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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