Blessed are those who have their eyes closed

Note. – This communication was given on the occasion of a blind lady who was attending the session.

My good friends, I do not come much among you, but today here I am. For this I thank God and the good Spirits who come to help you walk along the new path. Why have you called me? Was it so that I might lay my hands upon the poor sufferer who is here and cure her? Ah! what suffering, good God! She has lost her sight and the darkness has enveloped her. Poor daughter! Let her pray and hope. I do not know how to work miracles, I, without God's willing it. All the cures that I have been able to obtain and that have been pointed out to you, attribute them to none but Him who is the Father of us all. In your afflictions, always turn your gaze toward heaven and say from the depths of the heart: “My Father, cure me, but grant that my sick soul be cured before my body; let my flesh be chastised, if necessary, so that my soul may rise to your bosom, with the whiteness it possessed when you created it.” After this prayer, my friends, which the good God will always hear, there will be given to you the strength and the courage and, perhaps, also the cure that you only timidly asked for, in reward for your self-denial. However, since I find myself here, in an assembly where studies are chiefly the concern, I will tell you that those who are deprived of sight ought to consider themselves the blessed ones of expiation. Remember that the Christ said it was fitting that you pluck out your eye if it were evil, and that it were better to cast it into the fire than to let it become the cause of your condemnation. Ah! how many there are in the world who one day, in the darkness, will curse having seen the light! Oh! yes, how happy are those who, by expiation, come to be stricken in their sight! Their eyes will not be for them a cause of scandal and of fall; they can live entirely the life of souls; they can see more than you who have clear vision!… When God permits me to part the eyelids of one of these poor sufferers and to restore the light to them, I say to myself: Dear soul, why do you not know all the delights of the Spirit that lives by contemplation and by love? You would not then ask to be granted to see images less pure and less gentle than those it is given you to glimpse in your blindness! Oh! blessed is the blind man who wishes to live with God. More fortunate than you who are here, he touches, he sees the souls and can rise with them to the spiritual spheres that not even the predestined ones of the Earth manage to discern. Open, the eyes are always ready to cause the downfall of the soul; closed, they are always ready, on the contrary, to make it rise toward God. Believe me, good and dear friends, the blindness of the eyes is, many times, the true light of the heart, whereas sight is, frequently, the dark angel that leads to death.

Now, a few words addressed to you, my poor sufferer. Wait and take heart! If I were to tell you: My daughter, your eyes are going to open, how joyful you would feel! But, who knows whether that joy might not bring about your ruin! Trust in the good God, who made happiness and permits sadness. I will do all that is allowed me on your behalf; but, for your part, pray and, even more, think on all that I have just told you.

My good friends: before I withdraw, you who are here, receive my blessing; I give it to all, to the foolish, to the wise, to the believers and to the unfaithful of this assembly. May it serve each one of you!

Vianney, the curé of Ars. ⁿ Note. – We ask whether this is the language of the demon and whether we offend the curé of Ars by attributing such thoughts to him. An uneducated peasant woman, a natural somnambulist, who sees the Spirits very well, had come to the session in a somnambulistic state. She did not know the curé of Ars even by name, and yet she saw him beside the medium and made his portrait with perfect exactitude.

[1] Translator's note: See The Gospel According to Spiritism, chapter VIII, item 20.

[2]

[v. Vianney.]