Salesian Literature

Letters on:

Loving and Serving God in Your Daily Life

1. Marriage is an exercise in mortification   ::   2. As far as possible, make your devotion attractive  ::   3. Have patience with everyone, including yourself

4. Keep yourself gentle amid household troubles  ::   5. Do what you see can be done with love  ::   6. Parents can demand more than God Himself

7. Avoid making your devotion troublesome  ::   8. Have contempt for contempt  ::   9. Lord, what would You have me to do?  ::   10. Take Jesus as your patron

11. Remain innocent among the hissing of serpents  ::   12. Never speak evil of your neighbour  ::   13. Extravagant recreations may be blameworthy

14. We must not ask of ourselves what we don't have  ::   15. If you get tired of kneeling, sit down  ::   16. You will not lack mortification

17. We must always walk faithfully  ::   18. Illness can make you agreeable to God  ::   19. You are being crowned with His crown of thorns

20. Often the world calls evil what is good  ::   21. Rest in the arms of Providence  ::   22. In confidence, lift up your heart to our Redeemer

23. We must slowly withdraw from the world  ::   24. This dear child was more God's than yours  ::   25. Think of no other place than Paradise or Purgatory

26. How tenderly I loved her!  ::   27. Calm your mind, lift up your heart  ::   28. Miserable beggars receive the greatest mercy

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15. If you get tired kneeling, sit down

To a pregnant woman, on loving God in her suffering

 

My dearest daughter,

 

… It is necessary before all things, my daughter, to obtain tranquillity, not because it is the mother of contentment, but because it is the daughter of the love of God and of the resignation of our own will.

 

The opportunities of practising it are daily.  For contradictions are not wanting wherever we are; and when nobody else makes them, we make them for ourselves.  My God!  How holy, my dear daughter, and how agreeable to God we should be, if we knew how to use properly the subjects of mortification that our vocation affords!  For they are without doubt greater than among religious; the evil is that we do not make use of them as they do.

 

Be careful to spare yourself in this pregnancy: make no effort to oblige yourself to any kind of exercise, except quite gently.  If you get tired kneeling, sit down; if you cannot command attention to pray half an hour, pray only fifteen minutes or even half of that.

 

I beg you to put yourself in the presence of God, and to suffer your pains before Him.  Do not keep yourself from complaining; but this should be to Him, in a filial spirit, as a little child to its mother.  For if it is done lovingly, there is no danger in complaining, nor in begging cure, nor in changing place, nor in getting ourselves relieved. But do this with love, and with resignation into the arms of the good will of God.

 

Do not trouble yourself about not making acts of virtue properly; for as I have said, they do not cease to be very good, even if they are made in a languid, heavy, and (as it were) forced manner.

 

You can only give God what you have, and in this time of affliction you have no other actions.  At present, my dear daughter, your Beloved is to you a “bundle of myrrh” (Cant. 1:12); cease not to press Him close to your breast.  “My Beloved is mine, and I am His” (Cant. 2:16); ever shall He be in my heart.  Isaiah the prophet calls Him the “man of sorrows” (Is. 53:3).  He loves sorrows, and those who have them.

 

Do not torment yourself to do much, but suffer with love what you have to suffer.  God will be gracious to you, Madame, and will give you the grace to arrange this more retired life of which you speak to me.  Whether languishing “or living or dying, we are the Lord’s” (Rom. 14:8) and nothing, with the help of His grace, will separate us from this holy love.  Never shall our heart live, save in Him and for Him; he shall be for ever “the God of our heart” (cf. Ps. 72:26; RSV Ps. 73:26).  I will never cease to beg this of Him, nor to be entirely in Him

 

Your very affectionate servant,

Francis

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