Letter 143

My very dear Son,

This is the answer to your letter of the 13”. April for I have written to you fully in three other letters that you have received or will receive of general affairs of the country and the particular affairs of community. This fourth letter is to speak to you confidentially and to tell you in the first place how sorry I was that the letter I wrote last year gave you pain and led you to believe that it was you I was referring when I spoke of the third person. But what of you? I took good care not to say it because such a thought never came into my head and I know for certain it was not the case. I was speaking to you of certain reproaches that came from our mothers in Tours, inappropriately but innocently made and I spoke in the third person of the author of the rumours not wishing to name him on account of the respect I have for him and my obligations to him. Believe then my dear son that everything you write is a joy to me and I see it in only truth and common sense.

I found what you say about our staying here or going home reasonable and prudent. I share your sentiments but things rarely work out the way we expect. So say those who know the way God works in these countries where God’s Providence plays tricks on human prudence. I am as certain that His Divine Majesty willed our re-establishment and that my call to labour at it has come from Him as that I will die some day. Despite this certainty and the expenses we have undertaken we don’t know what will become of this country. According to appearances it is more likely to survive than not and I am as firm in my vocation as ever yet ready to return to France when such is God’s Will made known by those who hold His place on earth. Our Foundress is in the same disposition concerning her vocation but not for her return to France. God has not given her the grace of detachment. On the contrary she is so determined to build a Church that the incursions of the Iroquois do not prevent her collecting materials.

People strongly advise her not to think of it but she answers that her greatest desire is to build a house for the Good God. These are her terms and then she will build living temples for him. She means that she will collect poor French girls who have gone astray and have them brought up in piety and give them a good education such as they cannot have in their estranged state. She is not inspired to help us with our building, her heart is in her new Church which she will build gradually from her modest revenue. Monsieur de Bernières has sent this year five puncheons of flour which cost her 500 livres. He also sent us a clock and 100 livres for our poor Huron. What do you say to that? For me my interior inclination is to let such a loving providence lead me and to accept what He sends me from one moment to the next.

I was speaking this morning to two people with great experience of the affairs of this country about two girls that we would like to come from France to be accepted as converse sisters. They saw no difficulty but I saw plenty. Firstly the dangers at sea, secondly the troubles in France and finally on account of society and the different Congregations here so that we have not yet made any decisions. It’s not the hostility of the Iroquois that causes this. Some regard this country as lost but I don’t see much to fear for us. I hear from France that people of our sex and condition have more to fear than the French soldiers. What I hear makes me tremble. The Iroquois are barbarians but they do not treat persons of our sex with the ignominy that I hear the French soldiers are guilty of. Those who have lived among them assure me that they do not use violence and that they let free those who will not acquiesce to their wishes. Yet I would not trust them, they are infidels and barbarians. We would rather be killed than allow ourselves to be taken. It is in this kind of situation that they kill but thanks be to Our Lord we are not there. If we knew the enemy was approaching we would not wait for them and you would see us this year. If I saw seven or eight families going back to France I would consider it temerity to stay even if I had a revelation that there was no danger. I would regard my visions as suspect so that my sisters and I would take the surest and most obvious way. The hospital sisters have made the same resolution but to speak plainly, difficulties of getting food and clothing would bring us home rather than the threat of Iroquois although they are the fundamental cause because the raids and the terror they spread everywhere stopped much of the trade. That is why we clear as much of the land as possible. The bread here tastes better than that in France but it is not as nourishing or as white for our workmen. Vegetables too are better and in great abundance. That my dear son is our position with regard to the Iroquois.

I share your sentiments about providing for the future of the observance of the rules. For the present to my confusion I say it, I don’t see in me a single virtue capable of edifying my sisters. I cannot answer for the future but from what I can see of those who have come over from France, I am sure the greater number think as I do even if they wanted to go back and they are far from it. Those who were professed here having been trained to our rule and accustomed to no other spirit would be capable of maintaining it. That’s the reason that we don’t keep pressing our petition. Besides the wound which the hand of God inflicted is too recent and we still feel the inconvenience. We also fear that suitable subjects won’t be sent to us and that they will find it difficult to get used to the life here, to the food, to the climate and the people. But what we fear most is that they would lack docility and a good vocation, they have a different spirit and without submission and docility they would have difficulty in accepting ours and perhaps we would have too in tolerating them.

The difference of spirit has caused two of the Hospital Sisters to return to France and this makes us afraid. That we seem to be making people of our own sex and condition travel 1000 or 1200 leagues amid dangers from sea and from enemy only to send them back is something I should not be responsible for without absolute necessity unless a sister was so determined to return that we could not keep her except by force and perhaps endanger her salvation. I had a great desire to send for my niece, Mary of the Incarnation, who as they have written to me several times is good and virtuous, and has a strong vocation; I would have great pleasure in preparing her for our duties here and teaching her everything about this country. But my fear that she wouldn’t be contented and thus exposing her to the danger of returning has held me back. Besides I am old and my death would leave her in a solitude that she might find trying. And finally the obstacles that the Iroquois place to Christianity do not allow us to have Indian girls as before and it would give her great pain to see herself deprived of the object of her coming. For to tell you the truth it is extremely painful and disheartening. How could a girl have the heart to learn very different languages seeing herself deprived of the pupils on whom she hoped to use them? If hostilities were to end soon the mind would overcome this repugnance but death may come before peace.

That’s the reason for my decision about my niece despite my desire to satisfy her and the consolation I would feel: for being so far from you and having no chance of seeing you, She would be a substitute for you. For you are the two people for whom my mind journeys most often to France or rather to the Heart of our Loving Jesus where I visit both of you in my desires for my sanctification and your perfect offering of yourselves. But I sacrifice this satisfaction to my Divine Jesus, abandoning all to His guidance for time and Eternity. He knows what He wants to do with us - let us take pleasure in letting Him do it and if we are faithful to Him, our reunion in Heaven will be more perfect in so far as we have broken earthly bonds to obey the Gospel maxims.

But to come back to where we were. We are in no hurry to ask for choir sisters from France - we think it better to wait a little in order to take measures that will satisfy them and us. However we must ask for two lay sisters even this year. I don’t know if I told you, there being no bishop here, the Bishop of Rouen has announced that he is the local Ordinary here and has appointed the Father Superior of the Missions to be his Vicar General. He being the Principal Ecclesiastic in the country we depend on his authority for the validity of Professions according to the consultation signed by six Doctors in the Sorbonne.

As for yourself it is no want of affection that kept me from sending you the papers you asked for. I kept them only to send them to you; otherwise I should have burned them when my Superior who ordered me to write them had returned them to me. But as I told you last year they were burned in another fire. However as you ask for it, if I can steal a few minutes from my other occupations which are continued I’ll write what my memory and affection can furnish and send it to you next year.

That my dear son is how life passes and if our good God didn’t help by constant actual graces who could subsist? I confess that I have nothing to complain of but rather have reason to sing His Mercies. I assure you that I need more than virile courage to carry the crosses that pile up in our particular affairs and in the affairs of the country where everything is full of thorns though we must walk in the dark, where the clear sighted are blind and all is uncertain. With all that mind and heart are at peace and wait from one moment to the next for the orders of the Divine Providence and for what He sends. All this darkness makes me see more clearly into my vocation and I discover lights on things that were obscure and unknown when God gave them to me before I came to Canada. I’ll tell you about this in the writings I have promised you so that you can know and admire the Divine Goodness working in my life and His will that I should obey Him without human reasoning loosing myself in His ways in a manner that I cannot express. Our dear Sr. St. Joseph on her deathbed predicted I would have many crosses to bear. I await them my dear son and embrace them as they come and after all our dear Saviour makes me experience that His yoke is sweet and His burden light. May He be Eternally blest for having so regarded my weakness that He tasted all the bitterness of the cross to leave only the sweetness.

When I spoke of our Poverty, don’t think I was asking anything from you except your prayers which I regard as real riches. I leave the rest to the guidance of Divine Providence who is superabundantly rich to come to our aid in our necessities. I assure you He has never left us in need of food or clothing or other necessities of life but has paternally provided for all and even during Sr. St. Joseph’s long illness His Providence has helped so that she could not have got better care in France in the midst of her Family, apart from the lack of space. I have already told you about her death, I’ll say nothing more here. Her loss is a privation but I console myself that God possesses her, otherwise I would feel her loss keenly. May God be blessed for all He is in my life and wherever I am.

From Quebec. 1652.
Kelly, Sr M. St. Dominic, O.S.U. Marie of the Incarnation 1599 - 1672 Correspondence, (translated from the French edition by Dom Guy Oury Monk of Solesmes), Irish Ursuline Union, 2000, p. 186 - 189.