems to favor less.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill

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Letter 51 of Saint-Cyran

I like order in everything and that we do everything by number, weight and measure as we do ruling our house and as God did in creating the world and the church.

   I desire that you imitate the ancient discipline of the church. It used to do nothing except in common and the bishops used to call their priests to their councils. Even Jesus Christ who is the head of the whole church does nothing except in common with the entire universal church. He distributes his graces which are his goods and his riches in a general spirit. He does not consider any prayer or any good work in particular but in general as done by the whole body of the church which he takes into account when he makes his special awards and shares his particular gifts.

   I do not do otherwise in all my own matters. I consult all those who must have a place in them before reaching any conclusion. I give a place for God’s grace whom I invoke and I call on others to invoke praying him to make the matter clear to us. For without God all the resolutions of men are vain. And I use this method whether there is a little difficulty or a lot because of the consequences that can happen as a result which only God knows. Therefore I employ delayed actions and suspensions in order to give room to the grace of God to enlighten me by this waiting period and by my submission to him.

   I grieve over the sickness of my sister N. I recommend her to God and she has every reason to trust herself to his mercy. He has given us evidence by the change he worked in her that he wished to save her. She belongs to those souls whose natural charity results in tears. But the natural workings of grace dries them by the joy it gives to her heart. She should derive all her consolation from the memory of the love that was proof to her that it came from God. God has not given so much grace to others and it is they we should pity. Our faith causes us to have compassion for those inflicted with incurable evils and that condition should make us inconsolable. She will find God peaceful towards her and ready to receive her. That does not prevent that our prayers for her be mixed with tears.

   I would be pleased if we obtain the position you wrote me about for this young man David provided that he reveal beforehand the whole depth of his soul and all his inclinations to Monsieur N. He knows very well that I do not love anyone except in order to save him and that I do not intend that he enter this house except to live there virtuously and according to God. Someone should tell him also that because I desire virtue in young people and not having found him submissive to my teachings, I had separated him for a time from my house having however always maintained for him the same affection in my heart. In that I imitated the behavior of God who abandons sometimes in appearance his chosen and then brings them back to himself when he knows that the abandonment in which he left them for a time will be useful for them  in order to better keep them doing their duty in the future.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill

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Letter 50 of Saint-Cyran

In answering your last  letter, I must say that there are always things in us to abridge, that we must always raise and lower, rest and act, hurry and slow down, to progress in the grace of God and to prevent those empty places and those deformities that are used as safe havens by our enemy. When I wrote to you about your activity, I considered mine in yours and I urged on myself in order to keep watch with you. Everything in grace, as in nature, is composed of opposites and we must always have our eyes lowered and raised towards God in order to not fall into some fault.

   I believe that someone who is the most perfect is the least astonished when he falls back. He recovers from his fall more calmly by taking in easily a good amount of everything that is told to him. For what are we not capable of when it is a question of sin? We have only God to thank who holds us back and makes us take steps forward in virtue in the midst of our greatest weakness.

   I know the weakness of your body. Preside over it. It is a penitence that God has prescribed for you to deal better with you at this time rather than at another. Whoever can follow God by adapting himself to the weakness of his body is the most humble.

   As for what happened to you regarding this candidate for your religious community, I tell you that you must be very careful not to contribute to the union of those whom God separates as well as to the separation of those whom he unites. It is true that if we are not eager to become involved in vexatious encounters, and if we are not too afraid to be displeasing or to desire to be pleasing to people, and we let God act, so he can caution us and enlighten us with his light, we will escape without pain from the greatest difficulties. But we wish too greatly to unite God and men, our spirit and his, to keep ourselves at peace in our feelings and to conquer for God without making war.

   We must ask God for spiritual tranquility to act well with people who anger us, and especially that it may please him to make us simple and wise in conferences, in conversations and in businesses which are concerned with his glory. What difference does it make if we are not pleasing to men if we are thinking seriously about pleasing God? But it seems to me that there is nothing that causes us more harm after those prejudices and preoccupations of our spiritual life in certain situations than dialogues we have with ourselves and with others about what transpired in those kinds of conversations we had with someone. We should always let some time go by before speaking about them and let our spirit rest using one or two days for other occupations or for saintly conversations which make what happened previously die. And then afterwards if we think it is good to examine what we said and what happened in some conversation, we should do it after invoking God together with some spiritual person. But if there is a lot of doubt about the subject, it is better to not speak about it at all to anyone and make it die in God, in whom all good works should die as his chosen die to the world receiving a new life in him.

   I beg you to instruct my Sister N. that  extraordinary healings of souls are by no means less miraculous than extraordinary healings of bodies and thus she is more obligated to God and to all the instruments that it pleased him to use  as if he had resurrected her by the prayers of Martha and Mary Magdalene who are represented by these two good Mothers to whom she owes a complete obligation.  Since God used them, she should love, respect and revere them as the true Mothers of her soul  of which God alone who created her is the Father. There is nothing which makes me see better that God loved her with that love which he had before the creation of the world for his chosen. This obligates her to love him without attaching herself to any creature since he deigned to love her, as she herself has given me reason to believe, before there were any creatures either on earth or in heaven. Let her attach herself only to the practice of the virtues which have preserved themselves only in religion and which have been instituted only to separate the soul of creatures by saintly exercises and attach it by love to God alone.

   As far as my life in prison, I tell you that it is against Saint Paul to believe that the truth can be imprisoned and against Saint John also. While he was in prison, he preached by his disciples more strongly what he had been imprisoned for. It seems to me his prison was like heaven and being there he resembled Christ who did not establish faith by his disciples until after he had risen up to heaven. If you believe that the whole world is our country, and all the houses that are in the world our house, and all the riches of the world our own property, you would never believe I was a prisoner or poor, and so I do not believe I am in that condition. I consider myself not only free, something pagans could never have said, but also as really delivered living still in prison, something pagans ought not to have said and were unable to say in their wise madness either to God or to men. I say it boldly with full consciousness to both.

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 49 ofSaint-Cyran

Those who take care of you and desire to conserve your health for the good of your religious community have proposed to me with charity certain things that they have noted in your actions in order to know what I think about them. I answered in substance that, in order that all our actions be actions of virtue, they must have something of mediocrity about them without which there is no virtue at all. This excludes both activity and idleness from the life of a religious Christian.

   I try to live this way and when I fail I am repentant and I accuse myself before God of a fault. We must bear witness to him that our charity which is our virtue is well ordered and that we prevent that there be an emptiness in us by distancing ourselves just as much from a multiplicity of actions as from negligence and bad omissions. Without this there is neither peace nor joy in our occupations whose fruits should be charity.

   This advice is totally different from that I gave you in order not to wound your health doing more than your weakness permitted. We must admire God in all good people who are able to serve him otherwise than we and not always imitate them. A weak man who would like to do more than he can is speaking to you in this way.

  I will not tell you anything about what happened to me except to say that all of life is full of risks and adventures that we are unable to foresee. All of piety consists in taking them well as effects of the order of God for whom nothing is purposeless and accidental. We should pray to God that he deliver us from the bad effects which depend on our choices and that he give us patience in the face of other effects which depend on him alone and that he himself has placed in those that proceed from our freedom.

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