| Your Temptations Come From the Devil and From Hell |
At our Living Jesus Chat Room this Sunday we will be talking about part of a letter written by Saint Francis de Sales to St. Jane de Chantal, written from Annecy, February 18, 1605.To prepare for our chat, please read the article, which is reproduced below, and review the questions at the end.Click for Living Jesus Chatroom  Photo by NEOM on UnsplashIn short, for God’s glory, yield to his will completely, and never suppose that you could be serving him better in any other way; the best way to serve him is to fall in with his will for us. He wants you to serve him without joy, without feeling, with repugnance and revulsion of spirit. Such service gives you no satisfaction, but it pleases him; it is not according to your liking, but according to his. Imagine that you are never going to be delivered of your anguish: what would you do? You would say to God: I am yours; if my miseries are agreeable to you give me more and let them last longer.I have confidence in Our Lord that this is what you would say; then you would stop thinking about the matter, at least you would stop struggling. Well, do this now, and make friends with your trial, as though the two of you were always to live together. You will see that when you have stopped taking thought for your deliverance, God will think of it, and when you stop worrying, God will come swiftly to your help. Enough now on this point till God gives me an opportunity of explaining it to you at leisure, so that we can found our life securely on it. That will be when God lets us meet again. …I do not want to reply to your last letter in detail except for certain points which seem urgent to me. You say you cannot believe, my very dear daughter, that temptations against the faith and the Church come from God. But whoever told you that they did? He can send darkness, helplessness, can keep you tied to your perch, can lead you into dereliction and strip you of all strength, can upset your spiritual digestion and make your inner mouth taste bitter so that the sweetest wine in the world turns to gall; but suggestions of blasphemy, infidelity, unbelief—oh no, these can never come from our merciful God: he is too pure to conceive such ideas.Shall I tell you what part God plays in this? He allows the evil maker of lies to come and offer us these forgeries for sale, so that by despising them we may prove our affection for divine things. And are we to get anxious about it and change our attitude? O no, never, never! It is the devil who is roaming all round our soul, spreading confusion and prying to see whether he cannot find some door open somewhere. That is what he did to Job, to St. Anthony, St. Catherine of Siena and an infinite number of good souls that I know, and to my own soul which is good for nothing and which I do not know.Well now, my dear daughter, are we to be put out by all this? Let him kick his heels outside, and keep all the doors and windows tightly shut: he will get tired of it in the end, and if he does not, God will make him raise the siege. Remember what I think I told you once before: it is a good sign that he should be making so much noise and raising such a tempest in this matter of your will, for it is a sign that he has not got in.Take courage, my dear soul. I say these words with great feeling and in Jesus Christ: my dear soul, courage, I say. As long as we can say resolutely even though without feeling: May Jesus reign, we need not fear. And do not say that you feel you are saying this in a cowardly way, without force and courage, but, as it were, doing yourself violence. This is it; this is the holy violence which takes heaven by storm. You see, my daughter, my soul, this is a sign that all is taken and the enemy has seized everything in our fortress except for the inner stronghold which is impregnable, immovable, and which can not be taken except by its own will. It is, in fact, our free will which dwells before God, bare and alone in the highest and most spiritual part of the soul, depending on no one except on God and on itself; and when all the other faculties of the soul are defeated and delivered over to the enemy, the will alone remains in full possession of itself and does not consent.And now do you understand why souls are afflicted, seeing that the enemy occupies all the other faculties and carries on his great noise and tumult in them? One can hardly hear what is being said and done in the region of the higher will, which indeed has a clearer and more penetrating voice than the inferior will; but this other voice is so rough and huge that it drowns the first. Finally, note this: as long as you dislike the temptation, there is nothing to fear; for why should you dislike it unless it is because you do not want it?In a word, these troublesome temptations come from the devil’s malice; but the distress and suffering which they make us feel come from God’s mercy, who makes holy tribulation spring from this malice in spite of his enemy, and by this means refines the gold that he wants to put in his treasury. So what I say is this: your temptations come from the devil and from hell, but your distress and affliction come from God and paradise; the mothers come from Babylon but the daughters from Jerusalem. Despise the temptations, embrace the tribulations ….Please have no fear that you might be giving me trouble; for I assure you that I find it deeply consoling to render you service. So go on writing to me, often and without careful arrangement, and do it as simply and openly as you can; it will always give me great joy.Now I am going away in an hour’s time to the little town where I am due to preach, God having wanted to use my services both in suffering illness and in preaching: may he be forever blessed. The storm which I told you about has not yet broken, and nothing has happened to me so far; but the clouds are still heavy, dark and threatening above my head.You cannot have too much confidence in me, who am perfectly and irrevocably yours in Jesus Christ, whose dearest graces and blessings I wish you over and over again a thousand times a day. Let us live and die in him and for him. Amen.Your most sincere and· most devoted servant in Our Lord,Francis, Bishop of Geneva. Reflections: What does it mean to yield to the will of God completely? How can we know this?Why is it that God might lead us into darkness, helplessness, and so forth?Saint Francis says that God will not lead us into temptation. Why then in the Our Father do we ask God to not lead us into temptation?How can we stay safe from the wiles of the devil, and how can we recognize them?How can we embrace tribulations?Can you think of a time in your life when you resisted certain temptations many times and as a result became more virtuous in this area? How can a person best form good habits to resist temptations? Sign up for our Living Jesus Chat Room:Come to our Living Jesus Chat Room, 7:30 PM to 8:30 PM Eastern Time U.S. |