Письмо 27

Reading your letter, one cannot be without regret about your poor and pitiful dispensation; you are so entangled in the network of hostility that you don’t even see it, and you don’t try to get out of them, but blame people for what your passions are bothering you about. Your main thing: pride, and behind it ambition, which are not destroyed by you, but multiply and grow more and more. Do you have even the slightest whiff of humility? And we must try with all our might to acquire this treasure, and with it love: no matter what virtues we do, we are nothing without them. Instead of always reproaching yourself for impatience, you reproach your neighbors, despise them, and lose peace within yourself; no one can take it away from you except your wines. – Do not seek love from others, but show it yourself and create it; The Lord did not tell us that you love those who love you, but on the contrary, he commanded with affirmation: “If you love those who love, what grace is there for you, for the pagans do the same thing; I say to you: love your enemies, and so on. (Matthew 5:44). On the contrary, you are looking for love from others and suspect against yourself, in a bad disposition, but thereby giving rise to coldness towards you; Every word they say seems like an arrow to you: you see how the enemy has deceived you, and through all this you have lost peace, from yourself, and not through them. For a long time, you have accumulated this passionate rubbish, which you did not care about in the least in order to cleanse it from your heart, but kept adding it to the delight of the enemy and to your own disorder. – We must set about correcting our dispensation, and ask God with humility, and consider ourselves the last and worst of all, and ask them for forgiveness, explaining all our weakness, and make a good beginning; then we will receive God’s help and calm down; what I earnestly wish for you. I remain the desirer of your salvation, great sinner I.M. November 11, 1850. You might be interested in: