You speak perhaps truthfully when you say that everything that happened was a secret spiritual punishment for the anxieties that you cause yourself about whether everything is going well. We must do everything in peace in order to do it religiously and there is never any peace if we are not decided in our heart to depend on God. Saint Peter wished to walk with Jesus Christ on water. He granted him his wish but when the apostle saw that he was losing himself, he began crying out and worrying himself. The peace of a religious woman is worth more than all her household goods. Recover yourself and forget nothing of what you must do for the regulation of your community. If it happens that everything goes badly, support it and be prepared before God before it happens. If God desires that you live in a state of poverty, it is all for the better. Perhaps by that he desires to make you and all your community rich in the soul. In the end, it is not religious to be anxious about household goods and all the things of this world which all of them together are nothing. If you pray to God as much as you speak and act to make everything go well, probably everything would go better even if things were actually worse. We must live by faith and not by our senses. The Christian life is a life of God and is not only the life of angels and the life of heaven as says Saint Chrysostome in the lessons that we read today in our breviary. The life of the senses is not the life of men but of beasts. The life of reason is still worse than that of the senses because it is a life of vanity, anxiety and continual distraction.That is what I found in my heart to tell you since you called on me about your anxieties related to your household. However when distractions in affairs are not born from anxieties in the spirit, they are less harmful and it is more easy to chase them away. The Son of God having said in Saint Matthieu that it is not in our power to make a white hair black, he meant to tell us that the smallest things depend on him and not on us. We must ask of him that grace to look only to him in the success of things provided that we do
not make any voluntary omissions in things when we must act according to his orders outside of which if we amuse ourselves or promote ourselves we sin and we must ask his pardon because of it.
I have seen your debts and I am not too frightened because of them. If you are good, withdrawn, silent and entirely with God and not with whomever of the world, God will take care of your community. But in order to make him active there, your justice must be plentiful. It is towards that that I encourage you for the most part as the only way to pay your debts. God will cause you to experience a certain patience in your creditors that can come only from him.
You do well to live as someone in debt and poor. It is the second way to make God active in helping you.
I do not like your tears because of your debts. You must not cry for what is good. We must cry for our sins and those of our brothers and work to make our creditors as content as we will be able to make them. God is in heaven seeing prisoners and those in debt. It is enough for you and me that he deigns to look at us.
This will be a grace that God will grant you after you act as I advise, that is, that he will make you free of this debt. And if you support it with real patience and without grumbling, I am sure he will grant it to you in this world or in the other.
It is easy to sin performing the good works of God. For we believe we are lazy when we do not see ourselves in some activity. It is certain that whoever acts less, going peacefully from one thing to another and doing the work to which one is presently attached with a movement that derives from a mediocre degree of virtue, does better. For if virtue is only virtue in a mediocrity far from extremities, the actions of virtue should be likewise in a mediocrity removed both from slowness and activity.
All charity, if it is done well, should cause some pain, either before giving it, giving it or after. That causes me less surprise by N. but what will we do about her since God threw her into our hands? We must pray for her and continue to do for her the best for her that we will be able. Such sufferings are worthwhile penances when charity is part of them. Let’s not lose anything, if possible, of our good works by the bad mood of those in whose favor we do them. For as the Son of God said, it is not we but his spirit which speaks during times of persecution. Therefore it is not those ungrateful and unintelligent people who receive our charity but God in them.
More than prudence which asks that we pamper this girl and not turn her into a malcontent, these are penances that God offers you. I embrace willingly those who make me suffer more than you might be able to believe, for I hate ingratitude and disparagement more than pain that afflicts the body.
Translated from the French by Daniel McNeil
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