Salesian Literature

Letters on:

Bearing Your Cross

Love God crucified, even amid darkness   ::   Do not desire mortifications  ::   Practise the mortifications that are given to you

O good Cross, so loved by my Saviour  ::   You only want to bear the crosses that you choose

​

5. You only want to bear the crosses that you choose

To Jane de Chantal, on true resignation of spirit

 

Madame, my dearest sister,

 

May our glorious and holiest mistress and queen, the Virgin Mary, the feast of whose Presentation we celebrate today, present our hearts to her Son and give us His.

 

Your messenger reached me at the most troublesome and hardest place I can come across during the navigation that I make on the tempestuous sea of this diocese.  It is incredible what consolation your letters brought me… It is sufficiently said once for all: yes, God has give me to you, I say singularly, entirely, irrevocably…

 

I come to your cross, and know not whether God has quite opened my eyes to see all its four ends.  I profoundly desire and beg of Him that I may be able to say to you something thoroughly appropriate.

 

There is a certain powerlessness, you tell me, of the faculties or parts of your understanding, which hinders it from finding peace in the consideration of what is good.  And what grieves you the most is that when you wish to form a resolution, you feel not your usual firmness, but encounter a certain barrier which brings you up short, and from this come the torments of temptations against the Faith.  It is properly described, my dear daughter; you express yourself well.  I am not sure whether I understand you properly.

 

You add that nevertheless your will, by the grace of God, intends nothing but simplicity and stability in the Church, and that you would willingly die for the Faith thereof.  Oh, God be blessed, my dear child: “This sickness is not unto death, but that God may be glorified in it” (Jn. 11:14).

 

“You have two nations in the womb” of your spirit, as was said to Rebecca.  “The one fights against the other, but at last the younger will supplant the elder” (Gen. 25:23).  Self-love never dies until we die; it has thousand ways of rooting itself in our soul.  We cannot dislodge it; it is the eldest born of our soul, for it is natural, or, at least, connatural.  It has a legion of soldiers with it, of movements, actions, and passions. It is cunning, and knows a thousand subtle turns.

 

On the other side, you have the love of God, which is conceived afterward, and is second born. It also has its movements, inclinations, passions, and actions.

 

These two children in one womb fight together like Esau and Jacob; when Rebecca cried out, “Was it not better to die than to conceive with such pains?” (Gen. 25:22).  From these convulsions follows a certain disgust, which causes you to relish not the best meats.  But what does it matter whether you do or do not relish, since you do not cease to eat well?

 

If I had to lose one of my senses, I would choose that it should be the taste, as it seems to me less necessary even than smell.  Believe me, it is only taste that fails you, not sight.  You see, but without satisfaction; you chew bread, but as if it were rope, without taste or relish.  It seems to you that your resolutions are without force because they are not gay nor joyous.  But you are mistaken, for the Apostle St. Paul very often had only that kind… (Rom. 7:21-25).

 

You do not feel yourself firm, constant, or very resolute. “There is something in me,” you say, “which has never been satisfied; but I cannot say what it is.”  I should very much like to know what it is, my dear child, so I could tell it to you.  But I hope that some day, hearing you at leisure, I shall discover it.  Meanwhile, might it not be a multitudes of desires which obstruct your spirit?  I have been ill with that complaint.  The bird fastened to the perch knows itself to be fastened and feels the shocks of its detention and restraint only when it wants to fly; and in the same way, before it has its wings, it knows its powerlessness only by the trial of flight.

 

For a remedy, then, my dear child, since you have not yet grown wings for flight and your own powerlessness hampers your efforts, do not flutter, do not make eager attempts to fly; have patience until you get your wings. Like the doves.  I greatly fear that you have a little too much ardour for the quarry, that you are overeager, and multiply desires a little too thickly.  You see the beauty of illuminations, the sweetness of resolutions; you seem just about to grasp them; the proximity of good excites your appetite for it; and this other appetite agitates you and makes you dart forth, but for nothing.  For the master keeps you fastened on the perch, or perhaps you have not your wings as yet; and meanwhile you grow thin by this constant movement of the heart, and continually lessen your strength.  You must make trials, but moderate one, without agitating yourself and without getting yourself overheated about them.

 

Examine well your practice in this matter; perhaps you will see that you let your spirit cling too much to desire for this sovereign sweetness that the sense of firmness, constancy, and resolution brings to the soul.  You have firmness, for what else is firmness but to will rather to die than to sin or to quit the Faith?  But you have not the sense of it; for if you had, you would have a thousand joys from it.  So, then, check yourself; do not excite yourself; you will be all the better and your wings will thus strengthen themselves more easily.

 

Your eagerness, then, is a fault in you, and there is something (I do not know what) which is not satisfied; for this is a fault against resignation.  You resign yourself well, but it is with a but; for you would very much like to have this or that, and you agitate yourself to get it.

 

A simple desire is not contrary to resignation, but this panting of heart, fluttering of wings, agitation of will, and multiplicity of dartings our – this, undoubtedly, is a fault against resignation.  Courage, my dear sister: since our will belongs to God, doubtless we ourselves are His.  You have all that is needed, but you have no sense of it; there is no great loss in that.

 

Do you know what you must do?  You must be pleased not to fly, since you have not yet your wings.  You make me think of Moses.  That holy man, having arrived on Mount Pisgah, saw all the land of promise before his eyes, the land that for forty years he had aspired after and hoped for, amid the murmurs and seditions of his people, and amid the rigours of the deserts.  He saw it and did not enter it, but died while looking at it (Deut. 34:1-5).  He had your glass of water at his lips, and could not drink.  Oh God, what sighs this soul must have fetched!  He died there happier than many did in the land of promise, since God did him the honour of burying him Himself.  And so, if you had to die without ever drinking the water of the Samaritan woman (Jn. 4:15), what would it matter, as long as your soul was received to drink eternally in the source and fountain of life?  Do not excite yourself to vain desires, and do not even excite yourself about not exciting yourself; go quietly on your way, for it is good.

 

Know, my dear sister, that I write these things to you with much distraction, and that if you find them confused it is no wonder, for I am so myself, but (thank God) without disquiet.  Do you want to know whether I speak the truth, when I say that there is in you a defect of entire resignation?  You are quite willing to have a cross, but you want to choose it yourself; you would have it common, corporal, and of such and such a sort.  What is that, my well-beloved daughter?  Ah! No, I desire that your cross and mine be entirely crosses from Jesus Christ.  And as to the imposition of them, and the choice, the good God knows what He does and why He does it:  for our good, no doubt.  Our Lord gave to David the choice of the rod with which he would be scourged; blessed be God for this (2 Kings 24:12-14; RSV 2 Sam. 24:12-14).  But I think I would not have chosen; I would have let His divine majesty do all.  The more a cross is from God, the more we should love it.

 

Well now, my sister, my daughter, my soul (and this is not too much, you well know), tell me, is not God better than man?  Is not a man a true nothing in comparison with God?  and yet you have in me a man, or rather the merest nothing of all nothings, the flower of all misery, who loves no less the confidence that you have in him, although you may have lost the sense and taste of it, than if you had all the sentiments in the world.  And will not God hold your good will agreeable, although without any feeling?  “I am,” said David, “like a bottle in the frost” (Ps. 118:83; RSV Ps. 119:83), which is of no use.  Let there be as many drynesses, as much barrenness as you like, provided that we love God.

 

But, after all, you are not yet in the land in which there is no light, for you do have light sometimes, and God visits you.  Is He not good, do you think?  It seems to me this vicissitude makes you very agreeable to God.  Still, I approve of your showing to our sweet Saviour – but lovingly and without excitement – your affliction; and, as you say, He at least lets your soul find Him.  For He is pleased that we should tell Him the pain He gives us, and lament to Him, provided it be lovingly and humbly and to Himself, as little children do when their dear mother has spanked them.  Meanwhile, there must be a little suffering, with sweetness. I do not think there is any harm in saying to Our Lord, “Come into our souls.”  No, that has no appearance of evil…

 

God wishes that I should serve Him in suffering dryness, anguish, and temptations, like Job, like St. Paul, and not in preaching.

 

Serve God as He wishes; you will see that one day He will do all you wish, and more than you know how to wish…

 

Ah! Shall we not one day be all together in heaven to bless God eternally?  I hope so and rejoice in it.

 

The promise that you made to Our Lord (never to refuse anything that someone asks you in His name) only obliges you to love Him properly.  I fear that you might wrongly come to think that it obliges you to do things that would harm you (if they are asked in His name), such as giving more than you ought or giving indiscreetly.  Your promise, then, has the understood condition that you will always observe true discretion, which is no more than to say that you will love God entirely, and will accommodate yourself to live, speak, act, and give according to His pleasure…

 

I pray earnestly for our Celse-Benigne, and all the little troop of girls.[1]  I also recommend myself to their prayers.  Remember to pray for my Geneva, that God may convert it.

 

Also remember to behave with a great respect and honour in all that regards the good spiritual father you know of; and again, when dealing with his disciples and spiritual children, let them acknowledge only true sweetness and humility in you.  If you receive some reproaches, keep yourself gentle, humble, patient, and with no word save of true humility, for this is necessary.  May God be forever your heart, your spirit, your repose; and I am, Madame,

 

Your very devoted servant in Our Lord,

Francis

 

P.S. … I add, this morning, St. Cecilia’s Day, that the proverb drawn from our St. Bernard, “Hell is full of good intentions,” must not trouble you at all.[2]  There are two sorts of good wills.  The one says, “I would do well, but it gives me trouble, and I will not do it.”  The other, “I wish to do well, but I have not as much power as I have will; it is this which holds me back.”  The fist fills Hell, the second Paradise.  The first only begins to will and to desire, but it does not finish willing.  Its desires have not enough courage; they are only abortions of will, and that is why it fills Hell.  But the second produces entire and well-formed desires; it is for this that Daniel was called a “man of desires” (Dan. 9:23).  May Our Lord deign to give us the perpetual assistance of His Holy Spirit, my well-beloved daughter and sister!

 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[1] St. Jane de Chantal had four children: her son Celse-Benigne, and three daughters, Marie-Aimee, Francoise, and Charlotte.

[2] St. Bernard of Clairvaux, Soliloquies 1.

​

​

Back to Top

​