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
The United States of the World, The Theater of the Impossible, The End of All Beginnings, books by Daniel McNeill, are for sale at: amazon.com/author/graceisall
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08H8XKZ52
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