Letters - Direction - Theme 3

Salesian Spirituality: Six Themes

Theme III:

“Let us belong to God… in the midst of so much busyness.”

(Francis de Sales, Letter to Madame de Cornillon)

The classic spirituality of Christendom, growing as it does out of what might be termed a “desert” impulse, tends to locate authentic religious experience primarily outside the life of “the world.”[1] There is a marginal overtone to the desert voice, a prophetic ring that is discordant when played against the values that ring pleasing in the ears of ordinary society. There is in the silence, solitude, and withdrawal of the desert a challenge to the noisy activity of the marketplace and household. There is a warning that those in the world might well look closely at the lives, both private and communal, that they have fashioned and scrutinize them with the lens of the desert critique. There can also be in the desert spirit a subtle (or not so subtle) devaluation of the world and those who remain there, an insistence that the busy noisy life necessitated in making the social order continue is incompatible with a true discernment of the voice and will of God.

Salesian spirituality, while retaining much of the interior spirit of the desert, in the sense that a radical call from God does indeed claim and refashion the human heart, did not at all assert that that voice could only echo clearly in the stillness of the hermit’s cave or the monastery cloister. That voice might also be raised and heard in a life lived in the midst of the world. Francis and Jane insisted that all Christians were called to find God. seekers after God did not have to abandon the pursuits in which most persons ordinarily engaged. Some individuals might be pursued by the call of the desert and adopt some form of alternative lifestyle. But a vast majority of Christians would be called to find God precisely in the midst of the tasks and circumstances of day-to-day existence. All walks of life provided suitable means for fashioning an authentic Christian way of being. A vocation to a devout life was offered to all: layperson and cleric, man or woman, celibate or married. All were invited to a full participation in the human/divine existence found in Jesus. For this they were created.

It was precisely in the midst of all the busyness of worldly life that God could be found. As Francis encouraged Madame de Cornillon, his own younger sister who was also his directee and “daughter,”

Let us all belong to God, my daughter, in the midst of so much busyness brought on by the diversity of worldly things. Where could we give better witness to our fidelity than in the midst of things going wrong? Ah, dearest daughter, my sister, solitude has its assaults, the world its busyness; in either place we must be courageous, since in either place divine help is available to those who trust in God and who humbly and gently beg for His fatherly assistance.[2]

It was there, in the midst, that God had planted the householder, the worker, the statesman, the merchant, the courtier. There, among family and work, the will of God – God’s good pleasure – was revealed. The implications of this insistence on the religious value of all life callings are great. Jesus was seen to live in each Christian heart that opened to him and was believed to be carried truly on the lips, arms, and shoulders of sailor, housewife, green-grocer or advisor of kings.[3]

Devotion – making Jesus live – was not in the Salesian world something that necessarily took one away, either physically or psychologically, form one’s daily experience. It recognized that true Christian life could be realized anywhere. And insofar as one recognized the call of God, the will of God, in where one was and what one was, any situation could be embraced wholeheartedly. No facet of life was thus alien or indifferent: all of the ordinary things and actions had value in themselves and could express love of God and neighbour, notably by the compassion and competence that were brought to them.

The Salesian spirit is thus contextual. It is also relational. Being in the midst dos not mean simply trying to pray in the brief silences that emerge amid the noise. It means that making Jesus live is not something that occurs solely in the isolated individual vis-à-vis his or her own God. It is not something that is forged only out of the solitary vigil of silence represented by the hermit monk. The world mink itself comes from the root “monos” or “alone.” A better world to portray the Salesian spirit might be “between.” It is what goes on between persons, in their relationships, that is of the essence in making Jesus live. This interpersonal dimension of the Salesian spirit deepens the importance of the insight that it is in the midst that one loves God. For it is not that one glimpses God despite the persons around one but that one finds God precisely through and with those persons.

Relationships then are central in the Salesian context. They are neither inimical to nor peripheral to one’s love of God. It is in relationships between persons, in loving neighbour, that love of God is shown.[4] Francis and Jane’s own relationship is a case in point. It was between these two friends that eh simultaneous expression of human and divine love was so deeply explored. Their own ardent and poignant bond which spanned nineteen years drew them together into a mature love of God. It was precisely in the midst of that friendships with all the powerful dynamics of interaction between male and female that they both learned what it was to make Jesus live fully. And they extended themselves in friendship to a wide circle of intimates giving credence to the Pauline assertion that friendship is the bond of perfection.[5]

Within Salesian thought the way one is with others is of central importance to the art of letting Jesus live. Francis’s gentle demeanour, his graceful way with words, the intuitive skill with which he directed others was not social artifice. It was intrinsic to the realization of who Jesus is. Jesus is seen among persons, in the grace-filled way they gently lead each other to greater love and conformity to the will of God. likewise, Jane’s motherly guidance of her spiritual daughters was born not solely of her own maternal experience but also out of the recognition that it is in such guidance that the presence of God is felt and the face of the gentle Jesus known. The way one is, the way one loves one’s fellow human beings, the atmosphere of mutual charity this creates, marks one as a Christian.

Over and over in the two friend’s correspondence is found the insistence that affection and mutual regard are essential means by which the spirit of devotion is manifest. Which is to say, devotion is not so much a matter of how or how long one prays as much as how one enters into relationships with God and neighbour. It is instructive to look at the congregation of the Visitation founded by the bishop and the widow in order to see the way in which they envisioned this relational spirituality being worked out in practice. The Visitation of Holy Mary was established as an institute for women who were drawn to a life of contemplative prayer but who might not be suitable candidates for existing religious communities because of their age, health, or temperament. They formed an unobtrusive congregation not notable for any striking charism but intent on living hidden lives of greater interior intimacy with God and on manifesting that intimate union precisely in and through the community of charity that they were. The emphasis was on the shared cultivation of such a group ethos. In Francis’s words:

Since this congregation does not have as many austerities or as indissoluble bonds as formal orders and regular congregations, the fervour of charity and the force of a deep personal resolution must supply for all that and take the place of laws, vows, and jurisdiction; so that in this congregation might be realized the saying of the Apostle which affirms that charity is the perfect bond.[6]

The sisters were to be a perfect union of charity, the Pauline vision of love governing all their relations. This was to be true within each Visitandine house. It was also, as the institute grew, to be the commanding principle directing the relationships between monasteries. No formal institutional means were established to achieve unity and continuity of spirit. Mutual regard and the bond of love itself, nourished on the founder’s examples and expressed in the rule, were to reign as the principles of union.

In the Salesian world one loved God in the midst: in the busy bustle of what might be a “worldly” vocation and in the interpersonal exchanges of family, community, and friends.

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[1] For a contemporary look at Salesian spirituality as an alternative to desert spirituality see Joseph Power, “Marketplace Spirituality,” in Praying, No. 19 (July-August, 1987), 14-16. Thomas Gannon and George W. Traub also treat the same issue from the point of view of Ignatian spirituality in The Desert and the City: An Interpretation of the History of Christian Spirituality (New York: Macmillan 1969).

[2] Oeuvres, XIV, 339; Letter DCXIV.

[3] This did not mean that Francis, being a child of the Counter-Reformation, did not view the priesthood with special respect. On the place of the priesthood in de Sales’ thought and the high regard he had for the episcopal office, seeing it as taking is authority directly from the mandate of Christ and not from the papacy, see André Ravier’s introduction to L’Introduction à la vie devote in Saint François de Sales, Oeuvres in Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1969), pp. xl-xliv.

[4] Cf. Wright, Bond of Perfection, pp. 102ff. on love of God and of neighbour.

[5] Ibid. on friendship. See also André Ravier, ed., François de Sales, Correspondance: les letters d’amitié spirituelle (Paris: Bibliothèqie Européenne, Desclée de Brouwer, 1980). Ravier makes the point that all of Francis’s relationships of spiritual direction were also spiritual friendships and he entitled his collection accordingly.

[6] Oeuvres, XXV, 216: Constitutions 1613. It should be noted that after the writing of this piece, the Visitation was converted into a formal order with solemn vows. Cf. supra, p. 30.

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