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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