Letter 61 of Saint-Cyran

   The Holy Spirit should always purify our souls as he purifies the Angels without there being any faults in them although it is certain that there are always some in us. Scripture compares our good works to dirty things and if that is ever true it is true in our times.

   For my part, I am always ready to condemn myself in all my good works and especially for greediness in the simplest of them. I have the habit of saying every day to God among my prayers this verse from Psalm 119, Incline my heart unto thy testimonies, and not to covetousness so that it may protect me from greediness in all my best actions. I found out recently that Saint Augustine used the verse for the same purpose. Excuses, accusations, complaints and thoughts are fearsome in good works without mentioning other faults that slip into them.

   We must not think about the past. If God judged us by it, we would all be damned. We must always be seeing and taking care of the present as children of eternity.

   I have never so well seen as I have in my solitude that the life of man is war and a perpetual storm. I feel it in my everyday experience, as greatly in matters within as in those without. God desires to force us by it to not hold fast to anything and to make us remember that we are travelers who walk towards their country among the storms and wars of the century.

   It is only charity that rules, as much in each of the faithful as in the whole church. Happy someone who possesses it. He is always watching out for himself and for his friends. He makes from all of them and from their affairs a kind of particular body in honor of the charity of Christ who made from all the faithful and from all the affairs of the faithful one body and one spirit that he has made his own and that he does not distinguish from his own and the one he formed himself for himself in the Virgin by the Holy Spirit.

   I will have particularly in spirit tomorrow the two sick persons with you, the feast day of Saint Augustine which is a favorable day for us who love grace. Grace’s primary truth is that there is no sickness that God does not cause and  that he is both the true doctor and the one who put in the cure of the body the image of the cure of the soul.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill
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