Carmelite Convent, Reading
My dear Stella,
Jesus!
I am going to take you at your word, my “helpless baby sister”, and exercise the privileges of one who put you to sleep when you were quite small, who took you out in your pram, and who held your head when you had bilious attacks. My baby! The world pivoted round my baby! A great deal of my world does that still. At one period, when you could just manage a spoon, Mother used to prepare a cornflour pudding for you, warm and sweet. I fed you with the spoon. It was a great feature of the day. Every mouthful had to have a story. A letter for the post, and you would open your mouth. So the plate was emptied. It would have been much easier for me to have eaten the pudding myself, but that would not have fattened you. I could bear the spoon to your mouth, but you had to open your mouth and swallow the food.
So now, my precious, I can pray for grace for you. God has prepared it for you and allowed me to bring it near you, but I cannot act for you, you must do that yourself. Grace awaits you, but YOU must receive it.
You must know, deep inside you, that my anxiety about you is much more serious than you say. You know that your action is a grave sin, are you purposely “begging the point”, have you been to confession yet? That is the anxiety that breaks my heart, an anxiety that never leaves me. It is practically five months now, and are you still living out of grace? If I was there with you at this moment I would take you by the arm and run you round to Our Lady’s Church, then when we were in the presbytery reception room, I would say to Father McAuley, “This girl has come to have a serious talk with you, Father. Now I will just go round to the church and say my prayers. Get on with it, Stella!”
There again – you have the spoon, I could not go further than that, the rest is your action. You must be miserable whenever you face it. Perhaps you fill your mind with the thought of next April, but you are not being fair even to that thought, for he, too, will need grace. He needs it now, and the peace that grace can give him.
Why, my precious, why, when God has given all things to you, do you turn away from Him? Have you forgotten already – “Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest, I am He whom thou seekest! Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest me.”
It does not matter in the least whether you believe in the marriage contract or not. The fact remains, it is a law, and millions of wiser people than you have seen the necessity for keeping the law before you chose to break it. So in all probability you are quite wrong, and everybody else quite right. As the lack of devotion is based on ignorance, it really bears no weight at all, and certainly devotion has no chance of growing unless you encourage it. This is not the moment for argument, the matter is too serious, we are too near to Eternity, to hesitate and quibble. So, my own dear, make a big determined effort, and deliver yourself and everybody else from a most humiliating position. You know that you can, if only you will. The present situation is ignominious to a degree, and quite untenable.
I suppose I think of you more often than you do of me. My first waking thought is always a question, “What day is it, Lord?” Then when He has awakened my memory sufficiently, there follows another, “Oh, dear, and there’s Stella.” So my day begins.
I have often re-lived our week together [in July 1936]. How strange that after five years God should choose to send you, then. So that the first days of your tragedy were spent with me, who loves you more than anybody else on Earth. Do you remember our conversation about pedestals? Yes, yours did crash, after all. You are not less, dear, but you occupy a different position. I picked you up out of the debris, and want to shield and hold you now, whereas before I watched you from a lower altitude, and expected everybody else to do the same. They always crash, those pedestals, and I never grow any wiser. Ah, human nature, poor, weak, tainted nature, capable of divine heroism, and bestial wilfulness! And through it all, the plaint of the “tremendous Lover”, “Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest…”
I hope you will soon have the little house, I am sure it would be much better for you. I am glad that you are making a success of home life. You have the best cook on Earth to teach you, so you should not err in that department, but it is very difficult to imagine you as the critical shopper.
Here is the end of the page, and a last whispered pleading. Soon, precious, soon, there is not time for delay. All the love and grace are waiting for you.
With all my love, dearest baby sister,
Sister of the Heart of Mary
Nov 011936