| This Constant Flutter of Your Heart Exhausts Your Strength All the Time |
This week we read part of a letter from St. Francis de Sales to St. Jane de Chantel, in response to a troubling letter she previously sent him.To prepare for our chat on Sunday, please read the letter, which is reproduced below, and review the questions at the end.Click for Living Jesus Chatroom  Image by erge from PixabayI want to talk about your cross and I am wondering whether God has allowed me to understand it and to see the whole extent of it, with its four arms. I very much hope and pray that he has, so that I shall be able to say something really helpful. It is a certain incapacity or loss of power, you say, of your faculties or a part of your understanding which prevents it from enjoying the thought of what is good; and what grieves you most is that when you come to make a resolution, you do not feel that your reaction is as strong as usual but that you are brought up against a certain barrier which stops you short; and this is the starting-point of your painful temptations against the faith. This is well put, my dear daughter; you express yourself well. You add that nevertheless by the grace of God your will only wants to cleave simply and firmly to the Church, and that you would willingly die for the faith .Oh blessed be God, my dear daughter, this sickness is not unto death, but so that God may be glorified thereby (1 John 11:4). Two nations are in your womb, as Rebecca was told; one is struggling against the other in your spirit, but in the end the younger shall defeat the elder (Cf. Gen. 25: 23). Self-love never dies until we ourselves die; it has thousands of ways of entrenching itself in our soul, but we cannot cast it out; it is the first-born of our soul, for it is natural, or at least co-natural to us; self-love is attended by a legion of armed horsemen to help it–emotions, activities, passions; it is skillful and knows a thousand subtle twists and turns. To balance this, you have the love of God on the other side, which is conceived and born later; and that too has its emotions, inclinations, passions, activities. These two children in the same womb struggle with one another like Esau and Jacob; that is why Rebecca cried out: Would it not be better for me to die than to bear children with so much pain? The result of these convulsions is a certain inner disgust, so that you cannot relish food, however good. But what does it matter whether you relish your food or not, as long as you do not stop eating? If I had to lose one of my senses I should choose taste as being even less necessary than the sense of smell, I think. Believe me, you are only deprived of taste, not of sight. You can see but without satisfaction; you munch your bread and eat it, but as though it were just tow, without taste or relish. It seems to you that your resolutions have no force behind them because they are neither gay nor joyful; but you are wrong, for the apostle Paul very often had only that kind. Poor Leah is a little bleary-eyed and ugly, but your spirit must make do with her before you can have the beautiful Rachel. Be of good cheer, her children will be beautiful, her works agreeable to God. But I must get on.You do not feel firm, constant or resolute. There is something in me, you say, that has never been satisfied, but I don’t know what it is. I wish I knew what it is so that I could tell you, my dear daughter; perhaps some day when we have plenty of time to talk, I shall find out. Meanwhile, I wonder whether the blockage is caused by too many desires thronging in your mind? I have suffered from this illness. A bird chained to its perch is not conscious of its captivity and does not feel the pull of its chain until it wants to fly; in the same way an unfledged nestling only finds out that it cannot fly when it makes the actual attempt. And the remedy for this, my dear daughter, is not to struggle, not to make eager attempts to fly as your wings have not yet grown and you lack power for too great an effort. Be patient until you get the wings of a dove, and then you can fly.I am very much afraid that you are a little too ardent and headlong, that you pursue too many desires rather too eagerly. You see the beauty of light, the sweetness of resolutions; you feel as though you were very, very nearly there, and seeing goodness so close at hand makes you thirst and long for it inordinately; your longing increases your eagerness, you rush forward to reach the object of your desire–but in vain; for your master keeps you chained to your perch, or else your wings are not yet grown. And meanwhile this constant flutter of your heart exhausts your strength all the time. Of course, you must try to fly but do it gently and without struggling and without getting flustered.Examine yourself carefully on this point; perhaps you are straining too much in your desire to taste that sovereign sweetness which firmness, constancy and resolution bring to the soul. You are firm; what is firmness but having the will to die rather than to sin against faith or give it up? But you do not feel you are firm, for if you did, it would give you untold joy. Come now, stop fluttering and being in a hurry; you will feel all the better for it and your wings will grow all the faster. This straining eagerness then is a fault of yours; and this is the undefinable thing that is not satisfied in you, a certain lack of resignation. You do resign yourself, but it is with a BUT; for you want this and that, and you struggle to get it. A simple desire is not contrary to resignation, but a panting heart, fluttering wings, an agitated will, and many restless movements–all these undoubtedly add up to lack of resignation. Courage, my dear sister; if our will belongs to God, we ourselves are surely his. You have all that is necessary, but without feeling it; that is no great loss. Do you know what you ought to do? As your wings have not yet grown try to find pleasure in not flying.You make me think of Moses. When this holy man had arrived on Mount Pisgah he saw the whole of the promised land before his eyes, the land which he had longed and hoped for for forty years in the hardship of the desert, while his people murmured and rebelled. He saw the land of promise but did not set foot in it, and died even as he beheld it. He had your glass of water at his lips and could not drink. How deeply his soul must have sighed within him! He died a more blessed death there than many did in the promised land, since God himself honoured him in his burial. Well now, if you too had to die without drinking of the well of the Samaritan woman, what would it matter, as long as your soul is admitted to drink for ever at the source and fountain of life? Do not go chasing eagerly after vain longings, and I would even go as far as to say, do not be eager in avoiding eagerness. Keep quietly on along your way, for it is a good way.I must tell you, my very dear sister, that I am writing to you with much interruption, and if you find the letter confused it is hardly surprising, because I am continually distracted, but without letting it worry me, thank God. Would you like to be able to tell whether I am right in saying that your fault is lack of complete resignation? You are quite willing to have a cross, but you want to choose what sort it is to be; you want an ordinary cross, a bodily cross, or some other. And what is that, my beloved daughter? Ah no, I want your cross and mine to be no other than Jesus Christ’s cross, both as regards its choice and the way it is laid upon us. God knows very well what he is about and why; it is all for our good, you may be sure. God gave David the choice of the rod with which he should be scourged; and it seems to me (blessed be God) that I would rather not have chosen, but have left it all to his Divine Majesty. The more wholly a cross comes from God, the more we ought to love it.Come, my sister, my daughter, my soul (and this is not going too far, as well you know), tell me, is God not better than man? And is not man as nothing compared with God? And yet here is a man, or rather one who is absolute! y nothing in himself, the most miserable of creatures, who sets no less store by your confidence in him, even though you no longer rejoice in it and feel it, than if it were giving you all the pleasure in the world. And so, will not God too look with favor on your good will, even though it has no feeling behind it? I have become, said David, like a wineskin dried in the smoke of the fue, so that one cannot tell how it could possibly serve any useful purpose. Let us put up with any amount of dryness and aridity, provided we love God.But after all, you are not yet in the land where there is no daylight, for at times you see the light and God visits you. Is he not good? What do you think? It seems to me that your grief makes you take greater joy in him. Still, I approve of your showing your grief to our gentle Saviour, but do it lovingly and without excitement, so that you may at least find him in your soul, as you say; for he likes us to tell him how he is grieving us, and does not mind our complaining about him, as long as we do it lovingly and humbly, talking openly to him, as little children do when their beloved mother has punished them. Meanwhile you must suffer a little longer in meekness and patience. I don’t think there is any harm in saying to Our Lord: ‘Come into our soul’; no, there seems to be nothing wrong with that. Reflections: Do you think St. Francis is being too pragmatic in this letter and not compassionate enough?Martyrdom is an obvious way to show willingness to die for the faith. Especially in this day and age, what are other ways to die for the faith?What does it mean to be chained down by too many desires (even if good ones)?How do we resign ourselves to be at peace in God’s will at every moment of every day?How does being overly zealous in one’s spiritual goals harm one’s peace of mind? Why are these ambitions called self-love, as St. Francis mentions? How do we avoid being spiritually slothful and yet not be overly zealous?If we are beings made with feelings, why are we so often supposed to not allow our feelings guide us? Sign up for our Living Jesus Chat Room:Come to our Living Jesus Chat Room, 7:30 PM to 8:30 PM Eastern Time |