Capítulo XXXIX

Capítulo XXXIX

She continues on the same subject, recounting the great mercies the Lord has shown her: she discusses how He promised to act for the people she asked Him for. She tells of some notable cases in which His Majesty has granted her this favor. Once, when I was urgently asking the Lord to restore the sight of someone I was obligated to help—who had almost completely lost it—I felt deep pity for them, and I feared that because of my sins, the Lord would not hear me. He appeared to me as He had at other times and showed me the wound in His left hand, while with His other hand He was drawing out a large nail driven into it; it seemed to me that as the nail came out, it tore the flesh with it. The great pain was plain to see, and it wounded me deeply. He told me that the One who had suffered that for me—I should not doubt—would do even better whatever I asked of Him; that He promised me nothing I asked of Him would go undone; that He already knew I would ask only in keeping with His glory; and that He would do this thing I was asking for now.^✦ He said that even when I wasn't serving Him, I should look and see that I had never asked Him for anything He hadn't done better than I knew how to ask; that I shouldn't doubt how much better He would do it now, when He knew I loved Him.¹ I don't think eight days had passed before the Lord restored that person's sight. My confessor learned of this soon afterward. It may well be that it wasn't through my prayer, but since I had seen this vision, a certainty remained with me, and I gave His Majesty thanks for the favor done to me. Another time, a person was very sick with a very painful illness, and since I don't know what kind of disease it was, I'm not naming it here. What he had been going through for two months was unbearable, and he was in a torment that was tearing him to pieces. My confessor went to see him—he was the Rector I've mentioned—and felt great pity for him, and he told me that I must go see him no matter what, since he was my relative and I could visit him.² I went, and I was moved to such pity for him that I began to plead with the Lord very insistently for his health. In this I saw clearly, as far as I could tell, the favor He did me, because the very next day he was completely free of that pain.³ I was once in the deepest distress, because I knew that a person to whom I was under a great obligation wanted to do something very much against God and His honor, and was already firmly set on doing it. My distress was so great that I didn't know how to stop her, and it even seemed there was no remedy at all. I begged God from the heart to set her right, but until I saw it happen my distress could not ease.⁴ In that state, I went to a secluded hermitage—there are a few in this monastery—and while I was in one where Christ stands at the pillar, begging Him to grant me this favor, I heard a very gentle voice speaking to me, as if wrapped in a soft whistle.⁵ I shuddered all over, filled with fear, and I wanted to understand what it was saying, but I couldn't because it passed so quickly.⁶ Once my fear had passed—and it did quickly—I was left with such interior calm and joy and delight that I was amazed that merely hearing a voice (I heard this with my bodily ears), and without understanding a word, should work so powerfully in the soul. I saw then that what I was asking for would be done, and so it was; my distress was completely taken away regarding something that hadn't even happened yet, just as if I had already seen it finished, and that is exactly how it turned out later. I told my confessors about it; I had two at the time, both thoroughly learned and servants of God. I knew that a person who had resolved to serve God very earnestly, and had spent some days in prayer—and in that prayer His Majesty was granting him many favors—had, because of certain occasions he had run into, left prayer off, and still wasn't keeping clear of them, and they were quite dangerous. It caused me the deepest distress because he was someone I loved dearly and to whom I was indebted. I think for more than a month I did nothing but beg God to turn this soul back to Himself. One day while I was at prayer, I saw a demon beside me who tore some papers he held in his hand into pieces in a great rage. It gave me deep consolation, for it seemed to me that what I was asking had been done. And so it was (as I later found out): he had made a confession with great contrition and turned back to God so earnestly that I hope in His Majesty he will always keep advancing. Blessed be He for everything. Amen.⁷ As for our Lord drawing souls out of grave sins because I begged him for it, and bringing others on to greater perfection, that happens often; and as for drawing souls out of purgatory, and other remarkable things, the mercies the Lord has done me in this are so many that it would wear me out, and wear out whoever read them, if I had to tell them all—and far more for the health of souls than of bodies. This has been a well-known matter, and there are plenty of witnesses to it. At first—right at first—it gave me a great scruple, because I couldn't help believing that the Lord was doing it through my prayer (though let's leave the main cause as his goodness alone); but there are already so many such things, and so clearly seen by other people, that it doesn't trouble me to believe it, and I praise His Majesty, and it confounds me, because I see I am all the more in his debt, and it makes my desire to serve him grow, as it seems to me, and love is stirred up.⁸ And what astonishes me most is that for those things the Lord sees are not fitting, I cannot, though I want to, beg him for them—except with so little force and spirit and care that even when I try harder to force myself it's impossible—whereas with other things that His Majesty is going to do, I see that I can ask for them many times and with great insistence, and even though I don't bring that concern with me, it seems to present itself before me.⁹ The difference between these two ways of asking is so great that I don't know how to put it into words; because even though I do ask for the one kind (and I don't stop trying to beg the Lord for it, even when I don't feel in myself that fervor I feel with the others, however much they may touch me), it's like someone whose tongue is tied, who though they want to speak cannot, and if they do speak, it's in such a way that they see they aren't understood—or like someone who speaks clearly and wide awake, and sees that they are being gladly listened to. The one is asked (let's say for now) like vocal prayer; and the other in contemplation so high that the Lord presents himself in such a way that you understand he understands us, and that His Majesty is glad we ask him for it, and glad to grant us the favor. May he be blessed forever, who gives so much, and to whom I give so little. For what does anyone do, my Lord, who does not spend themselves entirely for You?¹⁰ And how much of it I lack for this—how much, how much—and I could say it a thousand times more! That's why I ought not to want to live (though there are other reasons), because I don't live according to what I owe You. How many imperfections I see in myself! With what slackness in serving You!¹¹ It's true that sometimes it seems to me I'd rather be without any awareness, so as not to understand so much evil in myself: may He who can remedy it.¹² While I was staying at the house of that lady I've mentioned—where I needed to be careful and always keep in mind the vanity that all the things of this life bring with them—because I was highly regarded and much praised, and plenty of things were offered that I could easily have grown attached to if I'd been looking to myself; but He who has true sight was watching so as not to let go of my hand. Now that I speak of true sight, I'm reminded of the great hardships people go through in dealing with those whom God has brought to know what the truth is in these earthly things, where so much is covered up. As the Lord once told me, many of the things I write here aren't from my own head; this heavenly Teacher of mine was telling them to me. And because, in the things¹³ that I especially say this—I understood it, or the Lord told me—I feel a great scruple about adding or taking away even a single syllable.¹⁴ So when I don't remember everything precisely, it's set down as coming from me—or because some things really will be from me as well.¹⁵ I don't call my own what is good, for I already know there's nothing in me except what the Lord has given me so undeservedly; rather, I call "said by me" what was not given me to understand in revelation. But oh, my God! And how even in spiritual things we often want to understand things by our own opinion—and very twisted from the truth, just as with worldly things—and it seems to us that we should measure our progress by the years we've spent in some practice of prayer, and it even seems we want to set a measure on the One who gives His gifts with no measure at all, whenever He wants, and who can give more to one person in half a year than to another in many! And this is something I've seen so clearly in many people that I'm astonished how we can stay stuck in it. I firmly believe that whoever has the gift of discerning spirits, and to whom the Lord has given true humility, will not be caught in this deception—for such a person judges by the effects and resolutions and love, and the Lord gives him light so he can recognize it; and by this he looks at the advance and progress of souls, not at the years, since in half a year one may have gained more than another in twenty; because, as I say, the Lord gives it to whom He wills, and even to whoever is better disposed.^✦16 For I see young women coming to this house now who are still very young, and as soon as God touches them and gives them a little light and love—I mean, in a short time when He showed them some favor—they didn't hold back, and nothing stood in their way; without a thought for eating, they shut themselves away forever in a house with no income, like people who don't count their lives as anything for the sake of the One they know loves them.^✦17 They leave everything behind; they don't even want a will of their own; it never occurs to them that they might grow discontented in so much enclosure and narrowness: all together they offer themselves in sacrifice for God.^✦ How gladly I give them the advantage here—and I ought to go about ashamed before God—because what His Majesty never finished with me in all the many years since I began to pray and He began to grant me favors, He finishes with them in three months, and even with some in three days, while granting them far fewer favors than He has granted me, though His Majesty pays them well for it: I'm quite sure they're not unhappy about what they've done for Him.¹⁸ For this I'd want us to remember the many years—those of us who have them in religious profession, and people who have them in prayer—and not to weary those who in a short time go further ahead, making them turn back so they'll walk at our pace, or wanting those who fly like eagles, with the favors God grants them, to walk like a hobbled chick; but rather that we fix our eyes on His Majesty, and if we see them with humility, give them free rein, for the Lord who grants them so many favors will not let them plunge to ruin. They trust in God—supported by the truth they know through faith—and yet we won't trust them? Instead, we try to measure them by our own standards, matching our own limited spirits? Not at all. If we don't reach their level of resolve and impact—which can easily be misunderstood without experience—let's humble ourselves rather than condemn them. While we might think we're looking out for their good, we're actually depriving ourselves of it. We lose the chance the Lord gives us to humble ourselves and recognize what we lack, and to see how much more detached and close to God these souls must be than ours, since His Majesty draws so near to them.¹⁹ I don't understand anything else, nor would I want to understand anything else, except that a short time of prayer produces very great effects that you grasp at once (for it's impossible there should be such effects for leaving everything only to please God without a great force of love)—I would rather have that than years of prayer that never quite made up its mind, any more at the end than at the beginning, to do anything of real worth for God—except, yes, some tiny little things like grains of salt, that have neither weight nor bulk, so that a bird seems ready to carry them off in its beak: we don't count them as a great effect and mortification; for we make much of some things we do for the Lord, and it's a pity we should take them that way, even if many were done. I am that person, and I'll forget the favors at every step.²⁰²¹ I'm not saying His Majesty won't hold them in high regard, since He is so good, but I would rather not make much of them, or even notice that I'm doing them, since they are nothing.²² But forgive me, my Lord, and do not blame me, for I have to console myself with something, since I serve You in nothing—for if I served You in great things, I would not make much of these trifles. Blessed are the people who serve You with great works: if my envy of having them, and my longing for that, are counted in my favor, I would not lag far behind in pleasing You—but I am worth nothing, my Lord. Give me that worth Yourself, since You love me so much.²³ One of these days it happened to me that, once a Brief arrived from Rome so that this monastery could not hold an endowment, the whole matter was finished completely—something that seems to have cost me some labor. Comforted at seeing it concluded that way, and thinking of the troubles I had gone through, and praising the Lord that He had wanted in some way to make use of me, I began to think over the things that had happened. And it's true that in each of those that seemed like something I had done, I found so many faults and imperfections, and at times little courage, and often little faith; because until now, when I see it all fulfilled—everything the Lord told me was to be done about this house—I never quite finished believing it with certainty, nor could I doubt it either:²⁴ I don't know how this was. It's that many times, on the one hand, it seemed impossible to me; on the other, I couldn't doubt it—I mean, believe—that it wasn't going to be done.²⁵ In the end I found that the good was that the Lord had done it all on His part, and the bad was mine; and so I stopped thinking about it, and I wouldn't want it brought back to mind, so as not to stumble over so many of my own faults. Blessed be He who brings good out of all of them when He is pleased to; amen.²⁶ So I say it's dangerous to go around totaling up the years you've spent in prayer, because even when there's humility, there can still remain some I-don't-know-what sense that you deserve something for having served. I'm not saying they don't deserve it, and they'll be well repaid — but any spiritual person who thinks that, for however many years of prayer they've had, they deserve these gifts of the Spirit: I'm certain they won't rise to its summit.²⁷ Isn't it enough that they've merited God's keeping them by His hand, so they no longer commit the offenses they used to before they had prayer — without turning around and suing Him for their wages, as people say?²⁸ It doesn't seem like deep humility to me. It may well be that it is, but I take it for presumption; for even with the little humility I have, it doesn't seem to me I've ever dared that. It may be that, since I've never served, I haven't been able to; perhaps if I had, I'd want more than anyone for the Lord to repay me for it. I'm not saying a soul doesn't keep growing, and that God won't give it these gifts if the prayer has been humble — only that these years should be forgotten, because everything we can do is sheer filth compared with one drop of the blood the Lord shed for us; and if by serving more we only become greater debtors, what is this that we're asking for?²⁹ Why, if we pay one maravedí of the debt, they turn around and give us a thousand ducats — so for the love of God let's leave these judgments alone, for they are His!³⁰ These comparisons are always bad, even in earthly things; so what will they be in what only God knows? And His Majesty made that plain when He paid the last as much as the first. I've written these three pages over so many sittings, and over so many days — because I've had and still have, as I've said, so little free time — that I'd forgotten what I began to tell, which was this vision. I saw myself while I was at prayer, alone in a great field: all around me were many people of different kinds who had me surrounded; it seemed to me that all of them had weapons in their hands to harm me — some lances, others swords, others daggers, and others very long rapiers.³¹³² In short, I couldn't get out in any direction without putting myself in danger of death — and I was alone, with no one I could find on my side. While I was in this affliction, not knowing what to do with myself, I looked up to heaven and saw Christ—not in heaven, but high above me in the air—stretching His hand toward me, and from there He helped me so that I no longer feared all those other people, and they couldn't harm me even if they wanted to. This vision may seem fruitless, and yet it has done me the greatest good, because I was given to understand what it meant; and a little later I found myself almost under that same barrage, and I recognized that vision as a portrait of the world—that everything in it seems to have weapons ready to wound the poor soul.³³ Let's leave aside those who don't serve the Lord much, and honors and estates and pleasures and other such things—it's clear that before you know it the soul finds herself entangled. At least, all these things try to entangle even more: friends, relatives, and—what is most frightening—very good people.³⁴ Afterward I found myself so hard pressed by all of this—they thinking they were doing right—that I didn't know how to defend myself or what to do. Oh God help me — if I told of the kinds and varieties of trials I went through in this period, even after what I've already said, it would be more than enough warning to make anyone hate it all completely!³⁵ I think it was the greatest persecution I've ever endured. At times I found myself so hard-pressed from every side that my only remedy was to lift my eyes to heaven and call on God; I remembered well what I had seen in this vision. It did me a great deal of good by teaching me not to put much trust in anyone, because no one is steadfast except God. Always in these great trials the Lord would send, as He showed me, someone on His behalf to give me a hand — just as He had shown me in this vision — without my clinging to anything except pleasing the Lord. That has served to sustain the little virtue I had in desiring to serve You. May You be blessed forever.³⁶ Once when I was very restless and agitated, unable to recollect myself, and caught in battle and struggle, my mind drifting off to things that weren't perfect (I don't even think I had the detachment I usually have), seeing myself so wretched like that, I was afraid the favors the Lord had done me might be illusions: in short, I was in a great darkness of soul.³⁷ While I was in this distress, the Lord began to speak to me, and He told me not to wear myself out—that by seeing myself like this I would understand what misery it was if He withdrew from me, and that there was no security as long as we lived in this flesh. I was given to understand how well spent this war and struggle are for such a prize, and it seemed to me the Lord had pity on those of us who live in the world; but that I shouldn't think He had forgotten me—that He would never leave me—but that I needed to do what³⁸ is in me.³⁹ The Lord said this to me with such compassion and tenderness, and with other words in which He showed me great favor, that there's no need to repeat them.⁴⁰ His Majesty says these things to me many times, showing me great love: "You are already mine, and I am yours."⁴¹ What do I care about myself, Lord, except about You? These words and consolations are such tremendous confusion for me, when I remember what I am, that—as I believe I've said at other times, and now I say it sometimes to my confessor—it seems to me more courage is needed to receive these favors than to endure the greatest trials.⁴² When it passes, I'm almost forgetful of my works—except that I'm shown I'm wretched, without any reasoning of the intellect, which also sometimes seems supernatural to me.⁴³ Sometimes such great longings to receive Communion come over me that I don't know whether they could be overstated. It happened to me one morning that it was raining so hard it didn't seem possible to leave the house.⁴⁴ Once I was outside it, I was already so beside myself with that desire that even if they put spears to my chest, it seems to me I would have gone through them—much less through water.⁴⁵ When I reached the church, a great rapture came over me: it seemed to me I saw the heavens open—not an opening like the ones I've seen at other times.⁴⁶ There appeared to me the throne I told Your Reverence I have seen at other times, and another above it, where—by a kind of knowing I cannot describe—though I did not see it, I understood the Divinity was present.⁴⁷ It seemed to me some animals were holding it up—I think I've heard of a figure of these animals: I wondered if they were the Evangelists, but as for how the throne stood, or what was on it, I saw nothing but a very great multitude of angels. They seemed to me incomparably more beautiful than those I have seen in heaven. I've wondered whether they are seraphim or cherubim, because they are very different in glory—it seemed they were aflame—and the difference is great, as I've said.⁴⁸ And the glory I felt in myself then can't be written down, or even spoken, and no one who hasn't been through this will be able to imagine it. I understood that everything one can desire was there all at once, and I saw nothing. They told me—and I don't know who—that what I could do there was understand that I could understand nothing, and look at how much of a nothing everything was compared with that. And so it was: afterward my soul was ashamed to see that it could settle on any created thing, still less grow attached to it, because everything seemed to me like an anthill.⁴⁹⁵⁰ I received Communion and stayed through Mass—I don't know how I managed it. It seemed to me it had been a very short time; I was astonished when the clock struck and I saw that I had been in that rapture and glory for two hours. I was astonished afterward at how, on coming to this fire—which seems to have come from above, from true love of God, because however much I may want it and seek it and wear myself out for it, unless it is when His Majesty wills, as I've said other times, I'm not able to have a single spark of it—it seems to consume the old self of faults and lukewarmness and misery, and in the way the phoenix does (as I've read), and from the same ashes, after it burns, another rises: so the soul is made another afterward, with different desires and great strength.⁵¹⁵² It no longer seems to be the soul it was before; instead it begins the Lord's path with a new purity. While I was begging His Majesty that it might be so, and that I might begin again to serve Him, He said to me, "You've made a good comparison. See that you don't forget it, so you keep trying to better yourself always."⁵³ Once, while I was still in that same doubt I mentioned a little while ago—whether these visions were from God—the Lord appeared to me and said sternly, "O children of men, how long will you be hard of heart!" He told me to carefully examine one thing within myself: whether I was completely given over to Him or not; and that if I was, and truly was, I should believe He would not let me be lost.⁵⁴ That exclamation deeply distressed me. With great tenderness and sweetness, He spoke to me again, telling me not to distress myself—that He already knew that for my part, I would not fail to devote myself to everything in His service, and that everything I wanted would be done. And so what I was then begging Him for was done: that He look at the love growing in me day by day for loving Him, and that by this He would see it was not the devil; that I should not think God would allow the devil such a large share in the souls of His servants, or that the devil could give you the clarity of understanding and the quiet that you have.⁵⁵⁵⁶ He gave me to understand that, since so many people of such standing had told me it was God, I would do wrong not to believe it. While I was praying the Quicumque vult, I was given the understanding of how there is one⁵⁷ God and three Persons, so clearly that I was astonished and deeply consoled. It did me the greatest good to know more of God's greatness and His wonders; and when I think about the Most Holy Trinity, or when it is spoken of, I feel I understand how it can be, and that is a great joy.⁵⁸ One day, on the Assumption of the Queen of the angels and Our Lady, the Lord was pleased to grant me this favor: in a rapture, I was shown her ascent into heaven, along with the joy and solemnity with which she was received, and the place where she now is. I wouldn't know how to say what this was like. The glory my spirit felt at seeing such glory was immense: I was left with great effects from it, and it helped me desire still more to endure great hardships, and a great desire remained in me to serve this Lady, since she deserved so much.⁵⁹ While I was at a college of the Society of Jesus, I saw a very rich canopy over the heads of the brothers as they were receiving Communion; I saw this twice, but I didn't see it when other people were receiving Communion.⁶⁰