To Sister Marie-Thérèse de Vioménil.
You desire the impossible, my dear Sister, you want to feel what is not perceptible by the senses, and to enjoy a certainty that we cannot possess during this life. True contrition which remits sin is, of its nature, entirely spiritual and consequently above the senses. It is true that with certain persons and on certain occasions it becomes sometimes sensible, and then it is much more consoling to self-love, but is not on that account either more efficacious, or more meritorious. This tenderness of feeling does not in any way depend upon us, neither is it by any means essential for obtaining the remission of our sins. A great number of souls truly devoted to God hardly ever experience this tenderness, and the fear inspired in them by this deprivation is the best proof that they are not responsible for it. The coldness they feel, far from depriving them of true repentance is, on the contrary, one of the best penances they could offer to God. What I now say on the subject of contrition in general, I say in particular about the sovereignty of this sorrow, a quality that is usually the one least felt. It must be asked of God and you must wait till He produces it Himself in your heart by His grace. To persist in tormenting yourself after this would be to allow yourself to fall into the devil's trap. Nothing should astonish us less than to be sometimes touched and affected, and at others to find ourselves callous and insensible to everything This is one of the inevitable vicissitudes of the spiritual life. Fiat! fiat! resignation is the only remedy. It is certain that God always gives what is necessary to those souls who fear Him. The gifts He bestows on them are not always the most apparent to the senses, nor the most agreeable, nor the most sought after, but the most necessary and solid; all the more so, usually, in being less felt and more mortifying to self-love; for that which helps us most powerfully to live to God is what best enables us to die to self.
To Sister Marie-Antoinette de Mahuet. On general confession.
My dear Sister,
Your fears have no reasonable foundation, and you ought to
reject them as dangerous temptations. When, in the course of
one's life one has made a general confession in good faith; all
the ideas and anxieties that follow are so many idle scruples
which the enemy makes use of to trouble the peace of the soul,
to make one lose time, and to weaken and diminish one's confidence in God. Do not let us foolishly fall into this trap; let us abandon all the past to the infinite mercy of God, all the future
to His fatherly Providence, and think only of profiting by the
present. The "fiat" formed in the mind by repeated acts and
gradually reduced to an habitual disposition, leads to all that
perfection which ignorant and mistaken people seek far and wide
in all sorts of ways. For the rest, do not imagine that you tire
me by speaking of your miseries. By dint of seeing nothing but
poverty and misery in oneself, one is not surprised at finding the
same in others. But if, in peace and humility they annihilate
themselves before God and ask for grace, working with His
assistance to diminish their faults and to overcome themselves,
they may be considered, in a way, not to have these faults.
This is what Fénélon thought. May it sink deeply into your
heart as well as this sentence which I find in the same author,
and which I copy for you because I think it is exactly what will