Week 4    Day 5

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Every Girl in Heaven

CSW 5660. How maidens are educated in the other life and in heaven.

Three, four, or five, are kept together, and each one has her own room, and in it her bed. Near that is a tiny little closet for their clothes and for necessaries. There is also given them a cupboard, with cases or drawers, so that they may put away in them things which they value. In these they take much delight, and store such things up in them.

CSW 5661. They are always kept at their work, which is embroidery worked on white linen. They embroider flowers and such things; and the things they produce by their labor are either for their own use, or they give them to others; they do not sell them.

CSW 5662. These groups [of 3, 4, or 5], unawares to themselves, receive garments with which they clothe themselves every day; a better garment for feast days.

CSW 5663. And they also have a little garden, and as long as they are maidens, there are only flowers in them, but no fruits until they become wives.

CSW 5664. When they see spots on their clothes, it is a sign that they have been thinking ill, and that they have done something which ought not to be done. The spots cannot be washed out, as from clothes in the world. When they find out what they have thought and done—for, at such a time, they always think about that—they then see their blemishes and their evils. If they then get the better of them again, the spots disappear from the clothes of their own accord. In like manner, when they see in their chamber that any one of their clothes is missing, they then immediately know that they have done amiss. Hence is their self-examination; and, if they do not themselves know [what is wrong], a wife comes, who tells them. If they see that there is a new garment in their closet, then they inwardly rejoice, because they know that they have done well.

CSW 5665. When, also, they see that the flowers in their little gardens become dim, or change into worse ones, their attention is arrested; if into better and more beautiful ones, they rejoice, because it is a token that they have thought well.

CSW 5666. Also, there are given them coins of silver or of gold. These they carefully treasure up, because they are tokens of industry or of virtue. They have the written Word and Psalters, and they take them with them to the preachings. They likewise read in them; and if they do not read, either some garment is taken away, or the little garden disappears.

CSW 5667. The preachers sometimes visit and examine them.

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