I have enough charity not to let my friends make errors without warning them about them. Your health no longer belongs to you anymore than your life. If it were praiseworthy for a weak person to live like someone who is stronger, it would be a great wrong for me to have never fasted for such a long time as a year, but I hope that since I have in my heart always the desire to fast, God will pardon my breaking this law. There is nothing by which God tests us so greatly as making us pass from from one life to another, and from fish to meat. Whoever opposes it does not know what Saint Paul said, that the Kingdom of God is neither meat nor drink. If in matters where we can carry out our good works, in spite of there being dislikable things among them, we are faithful to God acting according to the degree of our strength, he exempts us from everything that we do not do because we do not have enough strength. I beg you to be happy serving God according to the grace he gives you and not to aspire to the grace of others.
I believe I should give you this advice after the more expansive one I gave you after your sickness. Grace is always the same but exterior practices are different according to the age and the disposition of the body. It is not up to the old to do what the young do, nor for the young to do what the old do. All the sick and the weak are old and all the healthy are young.
Let each one regulate himself according to the gift and the power he has to serve God and let him remember that Saint Paul said we must think soberly. This applies also to good works and especially to those that concern the body. The will to do everything like we did them at another time, or as we see others doing them, means to violate, according to Saint Paul, sobriety, and to commit an excess when we believe we are fasting more austerely.
I was touched by your religious woman and I complain of when and whenever you hid her from me. I name Christian virtue the way you have represented to me hers. I would not like to be virtuous in any other way, for the peace and tranquility of the soul, in the midst of all the changes that happen, is the greatest mark of charity which is our whole virtue. All the rest is nothing for we must make judgments about charity and grace by this tranquility. I wish that in the Communion Of Saints God grants me goodness through her, as I would wish that he grant it to her by me. Yet it seems to me that having lived as she lived she has now little need of priests. I am happy if she still thinks of me.
I love poverty so much that sometimes I make it equal to martyrdom when a poor person takes pleasure in dying rather than finding a remedy for his hunger by taking a path that he does not believe to be Christian enough. There are ruins that God loves more than certain repairs, just as there are deaths he loves more than lives. It is a great thing to live on earth as though there is not anyone here except God and us. It is not believable what effects of providence dependence we have on him produces.
Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill
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