Nothing is so strong as gentleness

(St. Francis de Sales and St. Jane de Chantal)

“In prayer, Francis [St. Francis de Sales] advised Jane [St. Jane de Chantal] to offer simple prayers from the heart rather than following the long, complex methods her other director had pushed. He encouraged her to receive Holy Communion more frequently and to wait on the Lord for answers rather than darting in a new direction each time inspiration struck. ‘Do not go chasing eagerly after vain longings,’ he says, ‘and I would even go so far as to say, do not be eager in avoiding eagerness. Keep quietly on along your way, for it is a good way.’

It was challenging advice for a woman who rode nine miles each way to daily Mass and even branded the name of Jesus on her chest to scare off suitors after her husband’s death. Jane was a spiritual sprinter. Trying to do too much too soon was all she knew.

‘I am never satisfied, but I do not know why,’ she complained to Francis.

‘Is it not because the very multitude of your desires encumber your soul?’ he answered. ‘I, too, have suffered from that disease.’

The antidote, for Francis, was gentleness. A fruit of the Holy Spirit cited by Paul in his Letter to the Galatians, gentleness typically expresses itself in kind words and calm responses to the people and things that upset us. Yet those external expressions are merely means of cultivating the much greater interior gift of gentleness: the peace of a recollected soul that can maintain its equilibrium no matter what disasters, disturbances, and delays come its way.

Our world tends to equate gentleness with cowardice or enabling. But Francis saw gentleness as a sign of spiritual strength.

‘Nothing is so strong as gentleness,’ he says, ‘and nothing so gentle as real strength.’”

~Colleen Campbell