"And God will do the rest."

Those interested in learning more about Servant of God Elisabeth Leseur (last week I wrote a post based on an essay about her) should be reading along at bearing blog. Erin is reading and commenting on Elisabeth Leseur: Selected Writings.

Her first post is on "An Essay on the Christian Life of Women," a letter Elisabeth wrote to her niece on the occasion of her first Communion, in which she shares her "most important thoughts and deepest convictions...about what you can and ought to do to become spiritually strong, to make your life fruitful in good works, and to share with others, according to the great law of Christian solidarity, the gifts that you have received."

Erin suggests a few keys to Elisabeth's doctrine, including "a remarkably Eucharistic vision of the human person."

I love her insistence that the actions of Christians "appear to resemble" those of other people -- on the outside, they look the same and perhaps have the same effects as the actions of other people. The exterior has a natural appearance. But in those who have faith, a divine gift alters something wholly invisible, and not demonstrable to others -- the motives, the intention, the end-goal behind those actions.

She also quotes a passage in which Elisabeth demonstrates "an astonishingly clear vision of the value of every human life and the import of free will":

Every person is an incalculable force, bearing within her a little of the future. Until the end of time our words and actions will bear fruit, either good or bad; nothing that we have once given of ourselves is lost, but our words and works, passed on from one to another, will continue to do good or harm to later generations.

It is God's will that our words and actions bear good fruit in the lives of those around us, and in the lives of their descendants. When we sin, the bad fruit is twofold: the sin itself, and the absence of the good that we ought to have done instead.

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