Life of Paul - Jerome

MARGARET MARY ALACOQUE
Letters

To Sister Louise-Henriette de Soudeilles, at Moulins (4) (1679 or 1680) Most Honored Sister, I beg the Sacred Heart of Jesus to deign to consume ours in the flames of His holy love. This love I think it is that induced you to honor with your acquaintanceship one whose great wretchedness constantly urges her to live unknown and forgotten by men. But if Our Sovereign Master wills it otherwise, I consider it a great privilege to have a little remembrance from you before Our Lord. He grants me the favor of returning in a very special way the affection which Your Charity shows me, though I am very unworthy of it. God can, however, draw glory from our least actions when He so wishes, and I trust He will obtain glory from the desire His goodness has given you that we share in a special way each others spiritual goods, I can assure you that I never do anything good, but God in His Goodness lets me appropriate the treasure of the truly poor, that is, the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Its infinite riches can amply satisfy our great indigence. We must associate ourselves with this precious Good, placing in this Sacred Heart all the good we can do with the help of His Grace, then exchange our hearts for His and offer His to the Eternal Father in place of our own. This adorable Heart, then, beloved Sister, must be the center of our true friendship and our place of retreat. There we can live safe from all storms, and will see and learn to know each other. I assure you that I have already paid you some visits there. I think love has already given you a place of preference in It. I myself am aspiring to one surely, but I have not yet fulfilled the conditions required for entering. These are: A heart that is pure, free from all desire and affection, humble and completely given over to doing perfectly what pure love demands. This love wants to be in full possession so that it can dispose of a heart at will. I beg Him never to let us resist Him, and that our friendship be completely in Him and for Him. I hope, most honored Sister, that you will be so good as to excuse me for talking to you this way. I cannot but tell you frankly what I think. I have the greatest esteem and affection for Your Charity, and am completely and unreservedly yours, most honored Sister, in His holy love. As for what you asked me to recommend to Our Lord, I trust He will be glorified by it in proportion as you are submissive and abandoned to His good pleasure, which should strip us of all self interest if we really want to do His will. If God is satisfied, we ought to be content. I am sure you desire nothing else. Neither do I. So let us love Our Lord and give Him everything without reserve. By this same love I conjure you, beloved Sister, to undeceive yourself in my regard and not to think me to be what I am not.

To Mother de Saumaise, at Moulins (13) 1682 Dearest Mother, It would give me great satisfaction to be able to tell you my miseries, for they would make you understand better Our Sovereign Master’s great mercies to me. One of the most precious and useful of these is my illness. Yes, I assure you the cross of infirmity and humiliation is so necessary for me that my Sovereign told me that without it, I should not have been able to avoid another which, I think would have been very dangerous. I need not think about myself anymore, nor about what it may please my Savior to do concerning me or in me. He said He would never fail to take care of me except when I insisted on meddling in my own affairs. I have often found this out through my infidelity which has brought about the upsetting of my plans. All I wish to do now is what He has so often told me. “Let Me act”, He said. Moreover, He has turned loose in me three persecutors. They torment me continually. The first one calls up the other two. That first one is such a great desire to love Him that it seems everything I see ought to be changed into flames of pure love so that He may be loved in the Blessed Sacrament. It is a martyrdom to me to think He is so little loved there, and that there are so many hearts that reject His pure love, forget it, and spurn it. If only I myself at least would love Him my heart would be consoled with its sorrow. But I am the most ungrateful and faithless of creatures and lead a life wholly unmortified and filled with self love. I feel myself continually urged to suffer, but with what terrible repugnance on the part of my low nature! This makes my crosses so heavy that I would be crushed many a time if the Heart of my adorable Jesus did not sustain me and assist me in all my needs. And all the while in the midst of my constant sufferings my heart continues to thirst after suffering. My soul suffers great agony at not yet being able to be separated from the body. I can think of no greater sacrifice than that of having to continue to live. Yet I would go on living from now until Judgment Day if God wanted me to, although the thought of being separated so long from my Lord would be harder for me to bear than a thousands deaths. Everything conspires to afflict and torment me because I cannot give my whole affection to my Divine Love, who favors me continually with His Holy Presence and Himself instructs me to describe it to you as follows. Suppose that a powerful monarch, feeling urged to exercise his charity, should cast his eyes about over his subjects in order to select the poorest, most miserable and utterly destitute among them. Then, having found her, with overflowing liberality he poured out upon her his riches, of which the greatest would be that this great monarch would want so to humble himself as to walk constantly at the side of this poor outcast, carrying a torch and all gleaming in his royal purple. And, after allowing himself to be seen, he hid this light in the darkness of night, so as to give this poor outcast courage to approach him, and to listen to and speak to him with confidence, to receive his embraces and to return them on her part. He always looked out for her needs and took care of everything that concerned her. But if, after all that, this person should come to withdraw herself from her benefactor and to be unfaithful to him, and if, to punish her, he did nothing else than let the light he had hidden shine forth, so that she could see what he is and what she is, he all resplendent with beauty, she all covered with dirt, wounds and all sorts of filth...and if she saw at the same time the enormity of her malice and ingratitude, in contrast with the goodness of this Sovereign.. I do not know whether I put it clearly enough to make you see what I mean. This is something like the way in which my Sovereign has dealt with His unworthy slave. Indeed, this Divine Presence makes diverse impressions on me. Sometimes He raises me to the height of all bliss from which I draw inexpressible delight. Then all I can exclaim is: ‘My Life, my Love, and my All! You are mine and I am all Yours!’ At other times He plunges me into the depths of my own nothingness where I suffer inexplicable confusion at seeing this abyss of every misery close to the abyss of all perfection. At still other times He so enters into me that He seems to leave me with no other being or life than Himself. He does this in so painful a manner that I have to repeat incessantly: ‘I want to suffer everything without complaint, since my pure love prevents me from being afraid of anything.’ But I would weary you if I recounted all these things in detail, for God is an unfathomable abyss of every good. All my glory ought to consist, as He has taught me, in considering myself but a play thing to give pleasure to His adorable Heart, which is my whole treasure. I must confess that I have nothing but my Savior Jesus Christ. He often says to me: ‘What would you do without Me? You would certainly be very poor!’ As for the other graces and gifts I receive from His bounty, I must confess that they are very great. But the Giver is more Precious than all His gifts. My heart cannot love or be attached to anything but Him alone. All else is nothing and often serves only to contaminate pure love, and to separate the soul from its Well-Beloved, Who wants to be loved soley and without self interest. I beg you to thank the Lord for His great mercies to me.

During this holy time of Our divine Master’s loving visits (Eastertide) I pray His sacred Heart to consume ours in the flames of His holy love, and that not only in time but for eternity. The confidence your friendship inspires in me makes it easy to open my heart to you and beg your help in a matter that is causing me a great deal of trouble. It is with regard to our poor Sister J.F. who, I think has appeared to me twice now.

The first time she gave me some particulars about herself and spoke of some other people I cannot mention. About her though, I can tell you this much: she almost lost her soul and was saved only by the Blessed Virgin. During her last agony Satan assaulted her so furiously on three different occasions that for a while she did not know if she was lost or saved.

Then the Blessed Virgin came and snatched her from the very clutches of the devil. God permitted that I should be on duty at the time because the assistant infirmarian was sick. You would have pitied her had you had seen the terrible struggle she was going through: she trembled in every limb. Three times she cast herself from her bed onto the floor, and once one could hear her say: “I am damned!” But she was always conscious and her mind on God.

The first time I saw her after her death she said to me: “Ah, what cruel pains I suffer! Five years will be a very long time in such rigorous torments.” I asked her what she wanted. She asked for Masses and several other things our most honored Mother kindly granted. I offered for her everything I would do and suffer for six months.

Since that time, you may be sure, sufferings have not been wanting. Our Lord has sent me as much as I could bear, and in every form. During this time I have had a sore finger. That was at the beginning of Lent (March 7). It had to be lanced to the bone with a razor and it is not yet healed. But blessed be the Lord Who has deigned to favor me with His cross. It is my glory.

The second time this good Sister made me see the pitiable state she was in. She said “Oh, my poor Sister, what terrible torments I suffer! Although I suffer for many things, there are three especially for which I suffer more than all the rest. The first is my vow of obedience, which I so poorly observed. I only obeyed when I liked, and such obedience merits only condemnation in God’s sight. The second is my vow of poverty.

I was not willing to feel privation and allowed my body many superfluous creature comforts. Ah, how I am paying now for pampering it! How hateful in the eyes of God are those religious who want to have more than is truly necessary and are not perfectly detached! The third thing for which I suffer especially is my lack of charity, for having caused discord between others and being involved in it myself. For this the prayers offered for me are not applied to me here. The Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ sees me suffer without compassion because I had none for others when I saw them suffering.”

She asked me to write to you and beg you to have three Masses said for her. She also asked that for nine days you offer your Rosary and all your acts of fidelity in the observance of the rule, and a Communion. This will give her much relief, in her suffering, she says. She will not be ungrateful. This my dear Mother, is all I can tell you about it.

As for our poor Sister M.F., I think she will not have more than six months in purgatory. Then she will go to enjoy her sovereign Good.

With regard to what Your good Charity asks about good Mother Boulier, deceased. She no longer needs our help, it seems to me. I think she is high in glory, among the ranks of those Seraphim destined to render perpetual homage to the Sacred Heart of Our Lord Jesus Christ in reparation for the terrible outrages He has suffered in the Blessed Sacrament from our ingratitude and coldness. She is very powerful to help you. And now that is all I can say about her.

Ah, dear Mother, how much obliged I should be to you if you would help me comfort my dear friends suffering in purgatory. That is what I call these poor souls: my friends. There is nothing I would not be willing to do and suffer to console them. Rest assured that they will not be ungrateful.

A word about myself. Our Lord keeps on doing me many favors, altogether unworthy though I be. The one I consider most precious is conformity with Him in His life of suffering and humiliation. He keeps me in a state of such perfect submission to His good pleasure that I no longer care in what condition He places me. As long as He is satisfied and I can love Him, that is enough. This is what He suggests for me to dwell upon: “The cross do I glory to bear, and love for it leadeth me e’er; love divine my whole being doth own, and for me love sufficient alone.” I beg you to burn this letter after you have read it, and that it be seen only by you. I do not know whether or not I am being deceived in everything I mention to you in this letter. I beg the Lord to enlighten you. I am sure I could

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