Письмо 224
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Hearing that spiritual celebrations were taking place in your monastery - the tonsure of the sisters into the monastic form and in the mantle and cassock, I heartily rejoiced at this; I know that you, along with all your sisters in Christ, experienced great joy. And how can one not rejoice when there is great joy in heaven for one sinner who repents (Luke 15:7), how much more when many have flowed to this form of repentance, with a contrite heart and a humble spirit. Oh, if we always kept this feeling in our memory, we would have great help in the fight against passions, against the world, the flesh and the devil: but, forgetting it, we waver, like reeds torn by the wind. Your wonderful thought about moving me to a primitive monastery, to the fifth desert, should be limited to what you thought and told me. This is not our will, at least not at the present time; and what will happen in the future is hidden from us by the impenetrable curtain of God’s destinies.
Now I have no blessed guilt for this, nor the means to fulfill it: while the fathers and brothers of our monastery still bear my infirmities and do not cast me out, I do almost nothing, or am capable of little; let us submit this to the will of God, He will arrange it as it pleases Him and is useful to us. Mnogohreshny I.M. December 20, 1841.
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