I am feeling the same pain as you about N. but I say in my heart with David, “I am prepared and I am not troubled” (Paratus sum et non sum turbatus). There are troubles that are good and troubles that are bad, and charity has its true and sincere passions just as the passions have their false charity that we must name a false love.
The virtues of this world have something human about them and contain a little of the dirt from which they are born. Virtue as well as the soul contract something sensual in the body that receives it. That said, we can excuse the worries we have about the sicknesses of our friends. The trouble we have about them is a penitence for us and a punishment for our sins as well as a loss we cause ourself because of them when it pleases God.
I thank your whole religious community for the care it takes to pray to God for me and I console myself together with the sick person and I ask for her only calm for her heart and quiet for her spirit and her mouth joined to her suffering from the evil that she bears so well in her body.
We must remember that it belongs only to Jesus Christ to suffer and to die while crying out loud and for us to suffer and die silently. One is the mark of a force divine and human and the other the mark of our very human and very humble weakness.
I am nearly angry that the desire I have to be faithful to God in the least of things does not allow me to be always as self-satisfied as I might wish. I say to God for N. only one word, penitence. I do not see that she can do it better than by the exercise of the painful charity that God has involved her in by her own initiative. There are involvements that we enter either by surprise or by human passion from which God alone ought to release us. I would not however wish that my advice be taken as a rigorous law. I do not pretend to constrain and even less to dominate anyone of any social status who consults me. I follow first and foremost God in the counsel people ask of me and then I consider that souls are not always susceptible to what is best and cause sometimes harm to themselves while wishing to do good for others. Everyone is the judge of his own powers and excessive violence is bad even in the exercise of charity.
This person you speak to me about seems to be one of those simple and innocent souls to whom everything is allowed. They can even, according to the gospel, swallow poison without any harm. You should not break with her. Your business with her is saintly.
Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill
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