Salesian Literature

6.   The Right Use of Mortification

 

Dear Francis de Sales,

 

The promise of your prayers was a great comfort.  I don’t feel able to make very much effort these days with my prayers.  I’m afraid my pregnancy is upsetting everything.  I don’t seem to be able to do much for God at the moment, though I’m trying to preserve my peace of soul.

 

Yours sincerely,

Mrs. A. Christine

 

 

Dear Mrs. Christine,

 

It is essential to cultivate peace of soul before anything else, not because of the contentment it affords but because it results from the love of God and the submission to him of our wills.  Opportunities of practising it present themselves every day.

 

There’s never any lack of contradictions, wherever we are; and when nobody else provides them, we make them for ourselves.

 

How holy and pleasing to God we should be if we knew how to use properly the occasions of mortification our state in life affords.  They certainly exceed those to be found in the religious life.  Unfortunately we don’t take as much advantage of them.

 

Take every possible care of yourself in this pregnancy.  You must on no account try to force yourself beyond your strength, but be reasonable.  If it tires you to kneel, sit down.  If you can’t pray for half an hour, just pray for a quarter or even only five minutes.

 

Place yourself in the presence of God and in his presence bear your pains.  Don’t try to avoid complaining; only do it to him, as a little child would to its mother.  If it’s done lovingly, there’s no harm in complaining, nor in begging for a cure, nor in changing position, nor in obtaining relief.  Just do these things lovingly and leave yourself in the arms of God’s will.

 

Don’t worry if your attempts to please God seem lifeless.  They’re none the less good, as I’ve already told you, for being made in a feeble, weary, almost half-hearted way.

 

You can only give God what you have; and in a time of distress like this, this is all you have to give.

 

Isaiah describes our Lord as “bowed with misery and no stranger to weakness.”  He loves sorrow and those who suffer it.  Don’t fret over doing a great deal; just try to suffer lovingly whatever comes.

 

In weakness, “in life and death, we belong to the Lord”; with the help of his grace nothing “will be able to separate us from the love of God, which comes to us in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

 

We must have no other life than in him and for him; then God will comfort our heart, God will be eternally our inheritance.

 

I will never cease to beg this of him, nor to be sincerely in him,

 

Your devoted servant,

Francis de Sales

(Source:  Annecy, 16 July 1608.  Annecy Edition, XIV, 53-54)

​

​

Back to Top

​