I received your letter to P.R. yesterday. I intended to answer it at the first moment I had. Everything has been used up in favorable matters up to this minute as I write to you between eleven and twelve. I emphasize this for you in order to let you know that I wanted to please you because you are sick, afflicted and conscientious, although so as not to conceal anything from you, It would have been not at all necessary to respond to your difficulty if you had been willing to believe me and to remember what I have often told you. For the good will that is in the bottom of your soul should consume this fault which is not great in you because it is entangled with ignorance and simplicity. Remember that according to the gospel our parents are our enemies and their progress in the goods of the world is usually their ruin. There are two rules that should guide you in the future in relations with them. You have done the main thing having recognized the fault, having humiliated yourself, having carried it before God and having done penitence for it by the pain you had writing a letter being sick in order to expose the fault to a director. In my opinion the fire from heaven has already consumed it and it will be enough to say in two words to the first confessor: I accuse myself of...etc. and that in the interest of my mother whom I renounced by my religious vow. But if it happens that no confessor is available today or tomorrow, don’t look for one and don’t be afraid to take holy communion. Finally, I do admire how it’s possible that being very sane in your soul, you look for exterior support to sustain it. In Religion, we must use everything exterior like the clubs of sane and cheery men who carry them not out of weakness but because of excessive power to use them however they please. I am not going to take it upon myself to tell you anything more because from now on you are able, if you wish to remember everything that I have told you, to relieve yourself in your pain. Only get rid of any voluntary misgivings or anxieties and if any arrive that you can’t keep away, support them. There is nothing that purifies the soul more than the peaceful suffering of interior pains. The way to not have any more is to despise them when you have them and to not believe that their cure consists in telling them to a confessor. The soul may be made ready by cures. In the final analysis pains should be the servants of the soul. You have a particular cure in your sickness which exempts you from using any others. Happily everything gets lost in this world in a humble patience as in the other in charity. Anyone being sick who looks to do the good works he did being sane acts like someone who would be plunged in the glory and joy of heaven and would look to experience the same goods and suffer the same evils as those experience and suffer who are still on earth. I want you to be at peace if you can not be joyful. You would have peace if your temperament did not oppose it much more than the sicknesses of your soul and of your body. I think less highly of your complaints and your apprehensions because I know where they originate and that we must relate them more to the disposition of the body than to that of the soul which is good and only needs patience and grace in order to increase in grace. In a period of need and famine, the soul could do without all exterior bread while it possesses an interior with a love that it carries to God.
Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill
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