Lift Up Your Heart: A 10-Day Personal Retreat with St. Francis de Sales

Nihil Obstat: Reverend Thomas Knoebel

Censor Librorum

Imprimatur: +Jerome E. Listecki

Archbishop of Milwaukee

July 6, 2016

Scripture texts in this work are taken from the New American Bible, revised edition © 2010, 1991, 1986, 1970 Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Washington, DC, and are used by permission of the copyright owner. All Rights Reserved. No part of the New American Bible may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Passages cited from the Introduction to the Devout Life by Francis de Sales © Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

____________________________________

© 2017 by John Burns

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, except in the case of reprints in the context of reviews, without written permission from Ave Maria Press®, Inc., P.O. Box 428, Notre Dame, IN 46556, 1-800-282-1865.

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Paperback: ISBN-13 978-1-59471-720-8

E-book: ISBN-13 978-1-59471-721-5

Cover image of St. Francis de Sales © Julie Lonneman, courtesy of Trinity Stores, www.trinitystores.com, 800.699.4482.

Cover background © iStockphoto.com.

Cover and text design by Katherine J. Ross.

Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

Contents

To Begin

The First Meditation: On Our Creation

The Second Meditation: On the End for Which We Were Created

The Third Meditation: On God’s Benefactions

The Fourth Meditation: On Sin

The Fifth Meditation: On Death

The Sixth Meditation: On Judgment

The Seventh Meditation: On Hell

The Eighth Meditation: On Paradise

The Ninth Meditation: The Election and Choice of Heaven

The Tenth Meditation: The Election and Choice the Soul Makes of a Devout Life

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Appendix: St. Francis de Sales’s Original Meditations

Notes

To Begin

Like many people, I grew up knowing I was supposed to get to heaven and that God wanted me there. But as a child, I remember not really knowing what heaven was, not understanding the supposed goal of my life. With the passing of years, I found less and less attraction to the idea of heaven as it remained something distant, hard to understand, mysterious. With time, I gradually let go of this final goal and began working to make life here on earth my heaven. I sought satisfaction and fulfillment in earthly pursuits and tried to check off my own list of needs and wants. I fulfilled the obligations of my faith in a half-hearted manner, mostly because I knew I should and not because I wanted or cared to do so. For a while, I found myself somewhat satisfied; it was at times exciting to live according to the whims of culture and to engage in a materialistic, carpe diem way. However, it was only a matter of a few years before what seemed to be happiness began to wear off; an empty sensation lingered on the fringes and slowly crept into everything. With my faith on the periphery, my life slid into tepidity and even boredom despite having attained so much of what I thought I wanted. At first little more than an itch, I eventually found myself haunted by a thirst for something more. I searched for fulfillment in pleasure, popularity, possessions, and whatever else I saw making others apparently happy. I was, in hindsight, half asleep. I was unable to awaken within myself that rich movement of grace that opens the eyes of the heart to the deeper realities of human existence. I was unable to understand the need to turn my heart to its true purpose, its Alpha and Omega, to the Lord of all things. This turning, conversion, I have learned, typically happens through the assistance of others who truly know the ways of Jesus Christ. In the throes of an unfulfilling existence, I needed the help of a master. I stumbled across a book by St. Francis de Sales, called Introduction to the Devout Life. It literally changed my life.

First, a bit on the original book will help set the stage for this present one. St. Francis de Sales published the Introduction in 1609 to help those he was guiding in the ways of faith embrace a more vibrant and authentic imitation of Christ, which he calls the devout life. Devotion, as he speaks of it, is simply true love of God.¹ As I began to pray and as I wandered through the pages of the Introduction, I began to remember something from my youth that I had managed to bury in all the years of wandering. I remembered, or perhaps I accepted for the first time, this truth: in Jesus Christ, God has spoken the definitive Word about our purpose. In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus teaches that the greatest commandment is charity—to love God completely and to love one’s neighbor as oneself (see Mt 22:37–39). To live in this way ultimately frees one from the logic of self-love and, ironically, thereby satisfies the deepest longings of the human heart. God created humanity out of love and for the sake of love. In loving, and loving correctly—not according to the demands of the world but the ways of Jesus Christ—the human heart finds its rest, true peace, and happiness.

In preparing the way for readers, de Sales focuses on the first and greatest commandment of Christ, to love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind (Mt 22:37). Such love requires of most people a radical reordering of priorities and relationships. From earliest times, this has been the call of Christian faith: to cast off former ways of malice and put on the new, recreated self (see Eph 4:17–24). At its heart, authentic Christian living is a life-response to the first public words of Jesus Christ: The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the gospel (Mk 1:15). The process of conversion, the faith-based journey of turning back to God, constitutes the central focus of de Sales’s work.

A purification of the soul, de Sales describes conversion as, forsaking sin and removing and cutting away whatever obstructs union with God.² In the early parts of his book, de Sales is quick to explain that often we will encounter a standard difficulty as we undergo conversion. When we analyze our imperfections and identify whatever else obstructs our union with God, typically a certain sadness and even frustration arises as we discover that we are not as perfect as we had previously thought. Anticipating such discouragement, de Sales notes that self-awareness opens the way to progress: We must not be disturbed at our imperfections, since for us perfection consists in fighting against them. How can we fight against them unless we see them, or overcome them unless we face them? Our victory does not consist in being unconscious of them but in not consenting to them, and not to consent to them is to be displeased with them.³

In order to begin authentic living, de Sales explains, the soul must undergo a thorough purification that leads to the grace of right union with God. Living in right union with God opens the way to human perfection, and human perfection is the fulfillment for which every heart searches. With his acutely keen insight, de Sales identifies two stages of this purification. The first is the removal of sin from one’s life. This happens, quite simply, by making a good Confession. While not a simple task in itself, many others have treated the topic quite sufficiently. De Sales therefore focuses more energy on a second stage of purifying the soul. Even after sin has been forgiven and wiped away, it remains attractive and the memory of sinful ways remains powerful and persuasive. This lingering affection for sin dangerously draws the soul back toward that of which it was cleansed by the grace of Reconciliation. This affection for sin is thus the focus of the second stage of purification: Since you wish to live a devout life you must not only cease to sin but you must also purify your heart of all affection for sin. In addition to the danger of falling again, such base affections so lastingly weaken and weigh down your spirits that it will be impossible to do good works promptly, diligently, and frequently, as it is in this that the very essence of devotion consists.⁴

With that as his aim, de Sales begins the main thrust of his book by outlining the crucial undertaking of cleansing the soul of its affection for sin. To facilitate this purification, he lays out an ingenious sequence of ten thematically related meditations. He wrote them to assist the prayerful reader in understanding and correctly embracing the fullness of God’s offer of life and love.

Encouragement for the Way

These ten meditations are immensely useful for anyone who believes in God and comes to stand before the question of life’s meaning and aim. They represent, in their totality, a journey of the soul with the highest of hoped-for outcomes: right relationship with God and right understanding of one’s purpose. They help to return the heart’s gaze to heaven by providing immensely practical insight into what it means to live for such a noble destiny.

No doubt, these are not easy meditations to make. In addition to the challenging spiritual journey they propose, they are sometimes difficult for the modern mind and heart to engage because they were written more than four hundred years ago. They include topics the contemporary mind often considers unpopular or irrelevant, including considerations of the traditional four last things: death, judgment, heaven, and hell. Furthermore, some of the subjects within the meditations are often dismissed as overly devotional or even outdated in the postmodern mindset: angels, demons, the saints, and the apparently flowery language of the love of God. Finally, as his word choice is particular to the sixteenth-century spiritual writers, even modern translations can be difficult to engage with centuries later.

Because of these factors, entrance into the original text often proves challenging. However, to lose the content of something so insightful and timeless would be a tragedy, principally because these meditations are among the best of ways to move from passive to active pursuit of vibrantly lived faith. The sole purpose of this present book is thus to make the contents of the original ten meditations accessible to the mind and heart of a believer many centuries after they were composed.

The following pages are simply the result of my own prayer reflections as I walked through the meditations myself, an exercise I have done now many times. They are an attempted adaptation of de Sales’s ideas with a view to facilitating easier entrance into these wonderfully important subjects. The structure and order of the contents reflects the series of themes he outlines, but this book contains my own glosses and expansions upon his ideas. In effect, the whole of this work is simply a reweaving of another’s masterpiece. It will thus be difficult (and I hope, unnecessary) to disentangle my thoughts from his; this meager effort is simply one more little moment in the long history of writing and rewriting the beautiful essentials of the faith, as de Sales himself noted in the preface of his own book:

The Holy Spirit disposes and orders in many different ways the devout instructions he gives us by the tongues and pens of his servants. Although the doctrine is always the same, statements of it differ greatly according to the various ways in which their books are composed. I neither can nor will, nor indeed should I, write in this Introduction anything but what has already been published by our predecessors on the same subject. The flowers I present to you, my reader, are the same; the bouquet I have made out of them differs from others because it has been fashioned in a different order and way.⁵

You hold in your hands another refashioning, and nothing more. I simply hope to provide a new angle and approach to something given us by one of the masters. I wrote these pages in a place of deep prayer before the Blessed Sacrament. My aim in putting these thoughts together is to help the next age of believers take concrete steps toward living the timeless gift of faith that has been so wonderfully handed on to us.

Some Practical Points before Beginning

Before beginning, be sure to step back and consider what you are about to undertake. St. Francis de Sales, a Doctor of the Church, has handed down in written form a basic roadmap to living a more intentional and dynamic faith. In a very real sense, you are about to take him as your spiritual guide. What