Letters - Direction - Theme 4

Salesian Spirituality: Six Themes

Theme IV:

“Walk in the presence of God in holy and absolute liberty of spirit.”

(Jane de Chantal, Letter to a Superior)

The Salesian experience of God is in the midst. But the quality of that experience, while contoured by the busyness and the personal relationships that surround it, is not wholly defined by the bustle, noise, and impingement that must necessarily be found there. The Salesian spirit instead bespeaks a God that bestows a spacious liberty on humankind. A fundamental assumption that underlies Salesian thought, and one which marks that thought as especially Catholic and especially early Counter-Reformation, is this idea of the centrality of human freedom in the divine scheme of things.[1] Essential to the nature of the person is the freedom to choose and act. God never, in this view, violates that principle of integrity. Human beings, to be truly in God’s image and likeness, are never simply puppets in a marionette show that plays out some remotely devised drama of predestination. Rather, each person cooperates freely in his or her own salvation. Christian humanism, beginning as it does from the point of view of human experience, asserts that human beings are saved, brought into the fullness for which they were created, not despite, but according to their intrinsic nature. The nature is free.

The liberty of the children of God that Jane and Francis taught their friends and which, in their own relationship, was one of the chief insights that he gave to her, was such a vision of freedom of choice. Each person, they thought, could exercise that freedom by the way he or she chose to love. The choice was: to love for self-serving ends, for the self-satisfaction that love brings or to love with a “pure love,” a love that is modelled on the unconditional love given to humankind by God. Each person could choose objects of love. T he choice here was between objects that could, by their nature or by association, lead one either away from or toward God. Finally, each person could choose to love or not to love the facts of their lives, the unique situation in which he or she found himself or herself. And each could choose the way in which he or she accepted all events that occurred.

To love purely meant to love in a way that did not always come easily. True, human nature, in the Salesian view, was created with the desire for good and the inner dynamic of love that moves toward conformity to the divine will. But human nature, in that view, is also wounded. To recover the ability to love purely was the essential task of human life. The Christian tradition of spirituality had long spoken of pure love contrapuntally with the terms “indifference” or “detachment.”[2]

While indifference could mean a devaluation of creation, a sort of blindness to or even recoiling from all that was seen as non-spiritual, at its best indifference was the ability to love creatures deeply without attaching oneself to them unduly. It was about seeing God in all things, about attending to what is of God in all things. It was about perceiving each person solely in the hope of the wholeness to which they were created. This did not necessarily devalue creation but treated creation as a product of God’s loving hand to be appreciated but not used for self-serving ends. Pure love of creatures and of God went hand in hand. Negatively stated, no created thing was to stand n the way of one’s love for God. Positively stated, one’s love for God and thus for God’s created order was to be shown in the respectful way in which one dealt with it. Within creation human persons, above all, were not to be possessed but love in such a way that they were freed to be fully themselves in God.

In practice, “indifference” was central to Salesian spirituality. It was the virtue which, when realized, freed one for the liberty of the children of God. it can be seen in de Sales’ teaching on living between the two wills of God, especially in his insistence that “submission” to the will of God’s good pleasure is as essential as “conformity” to the signified will of God. The Salesian emphasis on indifference cal also be seen in the directorial process both in the way in which the director was encouraged to view direction and in the way in which the directee was enabled to pray.

First, as directors, Jane de Chantal and Francis de Sales did not see themselves as superimposing a set of ideals or a set method of devotion on a directee. They saw themselves as enabling the person to respond fully to the spirit of God that speaks and lives uniquely within. They can be no constraint in this. Directees should not be utterly dependent on a director, should not substitute a director’s advice for an authentic experience of the presence of God. There may be as many faces and forms to that presence as there are directees. Directors then should not attach themselves too firmly to their own methods of prayer but foster a sensitive awareness to the diverse movements of God within the great variety of persons.

Mirroring this difference in the directorial process is the practice of prayer in the Salesian tradition. No one method, no one type of prayer – either meditative or contemplative – was seen to be superior to other types. Indifference should extend to the loving acceptance of whatever prayer to which one is drawn. Jane is quoted as saying:

The great method of prayer is to have no method at all. When the Holy Spirit has taken possession of the person who prays, it does as it pleases without any more need for rules or methods. The soul must be in God’s hands like clay in the hands of a potter so that he might fashion all sorts of parts. Or the soul must be like soft wax to receive a seal’s impression, or like a blank tablet upon which the Holy Spirit can write the divine will.

If, going to prayer, one can become pure capacity for receiving the spirit of God, that will suffice for any method. Prayer must happen by grace not by artfulness. Go to prayer by faith, remain there in hope and God out only by charity which requires simply that one act and suffer.[3]

This “methodless prayer” in fact became a distinctive feature of the Vistandine charism. While novices were encouraged to respond individually to the ways in which they were drawn in prayer, they did seem as a group to have a special predilection for a simple waiting before God. Jane described it well.

I have recognized that the almost universal attraction of the daughters of the Visitation is to a very simple practice of the presence of God effected by a total abandonment of themselves to Holy Providence… Several are attracted this way from the beginning and it seems as though God avails Himself of this one means to cause us to achieve our end, and the perfect union of our soul with Him.[4]

In such an attitude before God one does not attach oneself unduly to how one feels, or to what the results of prayer might be. One might in fact affectively experience nothing. Yet, if the focus in the prayer is upon waiting before God in loving attention, then the receiving of “gifts” like warmth, spiritual thoughts, and attractions will be secondary. Jane herself experience this type of prayer. It was the dominant chord of the whole of her inner reality. Its harmonies were often discordant for she found herself always wanting to “feel” something. In his direction of her, Francis encouraged her to cultivate a state of indifference to such feelings. In a letter of 1612 he wrote:

It is the height of holy disinterestedness to be content with naked, dry, and insensible acts carried out by the superior will alone. You have expressed your suffering well to me and there is nothing to do to remedy it but what you are doing: affirming to Our Lord, sometimes aloud and other times in song, that you even will to live and to eat as the dead do, without taste, feeling or knowledge. In the end, the Saviour wants us to be His so perfectly that nothing else remains for us, and to abandon ourselves entirely to the mercy of His providence without reservation.[5]

Salesian teaching on indifference, that true liberty of the children of God, is summed up in Francis de Sales’ oft-quoted maxim: “ask for nothing, refuse nothing.” It is this kind of liberty, which neither seeks a specific result nor rejects what in fact is, that characterises the free human response to God and God’s world. Human liberty resides, not in not caring about what happens (were that possible) but in caring more that God’s results be accomplished whatever the outcome.

Salesian liberty, in terms of practice, becomes a freedom to serve. The Genevan bishop was famous for his generosity with time and advice. His episcopal apartments were daily open to all who sought his counsel. The poor, the powerless, the tedious and overly scrupulous, were received equally with (and sometimes to the chagrin of) the rich, powerful and magnanimous of spirit. This personal generosity of service was a result of the Savoyard’s profound internalisation of the liberty of the children of God. Such a freedom rested upon a non-attachment to his own particular notions of results.

In the bishop’s personal life and in the spiritual that bears his name, this indifference extends even to the realms of sanctification and salvation. In this view such concerns were, as a matter of continual attention, best left up to God. human freedom resided not in being able to ferret out the inscrutable mysteries of divine judgement, not in being able to “earn” one’s place in heaven or assure oneself of one’s perfection. Freedom was instead found in the cultivation of non-attachment, even to these assurances so dear to religious personalities. If the focus of attention in one’s relationship with God became one’s own ultimate good as one’s own felt acquisition of some ideal state, then the focus would not be upon God.

Salesian spirituality, as has been mentioned, is deeply relational in its operations. One comes to God in the midst of worldly vocation and of interpersonal relations. But one must be in the midst as a child of God. One must cultivate a holy freedom that truly loves all things. One must have a clarity of perception that sees the purpose in all things, that sees their origin and destination. One loves, one realizes the kingdom proclaimed in Jesus when, free from the desire to possess anything, even one’s own ultimate good, one enters into the service of the created order desiring only the manifestation of the will of God. in this, Jesus lives.

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[1] An excellent study of Christian humanism and one which places Francis de Sales firmly within that tradition (as opposed to Henri Bremond whose classic Histoire Littéraire describes de Sales as “devout humanist”) see Julien-Eymard d’Angers, L’Humanisme Chrétien au XVIIe-siècle: St. François de Sales et Yves de Paris (La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970).

[2] St. Bernard of Clairvaux and Catherine of Genoa are among those whose thought centers on the pure love of God. the basis for this was ultimately, of course, biblical, and Francis de Sales utilized the Song of Songs extensively to construct his vision of the human-divine interaction. Likewise, in his Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius twice asks his retreatant to develop the virtue of indifference: in the foundations and in the exercise preparatory to election. On Francis and Ignatius on indifference, see Charmot, Two Masters, One Spirituality.

[3] Sa Vie et ses oeuvres, III, 260. Cf. Francis’s letter to Madame de Granieu (Oeuvres, XVIII, 237-240).

[4] Ibid., Conseils de direction, 337.

[5] Oeuvres, XV, 198; Letter DCCLXIV.

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