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

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