LETTER XVII.--Conduct during Trials.
To the same Sister. On conduct during trials.
My dear Sister,
Ought you not to be able to overcome your fears, and to check
your tears after all the experience you have had of the way in
which your mind creates phantoms when anything affects it
keenly, making you indulge in idle terrors? If it is impossible
to prevent these tiresome wanderings of the imagination, at least
endeavour to gain some profit by them, and to make of them
matter for interior sacrifice, and an occasion for the exercise of
a complete abandonment to all the decrees of divine Providence
whatever they may be. I am of your opinion, and have never
desired, and still less, prayed for pains and contradictions.
Those sent by Providence are quite enough without wishing
for more, or inflicting them on oneself. We must wait and
prepare ourselves for these; that is the best way to gain strength
and courage to receive them, and to bear them properly when
God sends them. This is one of my favourite practices, and
suits me both for this life and the next. I offer to God, beforehand, all the sacrifices that occur to my mind without any effort
of my own. It is to enable us to acquire the merit of this offering
that God tries us by these ideas, and these fears of future evil
that He does not intend to send us. When, on the other hand,
He sends us consolations whether spiritual or temporal, we ought
to accept them simply, with gratitude and thanksgiving, but
without clinging to them or taking too much pleasure in them,
because all joy that is not in God only serves to feed our self-love. Your solitude in the absence of the person on whom you
could most rely, in spite of her having been very tiresome, cannot
fail to be very good for you. How many acts of resignation will
you not have made in your illness and weakness! How often
will you not have raised your heart to God! How many holy
affections and good resolutions will you not have made! You
will be saved by the good will which God sees in your heart.
Each of us has a particular path to follow, according to his
light. Try to make use of your present circumstances and of
your sadness, to place your whole confidence in God, both for
time and eternity. The present calamities of which you paint
so sad a picture, will, if only for the sake of your own peace,
place you under the necessity of making incessantly, very
meritorious sacrifices to God. Public misfortunes are great, but
the part you can take about them is great also. The lives of
sinful men, and that we all are, ought to be passed entirely in
works of penance and mortification, and God shows His mercy
by giving us this remedy with His own hand. The chalice is
bitter, it is true, but how infinitely more bitter would be the pains
of hell, or of purgatory; and since we must drink this chalice
whether we like it or not, let us, as the proverb says, make a
virtue of necessity. In this way all our difficulties will be
smoothed away. As you say, interior sufferings are much harder
to bear, but they are also more meritorious and purifying, and
after having been made to endure these purifications and
detachments, everything else seems easy. Then it will be much
more easy to give oneself up to a perfect abandonment and a
filial confidence in God through Jesus Christ. The reflexions
you make on this subject are reasonable and true, but too human.
We should always revert to abandonment and hope in divine
Providence, for what can man do, exposed as he is to continual vicissitudes? Let us depend then on God alone, for He never
changes, and knows better than we do what is necessary for
us, and, like a good father, is always ready to give it. But He
has to do with children who are often so blind that they do not
see for what they are asking. Even in their prayers, that to
them seem so sensible and just, they deceive themselves by
desiring to arrange the future which belongs to God alone.
When He takes away from us what we consider necessary, He
knows how to supply its place imperceptibly, in a thousand
different ways unknown to us. This is so true that bitterness
and heaviness of heart borne with patience and interior silence,
make the soul advance more than would the presence and instruction of the holiest and cleverest director. I have had a
hundred experiences of this, and am convinced that, at present,
this is your path, and the only things that God asks of you are
submission, abandonment, confidence, sacrifice, and silence.
Practice these virtues as well as you can without too violent
efforts.
