VII
Touch My Heart
The soul asks that outward affliction be joined to true interior repentance, lest bodily pain only deepen sin.
Touch my heart with repentance for my faults, since without that inner sorrow, the outward afflictions with which you touch my body would only become a new occasion of sin for me.
Pains That Heal
Bodily afflictions are read as punishment and figure of the soul’s wounds, then begged as remedy for a heart once numb to its own misery.
Make me understand clearly that the afflictions of the body are nothing other than both the punishment and the figure of the afflictions of the soul.1 But, Lord, make them also the remedy for those ills, by making me consider, in the pains I feel, the pain I did not feel in my soul, though it was entirely sick and covered with sores.2 For, Lord, the greatest of its diseases is this insensibility and this extreme weakness, which had stripped it of all feeling for its own miseries.3
A Continual Penance
The prayer closes by asking to feel those miseries keenly and to spend remaining life as penance that washes past offenses.
Make me feel them keenly, and let what life I have left be a continual penance to wash away the offenses I have committed.4
Read the original Latin
Touchez mon cœur du repentir de mes fautes, puisque, sans cette douleur intérieure, les maux extérieurs dont vous touchez mon corps me seroient une nouvelle occasion de péché. Faites-moi bien connoître que les maux du corps ne sont autre chose que la punition et la figure tout ensemble des maux de l’âme. Mais, Seigneur, faites aussi qu’ils en soient le remède, en me faisant considérer, dans les douleurs que je sens, celle que je ne sentois pas dans mon âme, quoique toute malade et couverte d’ulcères. Car, Seigneur, la plus grande de ses maladies est cette insensibilité et cette extrême foiblesse, qui lui avoit ôté tout sentiment de ses propres misères. Faites-les-moi sentir vivement, et que ce qui me reste de vie soit une pénitence continuelle pour laver les offenses que j’ai commises.
Notes
- 1 ↩French figure means sign, type, or outward image: bodily ills both punish and represent the soul's ills.
- 2 ↩en in qu'ils en soient le remède points back to the maux de l'âme of the previous sentence: bodily pains become the remedy for the soul's afflictions.
- 3 ↩ses / lui refer to the soul (l'âme) from the previous sentence, not the speaker's body.
- 4 ↩les in Faites-les-moi sentir points to the soul's miseries/diseases just named (insensibility, weakness, and its hidden wounds).
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