DRYNESS IN PRAYERS
Since it’s the first day of a new year, you had good reason to use a time so favorable to write to me. For there is a particular blessing on this day that is the feast of the name of Jesus (and it’s also the feast of the holy Circumcision of the lord which I’ll write about in another letter). On this day you ought to remember that there is an exceptional attribute to the name of Jesus which is that the simple pronunciation of his name causes a veritable movement of faith that brings about, according to Saint Paul, the same salvation of our souls that his passion and suffering on the cross brought about for all. Jesus says that his body does not put life in our souls except by means of his spirit. We have only to put our soul in possession of God’s grace which is the same thing as his spirit, and the least of things can be of as much service to us as the greatest. The name of Jesus which is nothing but two syllables that pass by quickly can produce his life in us like his holy body when we consume it in the sacrament of holy communion.
Don’t give way in your spirit to a lot of questions about this. Be simple in spirit as you read what I say and admire the abundance of the grace of God in souls which are his by the participation of his spirit.
I say that now in order to prepare you for the answer I will give to what you wrote me about dryness in your prayers. For if one word, Jesus, that the tongue forms has so great an effect on a soul that it increases divine life and grace and the sense of being saved, what will a prayer even more interior bring about formed in the bottom of the soul?
If the dryness was consent to bad thoughts or to a design to do evil it would in reality prevent the effect and the efficacy of the prayer because it would chase from the soul the spirit of God. But while his spirit is there it is not in the power of dryness and all interior sufferings to cause you any hurt or to turn away the influence of God in the soul in the middle of the prayer. On the contrary, because there is nothing that God considers so greatly as sufferings, and all the more those of the spirit than those of the body, when the soul embraces them with humility and accepts them while renouncing every feeling of pleasure, prayers are so much better to the degree that they are dryer and more painful. For then they approach more closely those of Jesus Christ who never prayed except with an interior sorrow like that he had on the day of his passion. Work only to do nothing voluntarily which may grieve the spirit of God in you.
Don’t do anything except with the precise obedience as did the Son of God in the least thing he did during the thirty years that he obeyed his father. His father had ruled him precisely right up to the least blink of an eye before he was born and counted his actions as exactly as he counted the hairs on his head. You must hope that God’s spirit will remain as unchangeable in you as it remained in him. If you possess the spirit of God in that way, it follows that your prayers made with dryness, even if this dryness might last throughout your prayers, are as agreeable to God and as useful to your soul as if they were made otherwise. It even follows that the smallest interior remarks that you speak to God coming from your heart united to him, and because of his desire, although you do not feel it at all, that you implore him sincerely, faithfully, humbly, carefully are as effective as all the movements that you could have had in your prayers full of spiritual taste and pleasure.
Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill
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