Letter 80 of Saint-Cyran

I have always carried you in my heart since the Reverend Mother and Monsieur Singlin gave me knowledge of you. I have felt some of your pain and I would have wished to do everything possible for your relief. If prayers are the greatest testimony to our affection and our charity, God knows that I take care often to offer them to him for all your religious community and for you more than anyone else in particular.

   Do not be wearied at all to be persecuted by an enemy who persecuted the Son of God and Saint Paul to the point of making him desire to be delivered from him by continual prayers. We lose ourselves often in the harbour and save ourselves sometimes in storms and perils. For God says by the voice of his Prophet that he hides himself in a storm in order to watch over us and and to assist us from this secret place.

   If you were anywhere else than in your saintly house I would fear for you. But those who are in such places and lead such a life are surrounded by mountains which are angels and these mountains are surrounded by a higher mountain, Jesus Christ, who supports them. While you are in such a place, don’t fear anything if you are subjected there to God under those who govern you in his name.

   I know very well why your enemy persecutes you. It consoles me and assures me that God is for you and against him. I say it to you with some confidence in the mercy of God. Do not fail to go to mass both before and after whatever happens to you. In fact do the opposite, go there again with the firm purpose to be more attached to it than you were before. You would give way to temptation if you were not to go there and you would yield to the devil who tempts you only to prevent you from going there.

  Three days ago someone who was tempted felt his temptation diminishing going to holy communion and that the enemy no longer was causing him impure tendencies. Since I knew his temperament, I told him that he should not for that particular reason go to communion more often than was his habit. For the devil himself wanted to play in this way with holy communion and withdraw when he would have received it in order to make him go to communion once more when it would please him. We must keep to rules more certain than those  when going to Mass and communion. Without taking communion he was delivered from this temptation just as I hope that without failing to go to Mass every day, God will give you true peace which does not always consist of that self-evident tranquility we demand.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill

The United States of the World, The Theater of the Impossible, The End of All Beginnings,Baseball Metaphysics, books and e-books by Daniel McNeill, are for sale at: amazon.com/author/graceisall

Dostoevsky held on stubbornly to only what a free examination of what was human in himself revealed. Lev Shestov wrote, “To enter the world of the human soul in order to subordinate it to the laws that exist for the outside world means to voluntarily renounce in advance the right to see everything there and accept everything". In "The Brothers Karamazov" , Dostoevsky revealed that God himself demands that man be free. Nicholas Berdyaev wrote, “In true humanity not only is the nature of man revealed but God Himself is revealed also." Three great thinkers reveal the authentic path to freedom.

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Letter 79 of Saint-Cyran

It is true that I had a great deal to do with the seclusion of Jeanne de Chantal who is now with God. In her last trip from Paris, God made a connection between her and me which was remarkable given my circumstances, which I will not describe here since they are so complicated. But it is that which makes the wound more acute. You will be able to learn otherwise how everything went and it is enough to tell you that I found in her everything I would ask in a true religious woman and principally with respect to temporal goodness, to the love we owe to the poor, to the work we do with our hands every day, to the minimal dealings we should have with men, and to the simplicity  of the ornaments for the Altar and the Church.

   I am very certain that there is nothing about which I was not in agreement with her from the most important up to the least in everything that can be useful in order to establish well a Religious Community in the Spirit of the Gospel, against which almost everyone is opposed.

   I have to say for your consolation only that it is certain that she is among those souls for whom we can pray with assurance that the prayer will be to their profit or among those for whom it is not necessary to pray, because death is their final purgatory and purifies in them all the blemishes and the unnoticeable stains of the soul that the most just are guilty of while they live in the world. Here everything we see, what we taste, what we feel has an infection which remains in it from the first sin of Adam and Eve which can infect the soul if God does not keep us from it by his grace.

   I hope I will be in the company of those that she will look at in heaven in the mirror which represents all things by its infinite light. We  must be silent to bear witness that we no longer treat her as we treated her in this world and that we bring to her the same reverence that we owe to heavenly things, things that no one on earth speaks about except stammering. You have only to remember her to keep yourself always in a renewed energy for the service of God.

   If those who govern in your houses are not like her in all things, I am not astonished by it at all because there is still less continuity and succession in the sequence of grace than there is in nature. We rarely see that the good qualities of mothers pass with the same perfection to their children.

   Nothing makes us see better that the holiness of grace is a completely free gift that depends wholly on the will of God. We should always keep those who possess it humble and make them admire continually that God has enriched them with it rather than others, without pretending that this grace should be communicated to others who will come from them by a natural or spiritual generation. We must leave the disposition of it wholly to God who interrupts very often the course of his graces in this world in order to make them better known and admired, as much by those who have received them as by others who can have knowledge of them without possessing them. This is very far from the perception of those who believe that the acquisition and the increase of God’s graces depend mostly on our spiritual activities and who hold to the principle that they must maintain their self-esteem and their reputation at any price whatever.

Daniel McNeill

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Letter 78 of Saint-Cyran

I received your letter where you provide me by the question you ask a subject for extensive writing. It is enough here to tell you in respect to absolution that everything is invisible and insensible in the sacraments and that we must have regard for nothing except good works which must be what we keep at continually. It is in heaven that we will have evidence, assurance and the experience of the good that we will take possession of there. As for the other point, the church on earth and that in heaven are but one communion. They join in spirit during the solemnity of All Saints Day. I chose that day by design for your first communion, because those who come from penitence are in that similar to non believers, for they come in again from the outside and as if from the space before the doors of the church to the inside. This circumstance regarding your communion will leave a mark forever on your soul and will emphasize the double obligation you have to the Son of God who made you enter two times into the unity of the saints. I beg him with all my heart that he do it himself by the entry of his Body in you in such a way that you may never be reduced to aspire to an equal grace which would suppose that the greatest disgrace in the world would have happened to you. I do not fear that any longer in you on condition that you continue to love separation from the world, that is, from men who live ruled by their reason or their senses. You include yourself among their company whenever your life, although solitary, holds you yourself under the power of these two faculties. In that case, you would do nothing by physically separating yourself, for the most excellent philosophers have achieved this, unless you go from the world to God in order to maintain yourself with him ceaselessly by prayers and good works. With that I dispense you from everything else except the obligation you have to love me, relating to me in the sight of God and as a part of the Body of Jesus Christ his Son. Never separate yourself from someone that God has made, as I hope he has by his infinite mercy, a selfsame spirit with him in order to be a selfsame spirit forever with you both on earth and in heaven.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill

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Letter 77 of Saint-Cyran

   There is nothing as dangerous as to weaken ourselves by too great consideration of our troubles and of the different means of entry to ourselves from the outside world which happen to us from time to time and which we ourselves often cause ourselves by our own conversation. We must forget ourselves ourselves in order to advance and we must make for this end some effort by listening to God so that his grace may make us do it. We should thus go from occupation to occupation in order to avoid the emptiness that our enemy fills up by playing with us in endless ways during a sluggishness that he throws at us. He wants to persuade us without our realizing it or thinking about it that our listlessness and our troubles are similar to those of several souls who suffered for God. We should admire their troubles and not imitate them and we should not believe when they happen to us that ours are similar to theirs. I could not give you better advice in order to go beyond the stumbling blocks which can arise from the trickery of our enemy than that you continue to take note of all their varieties. For we know his thoughts, as Saint Paul says, in a similar occasion when he feared that a too great sadness might make penitence more harmful than useful to a penitent. That is why I dispense that man from the continuation and wish that he be put back in the common course of other believers to erase the remains of his sin by a charity in common and by the society of other Christians. I beg you therefore to distance yourself from all the views you could have about yourself and about others and no longer think anything except about the works of the Community. Participate in the joy of those who will seem to you more simple and more sincere in their ways of acting in order to deserve by this to enter into the joy of all the church at the feast of Easter. We must celebrate Easter as a banquet which is an image of that in heaven celebrated with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth as Saint Paul says. Every other type of devotion is blamable in you. The more you will be gay before God and mixed with the whole group of your sisters with a face sereen and anointed, as says the Son of God in the Gospel, marking the joy and the unction of the grace that is interior, the more you will be agreeable to your Spouse and fearsome to your enemy.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill

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Letter 76 of Saint-Cyran

Sister Mary,

I would like all my omissions to be like those of God which often are only evidence of the affection he has for those he seems to have forgotten. But I can tell you without lying that I have not forgotten you and that I have not omitted answering you by lack of remembrance or affection. Don’t make me tell you about other causes like the distractions and powerlessness of my condition in prison that prevent me from doing what I would like the most to do. This opportunity I take to write is all the better as it will help you fill the emptiness caused to the house at Port-Royal by the departure of Monsieur Singlin. His absence affects you particularly because of the weaknesses resulting from your sickness giving you cause to fear being without him when you need him. The first good news I announce to you is that you are no longer by the grace of God in the company of those for whom the assistance of a man however pious he may be is necessary. You have returned to God so well that you will never lack anything when there is only you and he to give you the assistance of his grace which you will need during your health or your sickness if it returns.

   I was pleased to hear in today's gospel reading what the Son of God said, that he is not alone since his Father is with him. He does not give any other proof of this company that his Father gives him except the care he has to be pleasing to him in everything and to do all the things his Father wishes. Everything he says of himself, every member of his being can say it about themselves when they feel that they are his and that they would not wish for anything in the world to belong to another and that everything in the past is an object of aversion that they avoid thinking about because it is not in harmony with the heart of God. I would not want a better disposition in the greatest troubles of the spirit, nor in  anguish facing death, than to receive with a good heart such a favorable answer which establishes in my heart the presence of God with a full measure of his grace. I care nothing for the help of men if it pleases him to maintain that in me. In whatever dejection I may fall, I am happy from now on if it pleases him to give me such a good disposition compared to which all the others must be less. For they are nothing if they do not produce in our soul that excellent fruit which puts there peace and joy. If men in the past were of profit to us by their encouragements and their help, that was to put us in that condition where once having placed us we have no longer any need of them. They should go away quick to assist other souls who have not reached where we have arrived. We have reason to hope that we will live and die well without them observing only what they have left us as a token of their charity. This virtue even operates sometimes better in souls in the absence of the person who was their spiritual director. For the good priest must say to those he has directed what Jesus Christ said before his death to his apostles: it is expedient that I go away because if I do not go away the Holy Spirit will not come to you and you will remain always in the childhood of grace without being able ever to act like strong men who have reached the perfect age of Christ. God has urged me to tell you this truth so that you may be attached only to him expecting everything from him without the intervention of any one, whatever excellence or integrity they seem to have.  

Faith teaches you that neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything and that everything comes from the invisible operation of God, who gives growth to the sowings and waterings of men. Consequently,  It is truly necessary that we begin already in this world to familiarize ourselves with God alone and to look only to him alone, since we hope to enter into eternity in order to live there only from him and from his look. It was the great service of Jesus Christ in this world; which he declares by those words of the Gospel which is to be read on Monday where he says that he is always in the company of his Father. For being in the company of men he did not believe to be there considering only the company of God. I will pray him to give us that grace to both of us to detach us from all other company and to make us live as we would like to die with him alone. May he represent Jesus to us on his cross where he receives consolation from no one, no one having spoken to him except to persecute him. Even his Father, in a manner of speaking, abandoned him which did not prevent him from being with him. For without that he could not have died as the redeemer of men and as the victor over demons. Do this favor for Monsieur Singlin to believe he is just as much with you even though absent. For me, I don’t ask anything more except that you practice with pleasure what I am telling you.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill

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Letter 75 of Saint-Cyran

Sister Mary,

I will speak again a little about your devotions. Saint Luke was a familiar of the Virgin and the most eloquent of the canonical authors of the New Testament. But he said nothing about the Virgin in the Acts and he spoke about her in the Gospel with an admirable brevity. Saint John who knew her as his mother and who has such an elevated perspective in his writings said nothing about the Virgin. The best way to praise the Virgin is to employ towards her the hymn of silence that we can even employ towards God according to Saint Jerome. We spoil the virtues of the saints by our words. Only the piety of our thoughts, our actions of charity and the imitation of their virtues can praise them well. As for me who am nothing, if someone praises me even so little, I feel something within me that turns sour and feel a sort of disgust for praise. On the other hand, when someone agrees with me in the same sentiment about truth and virtue, I am delighted. I feel united with another spirit in my soul in a way that is impossible to express and that moves me even as far as wishing to give my life for this man who loves God as the Gospel orders us to love him. Let’s imitate the saints. That’s how we will praise them. If we do not imitate them at all, they scorn our praise as God rejected with disgust the sacrifices of the Jews.

   I learned by a recent visitor here in prison with joy that God has given you back your health to use it for the embellishment of your soul so that falling sick again it will be still more prepared to leave your body. God has given it to you only for this purpose, that is, to be an instrument for the purification of your soul. It can not embellish itself and purify itself in this world by itself. For that the soul has necessarily the need of the body, like its own organ, and without that it would not be possible to increase what it has in it of beauty and grace. That is indeed what happens in baptism since the body then is washed in order to pass this mysterious good to the soul.
Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill

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Letter 74 of Saint-Cyran

Sister Mary,

It seems to me that I already told you that we must be moderate in everything and that it is God alone that we can and we ought to love without any moderation. However Job complains about his friends that they defend God too much and they pass beyond the limits in defense of his justice, not looking closely at the commands that such justice specifies for men. What happens to them with regards to his justice can easily happen to religious persons with regard to the charity we owe the saints and especially to the queen of saints and the mother of God. For she has been raised above all saints and all creatures, and so close to God, that it is easy because of this elevation she has among them, and this nearness she has with God, to deceive ourselves in our works and our words when we are ardent with her her and even with God. It is easy to transport the same affections we have for God which are without limits towards the Virgin who does not find them agreable because she considers herself a nothing even in heaven with respect to God. That is why you do not praise her by praising her as you do, you do not love her even while loving her, if you do not place some limits on your love, keeping only the love of God that we bring to God as the love which ought to be without limits. God has certainly given to his chosen his love in measured amounts but in spite of that he wished that we love him without limits. That is perhaps the sense of these words, In quem desiderant Angeli prospicere, which seem to say that the blessed angels desire always to look more and more at God without it causing them any uneasiness or violating their sabbath and rest. All the love we have for the saints, the angels and the virgin Mary should be with a certain measure to be distinguished from the love we have for God which has none at all. Otherwise it is an unregulated passion without knowledge and intelligence which is all the more to be feared because it is elevated and reaches to infinity creating an idol in the heart of the creature. All the virtues should possess moderation as though they are between two boundaries which are like two steep cliffs.

The soul easily loses itself if it is not well led and does not walk with discretion on a path so narrow that is like the one that leads to heaven which is not larger than an eye of a needle according to the Gospel. All the more reason that Christian piety which contains all the virtues must be moderated and conducted with discretion. It is enough that the virgin Mary be between God and the persons of the Holy Trinity on one hand and on the other hand all the creatures as if making a link between the angels and the blessed souls with God. Descending she finds that she is the first after the three divine persons; ascending she finds herself first before all the hierarchies of saints. What more do we want? - isn’t it a great enough marvel that God made a corruptible woman the mother of God and then afterwards he made her in the heavenly paradise what Adam was in the earthly one with respect to all the visible creatures, and to Eve even, having been the end, the principle and the center of everything. For me, I consider her greatness elevated above every idea even that the angels can have of where a creature can reach by the unlimited power of God that I admire that men might have been able to believe it. And it is certain that if God had not caused for them a sweet violence in the heart neither men nor angels ever would have been persuaded of it. Persuaded that a poor creature and especially a woman, and a woman created from Adam and by generation from Adam, who is tainted with filth might have been able to rise to this eminence incomprehensible to men’s senses, to their reason and even to their faith and which makes them only humble themselves before the vision of such an object even more extreme than every thought that God and the Church propose to them. You could not do better than imitate them in the devotion you have for the virgin Mary following your faith without using your reason and to not extend yourself in movements and words which are not in harmony with divine knowledge and are not pleasing to the virgin, being wasteful to your heart making it more vain without you yourself noticing it. For all excesses in devotion are different from deficiencies and flaws we encounter in it that we see and we notice. We easily believe these when we are warned about them but not the others and we often attach ourselves to them thinking we are doing well because of the excellence of the saintliness and of the grandeur of the object which we pretend to honor and respect with such effusions of the heart and of the tongue. That is why I could not give you better counsel than to remove from your spirit and your letters these words that perhaps it will be infinitely pardoned because the virgin Mary has loved infinitely. They belong only to Jesus Christ from whom you remove them by offering them to the virgin Mary who does not receive them in the sense that you give them. Nothing displeases more men of good sense who are well regulated in their souls than to hear the excessive praises that they are given and that they know do not belong to them. It’s like a false tone in music. Someone who understands it better is more offended. I would prefer to suffer an affront than false praise and it seems to me it embitters my spirit more. Be aware of what the virgin can do with those we give her when they are not regulated by our faith. You have only to follow it in all your actions and in all your words and say always the words of Saint Paul, Quid dicit Scriptura, and if you wish an additional support add, Quid dicit Ecclesia. For it is she that regulates us as much in the ways of expressing our faith as in faith itself which would be nothing if we did not receive it from the Church and from her teachings. We often spoil the virtue of the saints by our words. It is only the piety of our thoughts which can praise them well if they are accompanied by imitation of their virtues.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill

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Letter 73 of Saint-Cyran

Sister Mary,

If it is on this feast day that God has reconciled you, and he has done it truly, you have reason to rejoice. It is the day of the establishment of the Church, of the perfect reconciliation of God with the Apostles. It is the conclusion of all the mysteries of the Son of God after which he did not do anything more. He only did what God did after having created and formed all the natures of the world. If you live in peace and silence as Jesus Christ will live up until his Second Coming when he must come to act and to speak in another way than he acted and spoke in the First. You will bear witness that you have received the grace of a perfect reconciliation at Pentecost. For you have one quality as a religious woman more than the Apostles because God has not sent you to make voyages in the world to teach it because by the grace you have received you have been cloistered and attached to one place. In that consists the perfect devotion of a religious woman who has been reconciled with Jesus Christ on the feast day of Pentecost. If there is activity in her words and works, she contradicts herself and distances herself from the ressemblance she should have with Jesus Christ, who does not speak at all and does nothing new since Pentecost, as greatly as she distances herself from silence and peace. There is the thought that I received for you this day. I feel obligated as a penitent to give you some sense not of my suffering and my solitude here in prison, as you indicated you want in your letter, and which in truth are nothing, but of the prayers I make to God. I pray that he may see me in those who have offended me and for whom I ask him (as I ask for myself) the spirit of penitence. Everything happens in common in the Church and the least grace that God spreads about in it is received in the whole community as is all the effusion of the Holy Spirit received by it on the day of Pentecost. But the spirit of penitence has this in particular among whoever asks and receives it, receives it to the degree that God has pity on him, to humble himself among all those who have sinned like he.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill

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Letter 72 of Saint-Cyran

Sister Mary,

I prefer to answer your letter in two words rather than not answer it at all. I have you as present in my heart as if I wrote you every day. I beg you only to not remember at all past things, and to never speak about them but to make die in silence all these infidelities and all these fears, all these miseries and these errors that you speak about. There is absolutely no greater penitence than the humility and the simplicity that we show to God and to men, and even to our spiritual directors, by never speaking about ourselves, neither anything good nor bad except as much as is necessary. God will accomplish in his eternity everything he decided to do with us before we were created. But we should do nothing other during the course of our lives except to be simple in our words and in our thoughts, saying little, and doing everything we can in order to obey him and to serve him during the rest of our lives. It’s in that that consists the thanks we owe him for the extraordinary graces he has given us. I pray him to put me in this condition when I will be on my deathbed, that men hear nothing from me, and that he alone sees that all my bones are humbled by the feelings I have from his grace in my heart. It is not only for Saint Agatha to triumph by expressing words of love both during her life and while dying. Innocence praises and sings, penitence humbles itself and is silent.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill

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Letter 71 of Saint-Cyran

Madame Arnaud,

I am writing you with darkness within me because of the bitter feeling I have about your distress which has deprived me of the usual means to do what I do. I can only tell you in order to console you firmly that you are certainly among those  whom sufferings permit to go sooner to paradise. Having given you previously signs that you are among his chosen, your state is certainly a grace that God has given you which includes your love for him and his love for you while he keeps you here to suffer a little. I speak of God’s love for you because being what you are in relation to him it is an advantage that purifies you and joins you more readily to him. If you were suffering other than with patience, I would have difficulty consoling you with such a benefit. But since those who have informed me of your sickness, have also informed me about your patience, I can only beg you to thank God that he deigns to afflict you here where his justice is joined to his mercy; this is not the case elsewhere where the justice which purifies the just and the chosen will be completely pure. As a result you owe it to yourself to rejoice in your bed with the joy that faith gives (which surpasses every feeling, like the peace that Saint Paul speaks about), you owe it to yourself, I say, to rejoice for three reasons. First, for the grace God gave you in your marriage, which expresses itself in you and your children, having exchanged worldly fortune, which ought to be viewed as a mere semblance, for divine fortune, which ought to be without any semblance. For it rarely happens that excellent persons of this world succeed well as far as God is concerned in their families, especially when those on whom the hope of a worldly fortune is founded seem to be entirely secular, and what is more, speaking of your sons, the brothers of the one who is deceased, they are more than just secular persons before God. Second, after having become a religious woman at Port-Royal with your daughters and under your daughters, God is making you see what is going well in their religious community which directly nourishes your soul. Your sickness is perhaps one of the greatest results of the religious life you chose after your marriage which heaps blessings over the others because God now makes you suffer in the community in order to purify you and exempt you from a more rigorous  purification even though full of love from God and also from his creatures. What you are suffering is an affliction of charity as the patience God gives you proves. You must thank him for it as a grace perfectly pure that he gives you, a grace in which consists, as Saint Paul says, the perfection of the work. You have only to await after it that he do with you whatever will please him as much in this world as in the other. I tell you with certainty what I would not dare tell others, that you have a place there and no doubt a place better than mine. It is in your submission to the will of God and in your patience which makes up all of your present devotion and all of the devotion of the most perfect. I exempt you because of it from any other prayers. For the prayer of the heart takes the place of all other prayers. It is the prayer of the blessed who do not speak at all while praying. If they should suffer, you would be like them as you are now like the souls in purgatory who pray and suffer with joy in their grief like you.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill

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Letter 70 of Saint-Cyran

My very dear Sister, you are right to praise God and rejoice, in whatever state you are in, because of the grace he has given  you by making you see the last of your five daughters also take the veil of Novice at Port-Royal. If it happened only as it usually happens, your joy would  be less. But it happened with proofs that God prepared for salvation all five of them with his Spirit and his graces and that he submitted them all instantaneously to his domination. Your joy should be extraordinary and you should admire the liberalities that God has granted you. For I know few mothers who can say what you can say in particular about all your daughters. I believe I should aid you to return thankfulness to God by alerting you to the magnitude of his grace. If it had been confined to your daughters alone, it would still be out of the ordinary, there being no one in Paris towards whom God has acted in this special way. But when I see that the eldest of your children, Robert, also participates in this grace and that your last son, Antoine, who seems to be the least has become the greatest using in his religious writings the two gifts that God has given him of science and piety, I see that nothing is missing from your present happiness.

   You know that you often told me that you love your children only for heaven. According to your wishes, I took trips to visit Antoine in order to draw the blessings of heaven to him and win him over completely for God. When you were thinking the least about his conversion and I also, God gave him to the influence of your prayers and God wished that I also had a part in his wonderful change even though I was absent when it happened. What does it mean except that God wishes to make you happy and content in this world before your death?

   This does not include yet my saying anything about your present relationships with your daughters since you have also as a widow taken the veil of a Novice at Port-Royal.  They have become by a marvelous change your Sisters and one, Agnes, as the Abbess of Port-Royal, has become your Mother. In addition, she takes the place for you of heaven where the holy virgin Mary, who was Mother of her Son on earth has become his daughter and he her Father by the glory that he gave her, a glory made possible by the mystery of the Holy Trinity which makes the Son fully equal to the Father. It was a spiritual generation as was the divine generation by which the Virgin Mary gave birth to God the Father in the form of God the Son. It is a change of names which should fill your heart with devotion and provide you with an interior conversation until the day when it will please God to call you to go thank him in the language of the angels for so many favors that he has rarely given to mothers in this world.

   I am sure that your admiration was doubled when you saw that under the government of your daughters, Part-Royal has entered into the spirit of poverty without which religions are almost nothing except vain appearances of piety. It must be a great satisfaction for you to be able to live as a true Christian as Jesus Christ lived and to not be religious in appearance but in spirit and truth. You can in the future live in this monastery as in a house of God with the same expectation as Simeon lived in Jerusalem and say with him when Christ will be present for the last time between your arms and in your mouth, his last words: now you will take away, my lord, your servant, according to the word you gave him. For what is admirable and of a great consolation, Jesus Christ will extend to each Christian who will have waited for him what he had promised to Simeon, to come to him in his person  and in his body of glory and not of death a little before his last moment. This makes us see that the whole short form of Christian devotion boils down to live waiting for the coming of Jesus Christ and that the Patriarchs and the Prophets had no other object at all before the birth of Jesus except to wait for him with the peace and silence of the spirit.

Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill

The United States of the World, The End of All Beginnings, The Theater of the Impossible, books by Daniel McNeill, are for sale at:

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