Dialogues of the Carmelites 3: Blanche and the Prioress

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Prioress: Whenever you like … But will you answer me now if I ask you what idea you have about the first obligation of a Carmelite?

Blanche: It is to conquer one’s nature.

Prioress: Very good. To conquer and not to force, the distinction is important. When one tries to force nature, one only succeeds in losing what is natural, and what God demands of his daughters is not to play act every day for His Majesty, but to serve him. A good servant is always where she ought to be, and never makes herself conspicuous.

Blanche: I only ask to pass unnoticed …

Prioress: Smiling, with a hint of irony.

Alas, one only reaches that stage after a long time, and to desire it too strongly in the beginning does not make it any easier to obtain … You are of a noble family, my daughter, and we do not demand that you forget that. Just because you have renounced its advantages, you ought not to think you can escape all the obligations that such a birth imposes, and they will seem to you, here, heavier than elsewhere.

Blanche makes a gesture of dismissal.

Oh, yes, you burn to take the last place. Distrust that feeling, my child … In wishing to descend too much one risks exceeding the measure. In humility as in everything, excess engenders pride, and that sort of pride is a thousand times more subtle and dangerous than that of the world, which is more often than not mere vainglory …

A silence.
What drives you to the Carmelites?

Blanche: Does Your Reverence order me to speak with complete frankness?

Prioress: Yes.

Blanche: Well, then, the attraction of a heroic life.

Prioress: The attraction of a heroic life, or that of a certain manner of living that appears to you – quite wrongly – to make heroism easier, to put it so to speak within arm’s reach?

Blanche: Reverend Mother, excuse me, I have never made calculations of that sort.

Prioress: The most dangerous calculations we make are those which we call illusions …

Blanche: I may well have illusions. I would ask nothing better than that I be stripped of them.

Prioress: That you be stripped of them … (she repeats the words slowly, with emphasis).
You will have to take charge of that yourself, my daughter. Everyone here already has their hands full with their own illusions. Do not imagine that the first duty of our way of life is to come to one another’s aid so as to make ourselves more agreeable to the divine Majesty, like those young people who share their powder and rouge before appearing at the ball. Our business is to pray, just as the business of a lamp is to give light. It does not come into anyone’s head to light a lamp in order to illuminate another lamp. “Every man for himself”; such is the law of the world, and ours resembles it a little: “Everyone for God!” Poor little thing! You have dreamed of this house like a timid child whom the servants have just put to bed dreams in her dark room of the salon with its light and warmth. You know nothing of the solitude to which a true religious is exposed to live and to die. For one finds a certain number of true religious, but much more often mediocre and lukewarm ones. Come, come! Here as elsewhere, evil remains evil, and the fact that it has been made from pure milk does not make cream that has turned any less nauseating than rotten meat … Oh, my child, it is not in keeping with the Carmelite spirit to grow soft and emotional, but I am old and sick, here I am very near my end, so I can well afford to be emotional on your account … Great trials await you, my daughter…

Blanche: What does it matter, if God gives me strength?

Prioress: What He wants to put to the trial in you is not your strength, but your weakness …

Silence.

The scandals of the world have one good thing about them, that they revolt souls like yours. Those that you will find here will disappoint you. All in all, my daughter, the state of a mediocre nun seems to me more deplorable than that of a brigand. The brigand can convert, and that would be for him like a second birth. The mediocre nun, though, she cannot still be born, she already has been, she has missed her birth, and except for a miracle, she will always remain an abortion …

Blanche: Oh, Mother, I would not wish to see anything but good here …

Prioress: Whoever voluntarily blinds herself to the faults of her neighbor, under the pretext of charity, often does nothing other than break the mirror so as not to have to see herself in it. For the infirmity of our nature demands that we discover first of all in others our own wretchedness. Take care that you do not let yourself be overcome by some sort of naïve benevolence which makes the heart soft and the spirit false.

Silence.

My daughter, people wonder what good we serve, and after all they can well be excused for wondering. We believe that, thanks to our austerities, we bring them proof that one can perfectly well do without the things they think indispensable. But for the example to have any meaning, they must still be sure that when all is said and done, these things are as indispensable to us as they are to them …
No, my daughter, we are not in the business of mortification, nor are we conservatories of virtue. We are houses of prayer, prayer alone justifies our existence, whoever does not believe in prayer can only consider us imposters or parasites. If we were to say this openly to unbelievers, we would make ourselves better understood. Are they not forced to recognize that belief in God is a universal fact? Is it not a very strange contradiction that humanity as a whole can believe in God, and yet pray to Him so little and so badly? They scarcely give him the honor of fearing Him. If belief in God is universal, should not prayer be just as universal? Well, my daughter, God has wished that it should be so, not by making prayer, dependent as it is on our free choice, a need as imperious as hunger or thirst, but by permitting that we are able to pray for others, ourselves in the place of others. So every prayer, be it that of a little shepherd boy who watches over his flocks, is the prayer of all mankind.

Short silence.

What the little shepherd does from time to time, at the prompting of his heart, we must do night and day. Not by any means that we hope to pray better than he does, not at all. That simplicity of soul, that tender abandonment to the divine Majesty that is for him an inspiration of the moment, a grace, and like an illumination of the spirit, we consecrate our life to acquiring, or to recovering if we had experienced it before, for it is a gift of childhood which more often than not does not survive childhood. Once childhood has been left behind, one has to suffer a long time to return to it, as at the very end of the night one finds again another dawn. Have I become a child again?