Independence Day July 4, 2020 approaches for the USA in a year of suffering and turmoil.
Our Holy Founder St Francis de Sales often encouraged us to have liberty of spirit.
A talk given by French Bishop Benoit Riviere highlights this theme: “Freedom … is the life of our heart.” Saint Francis de Sales.http://www.francoisdesales.com/La-liberte-c-est-la-vie-de-notre.html
Below is a translation of the text by a Visitation Sister.
“Freedom … is the life of our heart.” Saint Francis de Sales.
To his contemporaries divided between an external religious life and a daily life stuck in selfishness and futile pleasures, not to mention the more serious disorder of vices, Saint Francis de Sales does not say: “You are hypocrites! He tells them about the love of God who alone can give meaning and unity to their life, right now, in the world. He tells them about this pearl protected in the shell buried in the open sea, and which is not affected by the eddies of salt water.
He tells them about the freedom to love that resembles the flight of eagles and swallows in the sky. He shows them that this freedom is so much more beautiful and good for the heart than the heaviness of farmyard animals unable to rise more than a few centimeters … weighed down by the weight of the ties of sin.
Let us listen to Saint Francis de Sales: “See then how the Eternal Father draws us: he throws in our hearts spiritual delights and pleasures like sacred baits by which he sweetly attracts us to receive and taste the sweetness of his teaching … Grace has forces, not to force but to lighten the heart; she has a holy violence, not to rape but to make our freedom in love ”(Treatise on the Love of God II, 12).
Saint Francis de Sales is convinced that the summits of God’s love are offered to all without exception; he absolutely does not think that the turmoil of the world, the worries of business, the surrounding noises, the hassles, the servitudes of professional and family life, are a handicap to be overcome in order to enter life with God. He will say, in all possible ways, and adapting to whoever he is addressing: “Wherever we are, we can and we must aspire to a perfect life” (Introduction to the devout life, I , 3).
“As long as you want it, you can achieve a very high degree of perfection everywhere” (Sermon for the Feast of the Annunciation 1612).