Letters - Direction - Theme 2

Salesian Spirituality: Six Themes

Theme II:

“So let us live courageously between the one will of God and the other.”

(Francis de Sales, Treatise on the Love of God, Book 9)

The goodness of God – the sense of that goodness permeating all of creation, of the dynamic thrust in the centre of created reality that inclines toward its Creator – is basic to the Salesian spirit. Humankind is created to know and love God and to do God’s will. But the discernment of and response to the will is not always a simple matter. The traditional sources of revelation – Church teaching and Scripture – provide a framework within which the individual seeks that will. Beyond that, Christian writers before de Sales had dealt with the issue of discernment in myriad ways.[1] Particularly rich in its analysis of discernment , the Ignatian tradition, as cultivated by the Jesuits and known to Francis from his student days, had established guidelines for the subtle interior art of distinguishing good and evil spirits in order to better know the will of God for each individual life.[2] Moreover, the contemplative tradition known to the Savoyard through the spiritual classics taught a self-abandoned love of God and a heroic obedience to God’s will as revealed in that love.

Drawing on the wisdom of received tradition, Salesian spirituality found its own point of spiritual equilibrium by “living between” what Francis de Sales described as the two wills of God.[3] God’s will was, for the bishop, in fact only one. But he saw God’s essence as so transcending human capacity that it could not be known in its simple unity. God could be known only through the revelation of the divine will. And that will, as humans perceived it, had various forms. People attached different names to God’s will according to the different ways in which it appeared to them. God’s two wills are, in Salesian terminology, the “signified will of God” and the “will of God’s good pleasure.” The first of these is God’s will to be done. It is known to persons through what God says, directs, and inspires. The individual, discerning carefully his or her own heart and carried in the arms of the Christian community with its store of traditional wisdom, seeks to discover this signified will for his or her own life. Scripture, Church teaching, devotional literature, private and communal prayer, spiritual direction: these are places where such a will would likely manifest itself. Here de Sales sees human liberty in widest parameters. The person makes life choices based on the discerned knowledge of this will of God, relying on his or her powers of judgement and movements of heart to detect what that will might be. The person thus is, in a sense, a co-creator of God’s will under these circumstances. Francis taught that, even in cases when one could not clearly discern the divine will, one must rely upon one’s powers of decision making and, after consultation with other reputable persons, act upon one’s decisions with the vitality one would bring to carrying out a clearly perceived manifestation of divine will. Once perceived, the person begins to align himself or herself with that will by observing and loving the indications received. This volitional response the Genevan bishop terms “love of conformity” (i.e., conformity of a human will to a divine will thus revealed).

One example of the cultivation of this will might suffice. When first under Francis’s direction, Jane de Chantal, then a widow with four small children, began to discern the emerging shape of her future vocation. She felt she was called to a life of chastity and “withdrawal from the world.” Her mentor urged her to have confidence in her nascent inspirations despite the fact that her extended family and the society of her day could only look askance at such longings. He directed her in her growing intimacy and conformity to the signified will of God. He even confirmed her in the practice of imaging her own spiritual world with monastic imagery. For example, she took the Virgin Mary as the Abbess of the cloister of her own heart.

But God’s full will does not, in Salesian thought, reside solely in the received inspirations of either individual or community. God’s will is also manifest in the events, facts, and existing realities of one’s immediate situation. The “will of God’s good pleasure” – God’s will done – for de Sales happens independently of human consent. Where one finds oneself, one’s particular situation, is also revelatory of the divine will and must be taken into account and lived with creativity if one is to be truly responsive to the unique will of God. It is especially in painful situations or events – inner or outer – that might seem to thwart one’s own sense of God’s will that this will of God’s good pleasure can be felt. The term “good pleasure” may be misleading.[4] The bishop does not mean to imply that God causes all events and existing realities but that whatever is is in some way within God’s providence; it is not outside of the loving embrace of the creative and redemptive process. God is found wherever one finds oneself. It also means that the totality of the will of God is not to be found in any one place – either in individual discernment or in the factual situations that seem at variance with that discernment. It is not that one is God’s will and the other isn’t until an impasse causes one to change one’s sense of the shape of divine will. It is rather that living between the two wills – maintaining a creative tension that refuses to limit God to one expression or another – is in itself more consonant with the immensity and simplicity of the essence of a God whose wholeness can never be contained in any one part of creation.

The widow de Chantal’s situation is a case in point and in the bishop’s direction of her can be seen the way in which one is to live courageously between the two wills. Validate her emerging desires to give herself utterly to God, he did. Encourage her to be responsive to the will she sensed emerging uniquely in her, he did. But throughout the first five years of his direction he spent the majority of his effort impressing on his ardent and impatient friend the fact that the situation in which she found herself – her widowhood with its familial responsibilities – was the place in which she was, at present, called to love and know God. There could be no undue “yearning ahead” of herself, no serious anxiety about not being somewhere else. God’s will for her at this time was to be lovingly accepted in the facts of her motherhood and her uneasy situation in her father-in-law’s household.

Human response to this will of God that has already been done was termed by de Sales, “the love of submission.” A nuanced concept, love of submission had a number of forms. The acceptance of God’s good pleasure could be undertaken in more than one way. Existing situations, the trials that overtake one, could be received merely with patience and tolerance, what he deemed “resignation.” Or they might be embraced with a more responsive and flexible love, with what he termed “holy indifference” or better, “holy disinterestedness.” This grace-filled attitude of acceptance of what is beyond one’s control was for the Savoyard a mark of Christian character. For God’s will he felt was known not only in the promptings and dreams of one’s own heart but also in the present, often painful, reality in which one lives; not only in the “how it should be” but in “the way it is.” It is somewhere between these two facts that moral choice, loving surrender and authentic human life are discerned.

Thus Salesian spirituality steers a fine course between the otherworldliness and the fatalism that haunts much of Christian thought. To live courageously between the two wills, to engage in the constant and unending interplay between the two, is to begin to live in harmony with the unique will of God. The implications of this foundational Salesian position for a Christian vocation are manifold. By identifying the will of God with what one might call both prophetic and worldly voices Salesian spirituality allows the Christian to engage wholeheartedly in the facts of real life – to see the social and political arenas as legitimate spheres for Christian action. Yet the Salesian spirit does retain its prophetic quality by emphasizing equally the importance of inspiration and individual discernment in the Christian life. It allows for great freedom – what one might call a spirit-led approach to religion – while placing that liberty firmly within the scriptural, dogmatic, ascetic, and mystical traditions of the Church.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[1] Cf. Jacques Guillet, et.al., Discernment of Spirits (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1970).

[2] See Stopp’s article, “St. Francis de Sales at Clermont College,” and F. Charmot, S.J., Ignatius of Loyola and St. Francis de Sales, Two Masters, One Spirituality (St. Louis, MO: B. Herder, 1966), pp. 41-115).

[3] This analysis of living between the two wills is based primarily on the Treatise on the Love of God. Francis’s other works, while reflecting similar theological foundations, do not always use the same terminology. It is especially the architecture of the Treatise that suggests this. Book 8 and Book 9 treat respectively of the two wills and of the appropriate response to each, the love of conformity and the love of submission.

[4] This traditional term, used by the saint in a unique way, is most likely based on Matthew 11:26.

A Spirituality for Everyone

St. Francis de Sales presents a spirituality that can be practised by everyone in all walks of life

LETTERS OF St. FRANCIS DE SALES

LETTERS OF SPIRITUAL DIRECTION

:: Letters to a Wife and Mother :: Letters of Spiritual Direction :: Letters to Persons in the World :: Letters to Person in Religion

LETTERS OF SPIRITUAL DIRECTION