Letters - Direction - Theme 5

Salesian Spirituality: Six Themes

Theme V:

“Since the heart is the source of all our actions, as the heart is, so are they.”

(Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life, Part III, chapter 23)

Classic desert spirituality, while pointedly concerned with the Christian renovation of the whole person and stressing the importance of the interior dimension of religion, is notable for the extent to which it emphasizes the exterior dimension of the spiritual life. The hermitage, the monastery, celibacy, the religious habit, the cloister all witness to the counter-cultural quality of desert spirituality, to its emphatic insistence that to be made anew in the image of Christ one must be visibly changed. The outward signs of new life are both a witness to the world that its values are overturned by the new covenant and a means by which the interior change that challenges those worldly values might be facilitated. The desert ascetic flees the society, the person entering a religious community takes a new name, they submit themselves to a discipline of life, they undergo mortification, fasting, penance. All these practices are formative for the individual. They are the hallowed means by which a growing conformity to Jesus Christ is achieved.

The desert experience begins by calling one out of the world. Salesian experience does not. For Madame de Chantal and the Monseigneur of Geneva the location of that process is first and foremost interior. It is hidden in the heart. It is only after the slow and dramatic change of person has been engraved in the centre of one’s being that the issue of that metamorphosis can be seen. To impress this idea on his readers, Francis relied upon the metaphor of the almond tree (an image shaped by the particular botanical knowledge of his day).

Men engaged in horticulture tells us that if a word is written on a sound almond seed and it is planted again in its shell, carefully wrapped up and planted, whatever fruit the tree bears will have that same written word stamped on it. For myself… I cannot approve the methods of those who try to reform a person by beginning with external things, such as bearings, dress or hair. On the contrary, it seems to me that we should begin inside. “Be converted to me with your whole heart,” God said. “My child, give me your heart.” Since the heart is the source of actions, as the heart is, so are they…

For this reason… I have wished above all else to engrave and inscribe on your heart this holy, sacred maxim. LIVE Jesus! I am sure that your life, which comes from the heart just as the almond tree comes from its seed, will after that produce all its actions – which are its fruits – inscribed and engraved with this sacred word of salvation.[1]

Francis drew on the desert ascetic tradition but taught that mortification was an activity best hidden in the heart. Thus the desert practices which facilitated the profound renovation of character became translated, in the Salesian context, into interior realities which then might be realized exteriorly in a variety of ways depending on the setting in which the devotee finds himself or herself – for example, how to practise poverty while in the possession of wealth.

The Introduction to the Devout Life is based on the assumption that a fully authentic Christian devotion can be realized in virtually any circumstance. De Sales wrote this early work as a result of his direction of persons like Madame de Charmoisy, a young noblewoman of Savoy, who consulted him about integrating her religious practices and aspirations with her duties as the wife of a courtier serving at the opulent French court. For “Philothea” (the addressee of The Introduction), devotion is primarily an interior practice, something that occurs first in the heart and secondarily makes itself known in a visible way. Which is not to say that making Jesus live is simply a private, personalized matter which need not affect anyone else. Far from it. The almond seed does flower into a tree with real fruits. But devotion should not, in Francis’s view, interfere with the rightful fulfilment of the duties of one’s state in life. The spiritual life is not intrusive. Rather, it springs organically from the central core of the person and adapts itself to the unique life circumstances in which he or she finds himself or herself. Philothea can integrate her devotional longings with the reality of life at the French court because authentic devotion is simply a true love of God which makes one quick to do good and which perfects all vocations and professions.

The fruits of living Jesus will not then necessarily result in a religious posture that looks monastic and celibate. The fruits will be uniquely imprinted on each individual life, lived out differently on each pair of lips, shoulders, and arms. The flexibility and liberality of the Salesian spirit is seen concretely in this assumption that the living Jesus has as many and as varied faces and dwelling places as there are human hearts open to his presence. The devout wife of the courtier will move modestly attired among garish finery, attend dances and theatre without attachment to the frivolity and licentiousness that sometimes accompany these diversions, fast on prescribed days but otherwise eat moderately of foods set before her, pray fervently but only as often and as long as the discharge of her familial duties recommends, cultivate friendships that are based on mutual religious aspirations and practise the unobtrusive virtues of meekness, temperance, integrity, and humility.[2]

Even when an individual is called to a more traditional form of religious life, the devotion practised there must be primarily interior to be Salesian in spirit. This is the case with the Visitation. This women’s congregation founded by the bishop and the widow had as its raison d’être the tilling of a spiritual garden for the raising of “daughters of prayer.” The Visitation takes its name from the account in the gospel of Luke where the Virgin Mary, newly pregnant with child Jesus, calls on her cousin Elizabeth who is also with child. The story is one of ordinary human interaction. No special heroic or dramatic display is portrayed. Yet hidden within the person of Mary, the miracle of divine life grows. So too, the Visitation community was not to be known by the visible, exterior mortifications they practised nor by the heroic works they performed. Their lifestyle was to be extremely moderate by seventeenth-century ascetic standards. Instead, dying to self and letting Jesus live took the form of surrender to the demands of living in a community of charity, faithfully carrying out its rule, visiting the poor of the neighbourhood, practising the life of the humble Jesus, becoming daughters of prayer.[3]

The Salesian stress on interiority, that is, on beginning from the inner, hidden life, and working outward in whatever setting or circumstances, finds eloquent expression in de Sales’ language of the heart. To live Jesus meant to engrave that name on the human heart. For in Salesian spiritual anthropology, the heart is the vital core of the entire personality.[4] It is there, through the heart, that one comes to know and love God, for it is especially by virtue of the heart that humankind can be said to be made in the divine image and likeness.[5] There, at the crossroads of heaven and earth, the living Jesus becomes formed. The heart is the most adequate image Francis finds for human love for God. His is not a static picture of heart but a dynamic one. The heart is a living, ceaselessly pulsing organ which in one movement draws in God’s goodness and life and in another, breathes forth his praise. The alternating movements, in which the heart alone finds rest, symbolize the two movements of love which Francis, in his own special use of traditional language, calls “love of complacence” and “love of benevolence.”[6]

Throughout his writings, Francis de Sales used marvellously inventive language to describe his central intuition that is hidden in the heart that the living Jesus comes to be. At the root of his perception, and at the deepest point of wisdom of Salesian spirituality, is the assumption, which derives in part from the Christian humanist tradition, that the spiritual life is not primarily about understanding, nor solely a matter of enthusiasm. It is a dynamic, integrative process that is brought about through the engagement of the whole person. The heart in Salesian thought is the seat of both intellect and of will. There the affective as well as cognitive capacities of the person are seen to dwell. All Salesian praxis then proceeds from this conceptual point of departure.

Francis de Sales was renowned as a preacher because he proclaimed the gospel in a way that stirred his audiences’ very hearts.[7] This did not mean that he simply inflamed the emotions of his listeners or that he stimulated them with challenging ideas. His congregations were moved at the profound level where love of God is activated. He reached into the human heart knowing that that heart opens onto a living divine heart. He asserted that in preaching the Word one’s own words must come out of the heart as well as the mouth. One might speak beautifully, even eloquently, but in communicating the living word, “heart speaks to heart, the tongue speaks but to the ears.”[8]

Indeed, the Word spoken from and to the heart is generative. For between human and divine a creative union takes place. There can be a marriage of hearts. As the marriage “ripens” and matures the two hearts of the union become more alike, more closely aligned. Gradually the human heart expands, becoming transformed into the heart of God. Such a marriage is fruitful, giving birth to “mystical children,” spiritual offspring born of one’s own expanded heart. Persons whose hearts are in the heart of God draw others into a like union.

Direction is part of this spiritual parenting. When Francis and Jane write that they are “holding their correspondents in their hearts” they mean a good deal more than that they wish them well. They mean that they are encircling that person in the prayerful ardour that they know to be a creative medium, opening themselves at the very centre of their persons to admit another being and allowing that other to gain access to God through them. The power that draws the directee’s heart is the very love of God which compels and claims the director’s heart. That divine love, like a magnet, draws all other hearts that come near.

In Salesian direction the point is not to instruct but to appeal to the whole person through their vital centre, to make Jesus live by winning the heart through persuasion and gentle encouragement. The Savoyard was a master of this kind of intuitive interaction that drew his directees to him and into the fire of God’s love. He invited all his Philotheas to “pray for a director who is after the heart of God.”

But it is in the Visitation and in Madame de Chantal’s appropriation of Salesian direction that this sensitive appeal to the heart can be most clearly discerned. Visitandine superiors were entrusted with the task of seeing that this true Salesian spirit of direction was retained.

I beg you, my dear Sister, govern your community with a great expansiveness of heart; give the sisters a holy liberty of spirit and banish from your mind and theirs a servile spirit of constraint. If a sister seeks to lack confidence in you, don’t, for that reason, show her the least coldness but gain her trust through love and kindness… The more solicitous, open and supportive you are with them, the more you will win their hearts. This is the best way of helping them advance toward the perfection of their vocation.[9]

If all the heart symbolism given articulation in the Salesian world is visualized (and indeed this is what should be done, for Francis himself thought in images[10]), one sees the great tender heart of God undergirding all created life. Access to that heart is through the hidden doorways of the hearts of men and women. At this entry-way, the crossroads between two realms, one finds the heart of Jesus crucified. In the actual as well as symbolic act of love in death enacted on the cross, the heart of Christ is seen to be on fire, consumed in a holocaust of loving surrender. The flamed kindled in that oblation shoot off sparks which in turn inflame the hearts of women and men to abandon themselves to a similar consummation of love. The proper place, then, for a lover’s devotion is kneeling at the foot of the cross.[11]

Francis de Sales’ various writings yield a panorama of images that depict the human/divine drama as a marriage and union of hearts, but the accounts left us by his friend Jane de Chantal show the development of that theme specifically in terms of a martyrdom of love. In a remarkable colloquy, written down by her sister Visitandines on St. Basil’s Day in 1632, Madame de Chantal is reported as saying,

‘For myself, I believe that there is a martyrdom of love in which God preserves the lives of His servants so that they might work for His glory. This makes them martyrs and confessors at the same time. I know,’ she added, ‘that this is the martyrdom to which the Daughters of the Visitation are called and which God will allow them to suffer if they are fortunate enough to wish for it… What happens is that divine love thrusts its sword into the most intimate and secret parts of the soul separates us from our very selves.’[12]

Here the experience of living Jesus is consummately described in terms that show Salesian spirituality as hidden in the heart. No visible following, no heroic gesture mark the identification of the devotee and her Lord. Rather, living Jesus takes place in the interior of the person, in the heart. But Jesus, in this passage which became a seminal statement of the Salesian spirit embodied in the Visitation, is both the lover and the dying God. Jane de Chantal’s own personal devotion centred about this vision of Jesus.[13] through the confluence of her own experience of grief, loss, and loving attachment and the beloved face of the crucified, Jane was able to discover her own potential for growth, maturity, and wisdom.

The hiddenness of this loving surrender within the heart that Jane lived so eloquently was noted by her contemporaries.

“She was hidden deep in an abyss of humility where Our Lord’s eyes looked on her with a special love, a love of election, as one who perfectly understood His words ‘come to me… for I am meek and humble of heart.’”[14]

This hidden identification with her Lord was a special and subtle facet of Mother de Chantal’s spiritual gift.[15] It was a discipline she had learned over many years. A highly introspective personality, given to brilliant analysis of her inner life yet prone to paralyse herself by her own self-scrutiny. Jane had gradually learned the spiritual discipline of confiding all to the hidden action of grace within the heart. She was counselled by Francis, and later counselled her own spiritual daughters, not to think about or talk about self too much. She learned to keep her focus upon her God, keeping even her own inner life hidden within the mysterious transformative presence of God in the heart. The activity of this presence was thus concealed even from herself. She came to mirror the hidden life of Jesus, to live Jesus precisely in the way in which He bound Himself at the deepest core of His person to the Father and gave Himself utterly to the Father’s will.

This legacy of the martyrdom of love, which connected the Christian humanist tradition of love with the early Church’s spirituality of martyrdom, was given to the community of Visitation by its founding mother. They realized the living Jesus in the martyrdom of love hidden closely within the heart.

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[1] Oeuvres, III, 216-217: Introduction to the Devout Life, Part III, chapter 23.

[2] Cf. Introduction to the Devout Life, Part III.

[3] When the Visitation was converted to a formal order in 1618 it became enclosed. The sisters no longer went outside the community to visit the poor. The emphasis in living Jesus came to be upon the cultivation of an absolute interior conformity to the will of God.

[4] drawing on medical, philosophical, and biblical notions of the heart, de Sales developed an entire theology based on the symbolism of the heart. See John A. Abruzzese, The Theology of Hearts in the Writings of St. Francis de Sales (Rome: Institute of Spirituality, Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas, 1983), pp. 20-55. not only was the heart considered the most important organ of the body but the source and meeting place of the life forces and the world spirit within a person, the source of fire or body heat, the seat of intelligence, will, the passions, as well as the location of all noble emotional and intellectual human qualities.

[5] This assertion is not normative in Christian tradition. For many of the great spiritual writers the image and likeness to God in the human person is found in the mind. See Oeuvres, IV, 136; Treatise on the Love of God, Book 2, chapter 15.

[6] Oeuvres, IV, Treatise on the Love of God, Book 5. A clear analysis of these two loves, of benevolence and complacence, which at first reading of the Treatise are confusing terms, is found in Joseph F. Power, “Love of Benevolence and Liturgy,” in Salesian Studies III, no. 1 (Winter 1966) and No.3 (Summer 1966); pp. 27-34 are the most germane.

[7] John Ryan has a fine essay on Francis’s preaching as a preface to his translation of the saint’s own classic statement on the art in ON the Preacher and Preaching. A letter by Francis de Sales, trans. John K. Ryan (Chicago: Henry Rengnery Co., 1964).

[8] Oeuvres, XII, 321: cf. Ryan tr., p. 64.

[9] Sa Vie et ses oeuvres, VIII, 557; Letter MDCCCLXXII.

[10] See Henri Lemaire, Les images chez St. François de Sales (Paris: Editions A. G. Nizet, 1973). It was R.L. Wagner who wrote in his preface to Henri Lemaire, Lexique des oeuvres completes de François de Sales (Paris: Nizet, 1962), p. ii, that “Francis thought in images. That means that for him a notion is never pure but that it results from the subtle and often unforeseeable interpenetration of two related concepts. In this interplay what in itself was concrete, dense, becomes light; on the other hand, by these contacts abstractions gain substance; they take root in a nourishing soil.” An interesting example of the way in which de Sales thought in images is found in the letter he wrote to Jane de Chantal concerning the emblem he envisioned for the Visitation. See Oeuvres, XV, 63-64: Letter DCXCIII. Also, see Abruzzese, The Theology of Hearts, on imagery in spirituality and the use of emblem books to convey the characteristic teachings of a particular author.

[11] On de Sales’ vision of the heart of Jesus, refer to Abruzzese, Theology of Hearts, pp. 142-168.

[12] Sa Vie et ses oeuvres, I, 356-57: Mémoire Sur la Vie.

[13] Refer to Wendy M. Wright, “Jeanne de Chantal: Two Faces of Christ,” in Medieval Religious Women, Vol. II, Peace Weavers (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Pub., 1987), pp. 353-64.

[14] Sa Vie et ses oeuvres, I, 448: Mémoires.

[15] This insight comes from a talk given by Elisabeth Stopp in June 1986 at the Waldron Visitation convent in Sussex, England. It represents the fruit of her reflection on Jane twenty-five years after she wrote her excellent biography of the saint, Madame de Chantal.

A Spirituality for Everyone

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

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