Translated, excerpted and adapted from: https://marthe-marie.paroisse.net/rubriques/haut/actualites/5.mini-retraite-sainte-jeanne-de-chantalv2.pdf
Day 7:
Faith in the Providence of God
“
I want to lose myself and to spoil myself completely in the bosom of your paternal Providence, and to abandon myself
completely in the care of your divine love …
“
Abandoning yourself in the hands of Providence is more than abandoning yourself
: it’s no longer worrying about yourself,
: “
do with me what
you want, I lose interest in myself
It is putting our worries in the hands of God who knows better than we do what we need and
what our loved ones need. This is what Jeanne said to her collaborators
Meditation
–
:
Thinking of a project or a concern that is dear to us, and pray
Lord I want to rest between the
arm of your Providence, abandon myself completely to the care of your divine
love…
“
Day 6: simplicity
•
She does everything for God
:
“
This sacred simplicity makes the soul look only to God in everything
that she does. She didn’t have to do extraordinary things
; by this simplicity it delights the heart of
God by uniting with Him
!
“
simplicity is therefore doing everything for God without complicating one’s life and without seeking to make
extraordinary things.
“
Simplicity consists in having only one claim, in all our actions, which is to please
God in all things.
“
•
Sheis caring and non-judgmental
:
“
Simplicity does not philosophize about what others do and say. It’s a big clue that a
soul is very empty of God when it has fun watching the actions of others and discussing why
we do this or this…
“
Examen of conscience
:
in what areas of my life am I too complicated
?
What to do to be simpler, more natural, more spontaneous
Day 5:
Humility
•
It is recognition of our fragility.
:
“
It is to tend towards abandonment to God in complete indifference to being loved or not, honored or
despised …
“
•
She refuses titles and wants to be treated like everyone else
:
“
Concretely, even being superior, she did the cooking and domestic chores
in turn
like the other sisters.
•
:
“
The way to have inner peace is
to have a real and very sincere humility, because the truly humble has nothing to hurt him …
“
•
Meditation
:
I humbly surrender myself to God in indifference to what
think or say about me •
I
Day 4:
The temptations of internal dryness and the nights of faith
“Temptations have been chasing me for almost 41 years,it’s why I lose heart”
“Our Good Lord gives you very dry and very hard crusts of bread after the milk of
consolations. Is it unreasonable to strengthen your gums and feed your stomach with meat from now on-(food) of the big and robust?”
The temptations of Jeanne de Chantal are to abandon God, to move away from Him when he is no longer giving”inner consolations”,that he only gives”fine dry bread crusts”
What to do?
·
Keep courage, pretend everything is fine, be”big and sturdy”.·
Stay generous and don’t pay attention to these states of mind,let them pass would say the pyschologists
of today
:”We must hold the spirit in great generosity and hardly speak or think about it, suffer these
temptations and gently feel them without pretending to see them.”·”Take refuge close to the Lord”,surrender to Him in trust: “
The chicks, when they see the hawk, quickly withdraw under the wings of their mother, they hide there!”
·
Accept these droughts,these temptations to shed oneself, to enter into the nakedness of the faith which
makes the void in us that God and He alone can then fill:”It is very useful for the soul to be in these deprivations so that being perfectly devoid of and empty of all things created, God
is his Light, his life, his pleasure, his help, his clothing, his rest and his roof… “
Spiritual exercise: always remain faithful to God and to what he asks us to do and to be, whether we feel benefits or not, whether we feel fullness of the interior life or the great void.
Day 3:
A spirituality of discernment in the line of Françis de Sales
1. Remain in his Presence, his Will being proportional to the intensity of his Presence:
” prayers, not of a day nor of two, but of several months … are undoubtedly infallible marks that it was the Will of God ”
2 ° /
Do not rush but give yourself time:”We gave leisure to the first agitations of your conscience to cool down, if they had been ill-founded … “
3 ° /
Confide in a third person:
“It was neither you nor I who formed the treaty: it was a third who in this could only look at God alone! “
4 ° / Have a sincere and upright will
“I did not want to follow your desire or my inclination, but God and his Providence ”
5 ° / Have a willful and combative will stronger than the intellect:
“Know you what you will do while the enemy has fun trying to disturb the intellect
6 ° / Have a will of love
“You have to do everything out of love and nothing out of force; you have to love more
obedience than fear of disobedience ”
7 ° /
Have great interior freedom:
“
“The freedom I’m talking about is the freedom of children.
loved.
It’s a disengagement from the heart of all things to follow the
Will of God recognized … »… This freedom has two opposite vices:
instability and constraint, or dissolution and servitude.
Instability of mind or dissolution is a certain mind of liberté by
which we want to change exercise, state of life, without reason or knowledge that it is the Will of
God … Coercion or servitude is a certain lack of freedom by which the mind is overwhelmed,
or boredom or anger when he cannot
do what he decided … “
Freedom is neither the whim nor the stiffness, but the flexibility of a firm will but detached from it
8 ° / Let yourself be guided by Necessity and Charity,
bywhat is imposed by life (diseases,events requiring an immediate reaction …) and by Charity, which
is best for our brothers
the Good Samaritan…)
Meditation
What other criteria help us personally to discern the will of God
Day 2:
A spirituality of soul- stripping
“So much do I see myself stripped of all that was most precious to me … My God, my true Father,
the razor has penetrated ..
This good Lord wants to put his holy hand through all the places of my heart to take and strip everything: his most holy will be done! …. O God, how easy it is to leave those who are around us, but to leave our skin, our flesh, our
bone, and to penetrate into the intimacy of the marrow … It is a great, difficult and impossible thing, except for the Grace
of God !… “
Letter to Françis de Sales.
Meditation
I think about all the times where I have been stripped of my certainties, my habits, my hopes, all my
support points … and where I said or should have said: “Thy will be done”
Day 1:
Spirituality of voluntary love
St Jane loves God madly: she wants to do His Will especially when she no longer knows where her duty is or when she is tempted.
A vigorous heart who loves and desires mightily,that is all the spirituality of Jane de Chantal! This will of love,
this voluntary love manifests itself especially in its periods of “temptations’ which seem to be scruples, doubts, and mystical nights,:”It is a martyrdom to me to feel deprived of the confidence and rest that I once relished in a perfect abandonment in the hands of God and his Providence.
When I look at these deprivations, however little, it seems to me that I am on the verge of despair, without being able to
despair, nor to want to be out of my torment if I am assured that God wants me there.”
St Jane knows times of trust and rest thanks to abandonment in the hands of God and
of His Providence in which she strongly believes: it is the summit of her spirituality. But she also knows often terrible hollows where it is only the will that holds her, not even managing to make sense of her helplessness. This therefore invites one to love, to want to love, even when there is no longer the feeling.
“I write and I speak of God as if I had feeling!”
Meditation
I think of all those times when it’s my will more than my feeling that made me stand in faithfulness to God.