Salesian Literature

Letters on:

Overcoming Fear, Temptation, Failure and Discouragement

1. We must be patient as we seek perfection    ::    2. Have courage, for you have only just begun   ::    3. Be gentle and charitable to your soul

4. God loves greater infirmity with greater tenderness   ::    5. We must bear ourselves until God bears us to Heaven   

6. Self-love can be mortified, but never dies   ::    7. We must attain holy indifference   ::    8. Lean on the mercy of God

9. To change the world, we must change ourselves   ::    10. In patience shall you possess your soul   ::    11. Do not worry yourself about temptations  

12. We must not be fearful of fear   ::    13. Constrain yourself only to your serving God well   ::    14. True simplicity is always good and agreeable to God

15. We must do all by love and nothing by force   ::    16. Be then all for God

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6. Self-love can be mortified, but never dies

To a nun, on the masks that self-love wears

 

My dearest child,

 

Oh! Would to God that it was the Treatise of heavenly love that kept me occupied all the morning.  It would soon be finished, and I should be very happy to apply my soul to such sweet consideration.  But it is the infinite number of little follies that the world necessarily brings me every day that causes me trouble and annoyance, and makes my hours useless.  Still, so far as I can run away from these troubles, I ever keep writing a few more lines about this holy love, which is the bond of our mutual love.

 

Well, let us come to your letter.  Self-love can be mortified in us, but still it never dies; indeed, from time to time and on different occasions, it produces shoots in us, which show that, although cut off, it is not rooted out.  This is why we have not the consolation that we ought to have when we see others do well.  For what we do not see in ourselves is not so agreeable to us; and what we do see in ourselves is very sweet to us, because we love ourselves tenderly and amorously.  But if we had true charity, which makes us have one same heart and one same soul with our neighbour, we should be perfectly filled with consolation when our neighbour did well.

 

This same self-love makes us willing enough to do things of our own choice, but not by the choice of another, or by obedience; we would do it as coming from us, but not as coming from another.  It is always we ourselves who seek our own will and our won self-love; on the contrary, if we had the perfection of the love of God, we should prefer to do what was commanded because it comes more from God, and less form ourselves.

 

As for taking more pleasure in doing difficult things ourselves than in seeing them done by others, this may either be through charity or because self-love secretly fears that others may equal or surpass us.  By goodness of disposition we are sometimes more distressed to see others ill treated than ourselves; sometimes, however, our distress arises because we think ourselves braver than they, and believe that we should support the trouble better than they, according to the good opinion we have of ourselves.

 

The proof of this is that ordinarily we would rather have small troubles than let another have them; but great troubles we wish more for others than ourselves.  Without doubt, my dear child, the repugnance we have to the supposed exaltation of others comes from this, that we have a self-love that tells us we should do even better than they, and that the idea of our good designs promises us wonders from ourselves, and not so much from others.

 

Besides all this, know, my very dear child, that the things you feel are only the dispositions of the lower part of your soul; for I am sure that the superior part disavows it all.  it is the only remedy we have: to disavow the dispositions, invoking obedience, and protesting that we love it, in spite of repugnance, more than our own choice, praising God for the good which one sees in others, and beseeching Him to continue it.  And so we must do with other ill-feelings.

 

We must be in no way surprised to find self-love in us, for it never leaves us.  Like a fox it sleeps sometimes, then all of a sudden leaps on the chickens; for which reason we must constantly keep watch on it, and patiently and very quietly defend ourselves from it.  But if sometimes it wounds us, we are healed by unsaying what it has made us say and disavowing what it has made us do…

 

God bless you, my dear child.

Francis

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