She continues and concludes her account of this last stage of prayer, telling what the soul who has reached it feels when it returns to live in the world. She describes the light God throws on the world’s deceits. All of this is good doctrine.
IN conclusion, I will say that in this state the soul does not have to give its consent. This it has already given. It knows that it has voluntarily placed itself in His hands, and that it cannot deceive Him, since He knows everything. Here it is not as it is in the world, which is so full of deceits and duplicities, that when, judging from outward signs, you think that you have gained a man’s good will, you very quickly realize that all was a lie. Nobody can live amidst so much scheming, especially if he has himself some small interest in it all.
A soul is blessed indeed when the Lord brings it to an understanding of the truth. What a state this would be for kings! They would do better to strive after this than after great dominions. Then justice would rule in their kingdoms, and great crimes would be prevented – many in fact might have been prevented already. In this state no one fears to lose his life or honour for the love of God. What a grand thing this would be for one who is more obliged than lesser men to consider the Lord’s honour – for subjects will always follow kings! To advance the Faith by one step, or to show one ray-of light to heretics, I would give up a thousand kingdoms, and with good reason. For the winning of an everlasting kingdom is gain of another sort; and if the soul but tastes one drop of the water of that kingdom, all the things of this world appear loathsome thereafter. What men if the soul should be utterly engulfed in such water?
O Lord, if You were to make it my vocation to proclaim this aloud, I should be disbelieved, as are many others who can speak of these things in other ways, but at least I should satisfy myself. If I could make a single one of these truths plain to others, I think I should count my life as nothing. I do not know what I should do afterwards, for I cannot rely on myself. Yet, although I am what I am, I keep experiencing a violent desire to tell these truths to my superiors. But since this is all that I can do, O Lord, I turn to You and pray You to set all things right. You know very well that, provided I were left in such a state as never to offend You, I would gladly divest myself of all the favours that You have given me, and transfer them to the kings of this world. For I know that if I did they could not possibly allow the things that they allow today; nor could they fail to possess the greatest blessings.
O my God, let kings understand how great their obligations are. You have been pleased to distinguish them on earth in such a way that, as I have heard, signs appear in the heavens when You take one of them from the earth. It stirs my devotion indeed, O my King, to consider that it is Your will to teach them in this way how they must imitate You in their lives, since these signs that appear at their deaths are the same as those that appeared at Yours.
I am being very bold and your Reverence must tear this page out if you think it wrong, but, believe me, I should express this better in the presence of kings, if I might speak to them or if I thought that they would listen to me. For I pray to God most earnestly for them, and wish that I might be of service to them. All this makes one careless of one’s life – and I often wish I could lose mine. It would be a very small risk to run for so great a gain, since there is no real living once we see with our own eyes me great illusion in which we walk and the blindness from which we suffer.
When a soul has reached this point, it does not merely desire to serve God; His Majesty also gives it the strength to put its desire into effect. If any way occurs to it in which it thinks it may do God a service, it will perform that service; and all this is nothing because, I repeat, nothing except doing God’s pleasure is of any value. The trouble is that no opportunities occur to people as worthless as myself. May it be Your pleasure, O Lord, that the time may come when I shall be able to pay You at least one farthing of the great sum I owe You. Be pleased to ordain that this servant of Yours, O Lord, may serve You in some way. There have been other women who have done heroic deeds for love of You. I myself am only fit to talk, and so You have not been willing, O God, to test me by deeds. All my will to serve You leaks away, and even here I have no freedom, since it is always possible that I may fail altogether.
First strengthen my soul, and prepare it, O Jesus, my supreme Good, and then ordain the means whereby I may do something for You. No one could bear to receive so much and pay nothing in return. Cost what it may, O Lord, I pray You not to let me appear before You so empty-handed, since a man’s reward must be proportionate to his works. Here is my life; here is my honour; here is my will; I have given them all to You; I am Yours; do with me what You will. I know very well, my Lord, how little I can do. But now that I have come to You, now that I have climbed that watch-tower from which all truth can be seen, I shall be capable of all things so long as You do not depart from me. But if You depart from me, even for a moment, I shall fall back to where I was; which was in hell.
Oh, how it pains a soul which has been in this state to return to the business of the world, to look at the disorderly farce of this life, to waste time attending to such bodily needs as those of eating and sleeping! Everything wearies it; it cannot run away; it sees itself a prisoner in chains, and it is then that it feels most keenly the captivity in which our bodies hold us, and the wretchedness of this life. It understands why St Paul prayed God to deliver him from it;1 it joins its cries to his and, as I have said before, begs God to give it freedom. Such is its violence on these occasions that it often seems as if the soul is straining to leave the body and go out in search of freedom, since no one is delivering it. It wanders like one sold into a foreign land, and what most distresses it is that it finds so few to join it in its complaints and prayers, since men as a rule desire to live. Oh, if we were utterly detached, and never based our happiness on the things of this world, then the distress caused by our continually living without God would temper our fear of death with the desire to enjoy life. If a woman like myself to whom the Lord has given this light, but whose charity is so lukewarm and whose works have won her no certainty of true repose, is nevertheless so often sad at finding herself in this exile, I often wonder what the sorrow of the saints must have been. What must St Paul and the Magdalen and others of their kind have suffered when this flaming love of God burst so strong within them? Their lives must have been a continual martyrdom. I think that the only people who give me any comfort, and whose conversation relieves me, are those in whom I find these desires. I mean desires accompanied by works, and stress the works because I am thinking of some who imagine themselves detached, and claim to be. They must be so, of course, since their vocation demands it, and so do the long years that have passed since many of them began to tread the way of perfection. But my soul can distinguish from afar between those who are detached in words, and those who have confirmed these words by deeds. It knows very well how little is achieved by the one sort and how much by the other; and this is a difference that can be clearly discerned by anyone with experience.
I have described the effects of these raptures that come from the spirit of God. Actually, some of these may be greater and some less; by less I mean that at the beginning, although the effects take place, they are not expressed by deeds, and so their presence is not obvious. Also perfection is a thing of growth; the cobwebs have to be brushed away from the memory, and this requires some time. Meanwhile as love and humility grow in the soul, so these flowers of virtue give off a greater scent for the benefit both of the soul itself and of others. Indeed the Lord can so work on a soul in one of these raptures that there remains little for it to do in order to achieve perfection. Except from experience, no one will ever believe how much the Lord gives to a soul in that moment; no effort of ours, in my opinion, will achieve it. I do not mean to say that, with the Lord’s help, persons who over many years work according to the directions given by writers on prayer, and make use of their principles and methods, will not reach perfection and great detachment. But it will cost them great labour, and much more time. In rapture, however, without any effort of ours, the Lord deliberately raises the soul from the earth and gives it dominion over all earthly things, even though there may be no more merits in such a soul than there were in mine – and I cannot speak more strongly than that, for I had hardly any.
The reason why His Majesty does this is that it is His pleasure, and that He wishes to do so. Even if the soul is not prepared, He makes it fit to receive the blessing that He is giving it. Although He certainly never fails to give comfort to such as make proper preparation and strive after detachment, He does not always give it to those who have earned it by cultivating their gardens. Sometimes, as I have said, He chooses to display His greatness on poorer ground, and so thoroughly to prepare it for every blessing that it almost seems as if it would be impossible for the soul to return to its old life of sin against God.
The mind is now so used to dwelling upon real truth, that everything else seems to it childish. It laughs to itself at times when it sees serious men – men of prayer and religion – paying great attention to points of honour, which it long ago trampled underfoot. They say that prudence and the dignity of their calling requires them to behave in this way, in order that they may be able to do greater good. But the soul knows very well that they would achieve far more in one day by putting the love of God above their dignity than in ten years of prudent care for their authority. So this soul continues to lead a troubled life, and always has its crosses, but it is a life of continuous growth. Those with whom it has most to do keep on thinking that it has reached the summit, but soon they see it raised even higher, for God is always granting it new favours. God is the soul of that soul; and as He has it in His keeping, so He gives it light. He seems to be watching over it, always taking care that it shall not offend Him, assisting it and rousing it to serve Him. When my soul reached this state in which God granted it this great mercy, my troubles ceased; His Majesty gave me strength to escape from them. Meeting with occasions for sin, and even the company of those people who had formerly distracted me now did me no more harm than if they had never been. Indeed, what had once harmed me now helped me. Everything was a means of increasing my knowledge of God and my love for Him. Everything made me realize how much I owed Him, and grieve for what I had been.
I perfectly understood that none of this was due to myself, and that I had not won it by my own efforts; the time had been far too short for that. His Majesty, out of His own goodness, had given me the necessary strength. From the time that the Lord began to grant me the favour of these raptures until now, this strength has continued to grow in me, and He, in His kindness, had held me with His hand to prevent my turning back. This being the case, I do not imagine that I am doing anything of myself, but entirely understand that this is the Lord’s work. I think, therefore, that any soul to which the Lord is granting these favours and who walks in humility and fear, always realizing that all this is the Lord’s own doing and that we play next to no part in it, may mix with any sort of people. However disturbing and vicious its company may be, it will not be affected or moved in any way. On the contrary, as I have said, distractions will be a help and a source from which the soul may derive great profit. It is the strong that are chosen by the Lord to benefit others, even though their strength does not come from themselves, and when the Lord brings a soul to this state, little by little He communicates very great secrets to it.
In ecstasy come true revelations, great favours, and visions, all of which help to humble and strengthen the soul, to make it despise the things of this life and more clearly realize the greatness of the reward that the Lord reserves for those who serve Him. May it please His Majesty that the immense bounty which He has Heaped on this miserable sinner may help to strengthen and embolden those who read this, so that they may give up absolutely everything for God’s sake. If His Majesty so amply rewards us even in this life that we can clearly see the prize which is gained by those who serve Him, how immense will it be in the life to come?