Jane de Chantal and Salesian Spirituality

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It has been appropriate, until this point, to treat the two major forms of Salesian spiritually as essentially one, to focus upon the similarities in the thought of Francis de Sales and Jane de Chantal and to draw a broad picture of the larger vision that the two of them shared.  Now it appears necessary to begin the task of making distinctions between the spiritual visions of these two religious leaders.  This is a task that has yet to be accomplished by scholarly efforts. As has been mentioned, Jane’s perspective has generally been treated as essentially a carbon copy of her mentor’s.[1]  We have already suggested that the concrete circumstances in which they each lived out the Salesian spirit markedly altered the way in which that spirit was manifested.  De Sales was a bishop, a man of constant activity immersed in the world of Counter-Reformation Catholicism.  In France, this faith was very much identified with the militant spirit of reform and growth that marked the post-Tridentine Church in Europe through the mid-seventeenth century.  It was also much identified with the intentions and activity of the French monarchy.  His episcopal responsibilities brought Francis into frequent contact with people in all walks of life, from members of the royal household, courtiers in their entourage, and gentlemen and women in all spheres of society, to religious superiors and members of a wide variety of religious orders.  He was also a product of the educational ambience of his time.  Trained in law, theology, philosophy and rhetoric, he made full use of all the skills that delineated him as a man of the world.  This immersion in society could not fall to have implications for the way de Sales’ spirituality became articulated, particularly since he served as a spiritual director for a great variety of persons.

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And what of Jane de Chantal?  She was called to a life situation quite distinctive from that of her friend.  She became the mother superior of a women’s religious community.  Although the original structure envisioned for the Visitation was somewhat ahead of its time, it nonetheless was informed by the traditional assumptions about monastic life.  It was taken for granted in the early seventeenth century, as it had been in much of the medieval world, that the celibate life and especially the monastic contemplative life was the queen of lifestyles and a special kind of intimacy with and dedication to God was offered to persons responding to such a calling.  Persons in this life were expected to dedicate themselves to the process of sanctification in a way not required by those still “in the world.”  Emphasis was placed upon the acquisition of religious virtues and the cultivation of an attitude of obedience to the superiors and rules of the order.  The process of individual sanctification was placed squarely within the structural and ideological confines of the community.  Hence, there was a virtual identification of the rules of community with the will of God for all who were indeed called to participate in the life of a religious order.  All this stands in the background of Jane de Chantal’s articulation of her spiritual vision.  Her milieu was monastic and contemplative in a way that Francis de Sales’ was not.

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Her world was also especially feminine in a way that her friend’s was not.  Although the bishop was noted for his direction of women, and Jane was sought as a guide by men as well as members of her own sex, her primary experience, the environment in which she attained spiritual growth and the community to which she was primarily called to minister, was female.  The Visitation was unique among religious groups of the time in being founded especially for women.  Other women’s communities were offshoots or under the jurisdiction of male orders and their practices and spiritualities derived from these masculine origins.  The Visitation was created for women and the spiritual vision which it eventually embodied came into being through the experience of women living together and attempting to give articulation to the way they experienced and lived for God.  Jane is at the core of this attempt, for while Francis wrote a rule for the Visitandines and gave spiritual conferences to them about the spirit of the life to which they were dedicated, the specific ways this life came to be enacted in its daily reality was much more informed by Jane.

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These two friends were also very different personalities, a point that scholarship has not been loath to press. This fact has sometimes been used to explain the differences sensed in their teachings.  From the hindsight of three and a half centuries one is struck with his equilibrium, her ardour, his patience, her anticipation, his gracefulness, her compassion.  It is also important to remember that during the formative years of her self-identity before she met Francis and began collaboration on their joint spiritual pursuits, Jane de Chantal knew herself, not as a vowed religious, but as a baroness, as a wife and mother successfully fulfilling the expectations of these social roles and being shaped by the self-knowledge, relational perceptions and interpersonal skills that marriage and motherhood can bring out in a woman.  This early background is very much evident in Jane’s sensitive direction of her Visitation sisters.[2]

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Given all this, one wonders whether there is not something distinctive in the way Jane lived out the Salesian spirit precisely because she was a woman.  She, after all, claims her womanly identity not only by biological happenstance but by the fact that for the first half of her life she aligned herself completely with the societally defined roles of wife and mother, and later exercised her maternal gifts as superior of a women’s religious community.

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Contemporary research on the psychology of the gender lends some support to these assertions. It has been suggested that women’s and men’s psychological perspectives may be quite different – men exhibiting greater concern for autonomy and achievement, women being oriented toward relationships of interdependence.  Indeed, women may, as they mature, find the deepening of their own wisdom in a growing recognition of the vast fabric of relationships that sustain and nurture all human life.  Women may view reality, adopt moral perspectives and form a self-concept in a manner at variance from that of men, women tending to give pride of place to values of affiliation and care rather than achievement and principles of justice.[3]  This being the case, a woman’s spirituality may differ markedly from a man’s.  This is an issue of some complexity in the study of the Christian spiritual tradition, for the language and assumptions set forward by asceticism as normative tend to orient the person more toward autonomy than toward interrelationship.  Furthermore, while the richness of the discourse from that historical tradition (especially as seen in its entirety) does, we believe, contain a range of expressions that can offer a wide perspective on humankind’s encounter with religious truth, that tradition tends to assume that its language carries the same spiritual meaning for members of both sexes.  It has only recently been questioned whether the primary metaphors for the life of spirit, such as pilgrimage or journey, being derived as they are from models of development appropriate to men, are in fact apt metaphors for women’s spiritual perceptions.[4]  Similarly it has of late been questioned whether the classic definition of human sin as rooted in pride and self-assertion is not really a gender-specific definition.  Women’s “sins” seem to stem from a lack of sense of self resulting in diffuseness, triviality, and self-deprecation.[5]  The implications of such provocative assertions are of interest in the study of women in the Christian past.

 

The following will be an exploration – at best tentative in its conclusions – of several themes found in Salesian spirituality and the way in which these themes were distinctively expressed by Jane and Francis.  The language they used was often the same, but what that language signified, as a spiritual and psychological reality, may vary.  We begin to look at Jane independently of Francis, to see her, both as superior of the Visitation and as a woman with a unique spiritual life.  She was rooted in the spirit we have come to identify as Salesian, as was her friend Francis.  An imitation of him, she was not.  The attempt will be made briefly to describe three prominent Salesian themes – abandonment to the will of God’s good pleasure, the possibility of human perfection and prayer – as they were experienced differently by these two Salesian exponents.

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Abandonment to the Will of God’s Good Pleasure

 

As with de Sales, there is an emphasis on abandonment to the will of God’s good pleasure in Madame de Chantal’s spirituality.  We have seen how central the notion of living between the two divine wills was to the Salesian perspective.  Human effort must be directed toward the discernment and conformity to the signified will of God – the divine will to be done.   Yet one must be always ready to abandon oneself to the will of God’s good pleasure – God’s will done – as it presents itself in the factual situations of everyday life.  For the bishop this abandonment manifested itself in a variety of ways but tended to be most clearly identified with indifference: about one’s spiritual and material welfare as well as the course of human relationships.  Jane also cultivated a flexible attitude toward the spiritual and material goods she might or might not receive.  When we turn our attention to this woman’s prayer we will be able to see how poignantly and courageously she practised the virtue of indifference.  Yet in the realm of relationship, abandonment takes on a distinctive quality in Jane’s version of Salesian spirit.  Rooted as she was in family through her experience of marriage and motherhood as well as through her own woman’s apprehensions, abandonment to what life held in store for her was a painful process.  She lost her husband barely two weeks after the birth of their last child.  Of the four children who survived birth three died before her, one as a child, two in young adulthood.  Later in life she suffered the loss of virtually all those who were closer to her.  Under these circumstances, an acceptance of things “as they are” as a religious category became involved with the acceptance of the process of grief.  For Jane found herself intimately woven into a fabric of relationships.  As a woman that relational fabric was fundamental to her self-identity and spiritual well-being.  Contemporary research in women’s psychology has suggested that in general women’s self-identity is threatened by separation while male identity is threatened by intimacy.[6]   Moreover, affiliation with others, while important for both sexes, plays a different role in the psychology of women and men.  Affiliations tend to make women feel deeply satisfied, fulfilled and successful, free to go on to the other things.[7]  This is not a ”problem” but a strength unless the expectations of religion and culture assume that human development necessarily moves toward a subordination of affiliative bonds to the other aspects of development and achievement.  This would imply that abandonment to the will of God’s good pleasure, especially when it involved the acceptance of the loss of others, could evoke a somewhat different response from a woman than from a man.  This is not to suggest that men do not grieve deeply when confronted with loss but that the focus in the grieving differs.  For Jane, abandonment meant that hard dying to the very persons to whom nature and temperament had bonded her.  Because an identity-shattering grief is so much more present in her experience of abandonment, Jane’s response to situations of loss is more emotionally charged and fraught with ambiguity than Francis’s.  Jane’s articulated grief centers more upon the severing of the bond between herself and others and the inner conflict this initiates.  It is instructive to compare the ways in which they dealt with the deaths of those close to them.  The bishop wrote of his own mother’s passing:

 

I had the courage to give her the last blessing, to close her eyes and mouth and to give her the last kiss of peace at the moment she passed away; after which my heart swelled and I wept over this good mother more than I have done since I was ordained; but it was without spiritual bitterness, thanks be to God.[8]

 

Francis, it should be noted, was especially dear to his mother and he was perhaps closer to her than to anyone else.  He certainly was deeply moved and affected by her death.  Compare now Jane’s communication to her brother André in 1622 when Francis himself died.

 

You say you want to know what my heart felt on that occasion.  Ah, it seems to me that it adored God in the profound silence of its terrible anguish.  Truly, I have never felt such an intense grief nor has my spirit ever received so heavy a blow.  My sorrow is greater than I could ever express and it seems as though everything serves to increase my weariness and cause me to regret.  The only thing that is left to console me is to know that it is my God that has done this, or at least, has permitted this blow to fall.  Alas.  My heart is too weak to support this heavy burden, how it needs strength.  Yes, my God, you put this beautiful soul into the world, now you have taken it back; may your holy name be blessed.  I don’t know any other song except ‘May the name of the Lord be blessed.’

 

My very dear brother and dear Father, my soul is filled with grief but also full of the peace of God’s will which I would never oppose with even the slightest resistance.  No, my dear Father, I affirm what it has pleased Him to do – to take from us that great flame that lit up this miserable world and let it shine in his kingdom, as we truly believe.  May His name be blessed.  God has chastised me as I deserved because I am certainly too  insignificant to merit such a great blessing as well as the contentment that I had in seeing my soul held in the hands of such a great man who was truly a man of God.

 

I believe that God in his supreme goodness does not want me to take any more pleasure in this world and I don’t want to take any more either except to hope to have the joy of seeing my dearest Father in the bosom of His everlasting goodness.  Yet I still will to remain in exile – yes, my dear brother, I truly do.  It’s a terribly difficult exile for me, this miserable life.  But I want to stay here, as I said, as long as it is God’s plan for me.  I will let Him do with me as He wishes.  Remember me as well as this little family [the Visitation] in your holy sacrifices.  They are so sorrowful and suffer with such grace and resignation that I am consoled.  We will leave here soon to go back to poor little Annecy.  My pain will be redoubled by seeing our sisters there.  God be blest in and for everything.  Long live His will.  Long live His pleasure.[9]

 

Jane tends to seek for some unfelt consolation, some explanation that will restore the sense of unity she has lost.  She focuses over and over again, from various perspectives, on the severed relationship that now undercuts her very sense of self: she speaks of Francis as gift that has been taken away, of her soul having been held in his hands, of this world now [with his absence] as “miserable,” and “exile,” as without pleasure. One finds in her a tendency to view the tragedy as consonant with her own unworthiness or as a chastisement or corrective for human shortcomings.  She only rests in the existential fact of loss in the company of those other ways of acceptance and abandonment.

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It has been typical to view her style of encounter with loss as a sort of imperfect realization of what Francis de Sales realized perfectly in his version of abandonment.  This assumes however (as was then normative in Christian spirituality) that less attachment is to be equated with a better or more spiritual state.  We suspect that emphasis on autonomy and separate identity fundamental to male psychology is more in evidence in this assumption than is any intrinsic spiritual good.  It is also possible to see Jane’s mode of coping as characteristically feminine and at the same time spiritually mature.  For, as has been suggested, women seek something more complex than autonomy as it is defined for men, a fuller and not a lesser ability to encompass relationships to others, simultaneous with the fullest development of the self.[10]  Her letters show her as willing to deal realistically with the natural process of grief , as able to admit a great deal of her own emotional experience into the articulated process of abandonment, as aware of the importance of relationship in her life, as willing to live with ambiguity and as capable of admitting the poignant  human need for explanation that arises at times of inexplicable loss.  We see this woman, whose “lack of indifference” is sometimes judged harshly, as having the mature integrity to value and trust her own experience, to acknowledge the value and importance of relationships and the sacred quality of an attachment that nurtures, provides, sustains and protects in cooperation with a God who does likewise.

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Jane’s perception of abandonment was not contoured solely by the deep interpersonal ties which she cultivated and then was required to surrender.  It was also shaped by her own interior encounter with God.  Of all the saints in recorded Christian tradition she has the dubious distinction of having undergone one of the longest periods of spiritual desolation or “dark nights.”  For somewhere in the vicinity of forty years she struggled in prayer with the painful experience of the absence of God, turbulent doubts against the faith, and revulsions against all things religious.  The intensity of her struggle was so great during the last decade of her life that she admitted to a longing even for death.  To abandon herself to the state in which she found herself therefore involved tremendous courage and embrace of suffering.  During her lifetime and afterward in biographical accounts, the common attribution of these spiritual trails was to a purgative process allowed by God to divest a strong personality of its “all-too-human” attachments.  She herself thought of herself as called to a total renunciation of self as her unique way to God.

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But we question the traditional equation: more spiritual equals less “human,” and regard Jane’s identity as a woman the key to unlocking the experience of abandonment.  Jane’s version is a radical and poignantly suffered version of Francis de Sales’s own utter detachment and acquiescence to the will of God which he understood to be manifest in the particular circumstances of each life.  The difference between their two experiences of abandonment seems to reside in the fact that he found it acceptable, even enlivening, to live with the emotional tension that such a stance could effect.  The “not-knowing” encapsulated in his moment of crisis led him into the arena of freedom.  For his female counterpart, however, the act of surrender and abandonment to God was coupled with the yearning for completion, for an experienced relationship with the divine.  Jane loved God with all the powerful forces of loving commitment that she came to both by way to temperament and by cultivation in marriage and motherhood. Once again, it is all too easy to see her state of abandonment as merely an imperfectly realized version of what her friend so clearly achieved.  For Jane, the emotional ambivalence generated by the tension of loving so deeply, desiring response and not receiving one, was fraught with poignancy.  As a woman shaped by marriage and motherhood, she felt the psychic rightness of continually dwelling in the embrace of a fully realized relationship.  Yet she met her face bravely and did not shrink from honestly acknowledging what was occurring within her.  Her love then consisted in accepting the fact that God “wished” her to reduce all her desires to one single desire – to renounce all, even her own desire for relationship with Him, into His hands.  Jane de Chantal’s embrace of her own inner darkness introduces into Salesian spirituality a sense of courage and unswerving loyalty to one’s own experience, be it inviting or not, that is uniquely her own.

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The Possibility of Human Perfection

 

One other element latent in Francis’s vision and brought into focus by Jane is the idea of perfection.  The bishop, a Christian humanist, certainly believed in the possibility of human perfection but his insistence on indifference as a seminal principle in the spiritual life tended to downplay any zealous quest for perfection or inordinate concern for the achievement of a “perfect” spiritual state.  With Jane the issue was somewhat different.  She, like her companion, sensed the potential of the human soul.  And she, like him, accepted the principle that it was preferable to be indifferent to one’s spiritual progress than to be overly concerned about it.  Yet early on in her own experience the quest for continual perfection became central to her vision of life lived in the true love of God.  as early as 1610, when she was still the young mother superior of the Visitation, she experienced a “ravishment” during Mass while on a visit to Burgundy.  The chief communication which she received in this heightened state, about which she spoke to only a handful of people during her lifetime, was an acute sense of

 

the pleasure that God takes in a pure and perfect soul.  Then she was inspired to vow that she would also do whatever was most perfect and agreeable to God.[11]

 

This emphasis on perfection as pleasing to God is echoed in her instructions to the novices of the fledgling Visitation house.  It was certainly not to be identified with the heroic and visible exploits abounding in other religious orders of the day, but was consistently related to the acquisition of the “hidden virtues” and the embrace of a life of great interior simplicity and conformity to the will of God.  Yet, to Jane, this simple life was to be realized perfectly.

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The theme of perfection was likewise dominant factor in her own spiritual development.  For years after the ravishment in Burgundy she attempted to come to grips with the perfection that she felt called to by God.  She had long felt her vocation to be a continual process of loving surrender to God alone.  The self-denial this demanded was to cut into the most intimate of her connections and achieved a peak in the year 1616 when she made a retreat and chose detachment as her topic for reflection.  At this time, she and Francis de Sales had enjoyed twelve years of a friendship that was explicit in its affection, its mutuality, and its shared zeal for each other’s deepening love of God.  The impulse behind the retreat was her own desire to render herself more pleasing to God by a more completely realized interior dependence on Him alone.  But she found herself unable to focus upon her chosen theme because her friend Francis was ill.  She was constantly preoccupied with concerns about his health.  Struggling with this fact, she asked permission of him (they were in contact by letter) to prolong her retirement in order to do justice to her theme.  It was at this point that they both realized that their very attachment was itself an obstacle to her desired detachment and dependence on God.  Francis agreed to the extended retreat and counselled her to give into God’s keeping all her concerns and all relationships, including her relationship with him.

 

You must not take any kind of wet nurse but you must leave the one who nonetheless still remains and become like a poor little pitiful creature completely naked before the throne of divine mercy, without ever asking for any act or feeling whatsoever for this creature.  At the same time, you must become indifferent to everything that it pleases God to give you, without considering if it is I who serve as your nurse.  Otherwise, if you took a nurse to your own liking you would not be going out of yourself but you would still have your own way which is, however, what you wish to avoid at all costs.[12]

 

Jane likewise perceived her dependence on her friend and, in an exchange of letters both passionate and full of ecstatic pain, the two friends released each other from their spiritual embrace and, without renouncing their shared commitments to each other or their friendship, did set each other free.  The freedom was for Jane, of course, not without its element of wounding and grief.  These she always had to wrestle with, and her spirituality is marked by its faithfulness to her own ambiguous and complex experience.  She wrote to her friend:

 

My God, my true Father, how deep the razor has cut.  Can I remain in this feeling long?  At least our good God, if he so pleases, will hold me firm in my resolutions as I wish.  Ah, how your words have given my soul strength.  How it consoled and touched me when you wrote ‘What blessings and consolations my soul has received to see you utterly naked before God.’  Oh, may Jesus grant you to continue to be consoled by this and me to have this happiness.

 

Alas, my only Father, I have been reminded today of that one time when you ordered me to denude myself, I replied ‘o don’t know what is left’ and you said to me ‘Haven’t I told you, my daughter, that I will strip you of everything?’  Oh God, how easy it is to leave what is outside ourselves.  But to leave one’s skin, one’s flesh, one’s bones and penetrate into the deepest part of the marrow, which is, it seems to me, what we have done, is a great, difficult, and impossible thing to do save for the grace of God.  To him alone then glory is due and may it be given forever. [13]

 

The vividly embodied and relational quality of Jane’s love is attested to in this passage as is her keen desire to give herself utterly and perfectly to God.  That “perfect” also meant “detached” Jane learned from her Christian heritage.  This absolute dependence on God alone Jane lived out with tenacity and passion.  One is reminded here that Jane’s favourite saints were the Christian martyrs, those heroes and heroines of her heritage whose witness was radical and absolute.  Like those she admired, there was in Jane a hunger for complete and uncompromised self-giving, a hunger that could never be entirely satisfied.  This hunger fed Jane de Chantal’s desire for perfection throughout her life.  But as has been suggested, her encounter with perfect detachment was also profoundly contoured by her very woman’s capacity for relationship.  To detach herself from her primary source of spiritual nourishment, Francis, was indeed an act of martyrdom for this woman who had in her early formative years defined herself in and through relationships of love.

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Yet one suspects there in Jane’s insistent quest for perfection, especially as it centred on perfect dependence upon God alone, something that reflects her own instinctual woman’s wisdom.  For part of the maturation that must occur in any woman’s spiritual life is an increasing trust of her own experience, her coming into a sense of self and God which does not slavishly depend upon other’s definition of what that relationship should be.  The feminine “sinful” tendency to live vicariously or parasitically through others (to the detriment of both others and self) must be countered by a courageous attempt to author one’s own life-vision and to give oneself completely in a mature surrender to God.[14]

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The inner integrity that centres the self on God is not necessarily inconsistent with the recognition of the deep need for human ties that sustains a woman’s sense of self.  Somehow these two realizations must be artfully balanced.  Yet it seems clear that the Christian tradition’s version of perfect dependence on God too often reflects a male model of autonomy that is nuanced quite differently from what one begins to see through Jane de Chantal’s experience.

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With Francis, Jane shared a view of the human person as capable of perfection.  But, unlike her friend, Jane’s spirituality also exhibits a keen awareness of the imperfection discovered inhuman beings.  Not that the great bishop was unaware of human frailty.  Indeed, he was extremely sensitive to individual differences of temperament and gift and adapted his direction to accommodate these, never expecting too much of those given only moderate talents and capacity.  Yet the balance in his spirituality leans toward optimism and shows a trust in human and divine resources to bring all things into the fullness of their potential.  Jane’s perception was less sunny.  In part, we suspect this was due to her own ambivalence felt when struggling for perfect detachment – an ideal, as traditionally expressed, perhaps more congruent with male identity.  The language of Christianity, while replete with examples of relational values as part of spiritual maturity, does tend to emphasize values of detachment and autonomy when envisioning the heights of spiritual attainment.  Jane, courageous in her articulation of her inner life, lived her quest for perfection within the ambiguous context of a spiritual language that held up this sort of detachment as an ideal and of a temperament and life experience that suited her to the cherishing of relational attachments.

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But it was not simply the high ideals she set herself that may have contributed to her sense of the reality of human imperfection.  Her own inner tribulations, her difficulties with her headstrong son and one determinedly worldly daughter, her sorrow at the suffering generated by the religious wars that plagued her century, all contributed to push her from optimism to a sense of the fragility and limitation of the person.  She seems to have had a gift for identifying with other’s sufferings.  Throughout her married life and widowhood she spent herself lavishly in service to the poor and ill: visiting the incurably sick, nursing those with diseases too loathsome for others to bear, operating a daily bread line for the poor.  Jane had a capacity – related in part no doubt to her feminine relational gifts – for feeling other’s anguish as her own.  Hence, her awareness of suffering and limitation, both other’s and her own, was acute.  Coupled with her high ideals about the perfection that she believed pleased God, this sense of the human condition lent her spiritual posture a certain poignant and passionate awareness of the necessity for divine grace.  She knew how deeply she loved God and had glimpsed how much the divine love inclined to her, yet between the two the ambivalence of evil, of sorrow, of grief and of disappointment loomed.  These were the issues around which her spiritual struggle revolved.

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Prayer

 

The location in which this struggle took place was an interior one.  Like de Sales, Jane’s spirituality definitely focused upon the interior life, especially the heart, as the place of encounter with God.  There in the inner realm all asceticism and human transformation was felt to have its proper beginning.  Like her friend also, Jane did not espouse the practice of rigid devotional exercises or highly structured interior regimes of any kind.  For both of them the basic task of any interior practice was to cultivate a freedom to follow the voice of God that is discerned uniquely in each individual.  For Jane de Chantal, that voice had a certain quality with which the interiority of her spiritual life is marked.  For her the central fact of her inner being, the way in which she was drawn by God, was a contemplative type of prayer which she referred to as the prayer of “simple attentiveness” or “simple entrustment to God” (“simple regard” or “simple remise en Dieu”).  This prayer consisted in a hidden and quiet waiting, an expectant attention to the presence of God.  It was a virtually imageless and wordless type of prayer to which she had been drawn early in her own development.  Her practice in this prayer was fostered by her contact with the Carmelites of Dijon when she was a young widow newly under Francis’s direction.  The prayer practised in the French Carmel at the time was influenced by the spirit and teachings of Barbe Acarie, who was in part responsible for the Teresian Carmel’s introduction onto French soil.

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Francis seems to have been generally supportive of Jane’s attraction to this simple wordless prayer although he attested to the fact that he was hesitant about the advice Jane had received at the Carmel which introduced her to the idea that she should deliberately repress all images and thoughts in prayer.  Such teaching would be inconsistent with the interior freedom cultivated by the bishop in his spiritual vision.  Yet for Jane this prayer seemed to come quite naturally.  It was the prayer that she identified throughout her life as most uniquely her own.  It was the prayer which later became the inner charism of the Order of the Visitation and about which she wrote:

 

When the time comes to present ourselves before His divine Goodness to speak to Him face to face, which is what we call prayer, simply the presence of our spirit before His and His before ours forms prayer whether or not we have fine thoughts or feelings…. He is touched with the prayer of a soul so simple, humble and surrendered to His will.[15]

 

Deeply interior and characterized by its hiddenness, this prayer was expressive of Jane de Chantal’s entire approach to the spiritual life.  This life was for her essentially a mystery shrouded both from the eyes of others and from herself as well.  The living Jesus slowly being impressed upon her heart was a reality she could herself only obliquely discern.  Her own sense of darkness and of a distance from God that was so continuous and painful masked for her the actual activity of God within.  To others, it was radiantly obvious.  Virtually all accounts depict her late in life as gentle, patient and as surrendered in ”an abyss of humility.”

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The interiority of the widow de Chantal’s experience was a quality shared by her friend Francis.  But her spiritual life had a distinctive and hidden quality all of its own.  The slow working of God, unseen and unfelt, rendered Jane utterly simple and transparent.  Through her wordless prayer she brought herself into a divine presence that would shape her into itself.  Perhaps her deep longing for consummated relationship and the facts of both her inner and her outer losses prepared her for an encounter with God that could not be contained in words.  For there is a realm of both human experience and of the taste of God that partakes more of the spirit of music, of dance, of poetry than of discursive capacity. There is in icon and in image a perception of this realm far more accurate than in syllogism or worded definition.[16]  And Jane, tenaciously faithful to her own wisdom, discovered an iconic prayer for herself that became the vessel through which her unique religious perception could be born.  In her wordless relationship she saw herself as an uncarved statue waiting before a sculptor who alone held in imagination the image of what she, as the final work of art, might be.

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Within herself Jane indeed waited in this way.  Her prayer was the iconic gesture of her total person as it inclined toward its God.  there the depths of love, the heights of expectations, the hard facts of loss and grief could be gathered up and offered at the place within herself – that fine point of the soul – where explanation, construct, description and human knowledge fail and something of the immense and mysterious undivided will of God is grasped.

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[1] Jane is almost consistently seen, Pygmalion fashion, as Francis’s chief handiwork.  See Marcelle Georges-Thomas, Sainte Chantal et la spiritualité salésianne (Paris: Editions Saint-Paul, 1963).

[2] On Jane’s maternal charism, see Wright, “St. Jane de Chantal’s Guidance of Women,” in Salesian Living Heritage, Vol. I, no. I (September, 1986), 16-28, and Vol. II, no. I (September, 1987), 10-22 and Sr. Patricia Burns, “La tenderesse en Ste. Jeanne de Chantal” in Annales Salésiannes, No. 3 (1972), 10-11.  Several recent sources explore the issue of motherhood and a woman’s way of knowing.  References to this are woven throughout Mary Field Belenky et al., Women’s Way of Knowing: Development of Self, Voice and Mind (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1987).  Cf. also Sarah Ruddick, “Maternal Thinking” in Rethinking the Family: Some Feminist Questions, ed., Barrie Thorne (New York: London, 1982).

[3] See Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), Jean Baker Miller, Toward a New Psychology of Women (Boston: Beacon Press, 1976), and Belenky, Women’s Way of Knowing. For a view of counselling (which would also be applicable to spiritual direction) employing this perspective, see Miriam Greenspan, New Approaches to Women and Therapy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983).

[4] On this see Carol Ochs, Women and Spirituality (New Jersey: Rowan & Alanheld, 1983).

[5] Valerie Saiving wirtes of this in “The Human Situation: A Feminine View.”  Originally published in the Journal of Religion (April 1960), it is reprinted in Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion, ed. Carol Christ and Judith Plaskow (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979).

[6] This is one of Gilligan’s fundamental insights.  See her In a Different Voice.

[7] Cf. Miller, Toward a New Psychology of Women.

[8] Oeuvres, XIV, 262: Letter DLXXXI

[9] Sa Vie et ses oeuvres, Tome V, Letters 2, 90-92.

[10] Miller, toward a New Psychology, quoted in Joann Wolski-Conn, Women’s Spirituality, Resources for Christian Development (New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1986), p. 117.

[11] Sa Vie et ses oeuvres, I, 156f: Mémoires, P. 167.  Three incidents in Jane’s life have traditionally been singled out as expressive of her temperament.  Bougaud in his Histoire de Sainte Chantal et des origins de la Visitation, 2 Vols. (Paris: Librairie Poussielgue, 1863) particularly has created an image of the saint, based on these occurrences, as the “strong woman” – hard and unyielding in her personality.  These are: the branching of the name of Jesus on her breast, the moment when she walked over her son’s body (two complimentary modern interpretations of this can be found in Stopp’s Madame de Chantal and Wright, Bond of Perfection), and the making of a vow to always do the most perfect thing.  Elisabeth Stopp, in her talk given in June 1986 at the Waldron Visitation in Sussex, England, focused upon the third exemplary moment, pointing out that some have seen Jane’s taking this vow as scrupulosity.  She sees it rather as the “hidden heroism” of a very Salesian gesture as a result of which an impetuous and even proud young woman was slowly transformed into a saint through the practice of the little hidden virtues.

[12] Oeuvres, XVII, 215: Letter MCCIII.

[13] Sa Vie et ses oeuvres, IV, 115-17: Letter LXV.

[14] On this growing beyond predetermined expectations that marks a woman’s spiritual maturation see Joann Wolski-Conn, “Therese of Lisieux from a Feminist Perspective,” in her Woman’s Spirituality, 317-25.

[15] Sa Vie et ses oeuvres,I, 447.

[16] Susanne Langer in her Philosophical Sketches (New York: Mentor, 1962), 79-81 writes:

There is, however, an important part of reality that is quite inaccessible to the formative influence of language: that is the realm of the so-called “inner experience,” the life of feeling and emotion…. Art objectifies the sentence and desire, and self-consciousness and world-consciousness, emotions and moods, that are generally regarded as irrational because words cannot give us clear ideas of them.

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