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

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
Baseball Metaphysics finds indirect expressions of Christianity in baseball games

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