It is true that the time of Lent is a time of grace and that those who know how to live by faith can not find any time more appropriate in order to please God. For the whole church joins together over all the earth and separates itself from all the objects of the senses and concupiscence in order to purge itself by a general penitence from all the evils she committed all along the year. If she did not make up one single body in whose composition enter the least and the most imperfect of the faithful, both the guilty and the innocent, we would have to say that the greatest benefit would be only for those who would have fasted more: but just as we see in the bodies of sick men that the smallest and most feeble parts feel first the goodness of cures, so likewise the most feeble and the most listless members of the church often find that towards the approach of Easter they are more fortified and stronger participants in the effects of Lent. Only we must enter the period with a good will and take part in it with as much strength as we are able for after that God makes the allotment of the fruit that derives from it as it pleases him without our being permitted to take the trouble to examine or think whether our portion is small or great. For in this way God does not count the penitence of each one separately compared with those of his brothers but receives it in common. That should end all the complaints of the sick and disabled who need only hold themselves fast to the body of the church, and do spiritually everything that they can not do otherwise, in order to participate in all her works and her goodness. This is so true that those in this holy time who best use the strengths of their strong bodies and are capable of supporting the pains of fasting can only benefit from them in proportion to the spirit and the good will they had while bringing them about. For God does not see anything of the creatures who are outside of himself except in himself. He also doesn’t see and consider anything of our exterior good works except according to the good state at the bottom of our heart. That state is sometimes like trees in winter full of heat within without being able to produce anything on the outside. God loves more this loss of fruit which stems only from exterior obstacles considering that men who value only what moves their senses love only the flowers and the fruits that sensuality produces.
There is the state in which you ought to be during Lent in order to manage it in a more excellent way than those who manage it who fast better than you. This is the advantage Christians have over Jews, to be able to fast and to please God and to be able to please God without fasting by nothing other than their union with the church, a union not only as members with their bodies but as something much more interior like the union children once conceived have with their mothers who do not know how to take anything good from the outside except the vital fluid that comes from it to them and perhaps better to them than to their mother herself although she may have worked to get what may nourish her, as the doctors say, and as the thinness she bears on her face while pregnant makes obvious to us. This union of faithful souls with the penitent church is all the more marvelous as it is inseparable from the other state created by good will in the soul. This will would have been enough for the Jews to be pleasing to God, without going through the rigors of penitence, if the time to gain the will had arrived when it was necessarily joined with the time of the birth in the world of the man-God. We live in this time because of God’ mercy which we should value more than we do for in Christ’s coming lies all our advantage and is the greatest consolation that almighty God could give us. Accordingly, if we desire other consolations, we become by this wish more ungrateful than the first angel in heaven and the first man in paradise. Don’t trouble yourself then about anything else. It’s enough that you live in silence and peace in the church of Jesus Christ and in the corner that you chose to adore him in religious solitude. In that consists your great penitence which lasts the whole year and benefits you because of your first choice whether you work or not. For whereas outside of the church, the greatest actions of virtue and austerity are worth nothing, on the contrary in the church the slightest desires are worth as much as the greatest works and penitences. All the virtues count only by the degree of the good will that grace forms so that the invocation alone of the name of Jesus and the words, “my father, my father”, repeated with the faith of children, can save us, as the apostle says, and what is more admirable the sighs of the soul can be enough for us. And I dare to say with great truth directed by the word of God that the peace of the soul alone and the silence of the spirit can make us blessedly happy. For when the soul enters such a state as the result of good grace, she must not leave without causing herself harm and violating her happiness if God himself does not withdraw her from it by some particular command, like the one he gave to the wife resting in her cell in the Song of Songs who gets angry obeying God. You have only to cut off all the anxieties that come from the memory of your sins in order to enjoy the happy life of a christian and a religious woman. For if anyone thinks about things in the past, the greatest saints so thinking would also be unhappy. All of that sin from the past is drowned in the blood of Jesus Christ that you do not value enough when you think again of so many things in the past. What he asks of you to make your powerlessness powerful and your partly voluntary partly necessary hardships be of great worth is that it will please you to offer them to him as the effects of your sickness at the beginning of Lent without doing anything else except closing your eyes. For what he asks from you now is the peaceful tolerance of your sickness and the awareness of your faults that slip themselves into your mind because of your weakness and the tricks of your enemy. The means to overcome them is that you confess them and be sweetly sad to not be able to bring about total justice just as Jesus Christ was not able. If God sends you death, the passage from this world to the other, which is the greatest penitence of the soul, will carry away every blemish and will make you appear before God as if you had never sinned. Because you received death with the gracefulness of charity, which asks from us that we do everything God has asked of us, and as the last effect of your sickness, which is in fact a favor since lying in a merciful state it makes you pay what you owe to divine justice by delivering you in advance of the condition where we in good health pay a stiff spiritual price to satisfy it. After receiving this letter you must do without holy communion throughout Lent except for Sundays. For if you live in peace bearing your sickness in silence and with patience in the church and in your religious community, you have found what is necessary to be nourished with the grace of God during this voluntary fasting and this abstinence from the body of Jesus Christ. What you asked me to clarify at the beginning of your letter is no more than a minor misgiving. I want you to do without everything except the peace and the joy that you ought to have by the grace of God that destined you to be a religious woman after having made you a christian. That will certainly make you happy if you believe me.
Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill
