Though it didn’t make the headlines, Pope Francis offered reflections on a saint of spiritual game plans.
Though it didn’t make the headlines, Pope Francis offered reflections on a saint of spiritual game plans.
T here is “no better place to find God, and to help others to find him, than in the hearts of the women and men” of our time. Most days, if you look at the news or social media — or while waiting in traffic — that can seem impossible. But now and again a story will make the headlines, such as the radical acts of hospitality during the blizzard in Buffalo, that suggests it might possibly be true.
The assertion about opening our eyes to God in the lives of those around us is an insight of Saint Francis de Sales. Buried in the late-December headlines was a beautiful, practical reflection offered by Pope Francis on December 28, the 400th anniversary of de Sales’s death. In Introduction to the Devout Life, de Sales wrote on seeking to live a holy and contemplative life (speaking of things that seem impossible these days). It’s a book that remains as necessary and helpful as when he wrote it.
The “devout” or contemplative life can seem so exotic. I put a book together just before Covid hit called A Year with the Mystics: Visionary Wisdom for Daily Living, precisely to try to demystify mysticism a tad. Not everyone is Catholic, but the Catechism of the Catholic Church can be universally useful on this front, explaining that mysticism is about every person’s journey to union with God — which is the point of our lives. Surely that’s intriguing, at the very least? And insightful about questions of meaning and happiness and what comes next?
Preaching on the holiday we just celebrated, de Sales said: “Do you see the baby Jesus in the crib? He accepts all the discomforts of that season, the bitter cold and everything that the Father lets happen to him. He does not refuse the small consolations that his Mother gives him; we are not told that he ever reached out for his Mother’s breast, but left everything to her care and concern.” The Christmas story, even its divinity, is overflowing with humility. The lesson, according to de Sales? “So too, we ourselves should neither desire nor refuse anything, but accept all that God sends us, the bitter cold and the discomforts of the season.” Pope Francis adds in his reflection: “We are struck by how Francis recognized the importance of concern for the human dimension. At the school of the incarnation, he had learned to interpret history and to approach life with confidence and trust.”
There was very little chance the de Sales reflection would make much news. This is partly because on the same morning it appeared, Pope Francis asked the world to pray for the pope emeritus, Benedict, who we now know was in his final hours. When Benedict resigned as pope, he showed us, in a historically earth-shattering way, what humility looks like. Even before that, he showed us humility in prayer. When, with all your heart, you ask God for guidance about God’s will for you, it may not look like anything the world would expect. Who gives up the papacy? Well, Benedict did, because he believed that was what God was asking of him. The most important thing to Benedict was that he had some peace in this conviction. His resignation bewildered and angered people. I thought it was an incredible witness to those of us schooled in the faux importance of achievements — even as our very identities.
PHOTOS: Pope Benedict XVI
One of the blessings of people’s willingness to share the fruits of their prayer with us, as a way of guiding our own prayer, is getting to know God a little better through the eyes of another. And the traditions of Christianity have so many examples of people — spiritual masters — meeting the same triune God. There is a familiarity to Him if you do even a cursory study. A guide like de Sales is indispensable. Which is why Pope Francis points to him.
“At the very thought of God, one immediately feels a certain delightful emotion of the heart, which testifies that God is God of the human heart,” de Sales wrote in his Treatise on the Love of God. God is not abstract. Pope Francis explains:
An experience of God is intrinsic to the human heart. Far from a mental construct, it is a recognition, filled with awe and gratitude, of God’s self-manifestation. In the heart and through the heart, there comes about a subtle, intense and unifying process in which we come to know God and, at the same time, ourselves, our own origins and depths, and our fulfilment in the call to love. We discover that faith is no blind emotion, but primarily an attitude of the heart, whereby we entrust ourselves to a truth that appeals to our consciousness as a “sweet emotion” and awakens in response, as he was wont to say, an enduring benevolence towards all of creation.
I can’t do justice here to de Sales’s reflections, or to those of Pope Francis, but suffice it to say, it’s all about love. And most of the negative impressions people have of organized religion are of believers not showing their love — probably inflicting quite the opposite on others. De Sales makes clear: “Those who think they are rising to God, yet fail to love their neighbor, are deceiving both themselves and others.”
In this new year, if you are a Christian: Show the world the love for which we are made. It has a power (thanks be to God!) beyond any tweet or other broadcast opinion.
This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.