Ruminations of an Irascible Hermit.: St Jane Frances de Chantal

Monday, December 12, 2022

St Jane Frances de Chantal - mystic of patience and suffering

Today we have the memorial of St Jane Frances de Chantal. She is a wonderful saint that I wish was better known among people.

She was a baroness, a married woman and a mother of 4. She was widowed at at the age is 28 and had to live with her father in law who did not treat her well. Her spiritual director was that gentle Doctor of the Church, St Francis de Sales and together they founded the Visitandine Order known as the Order of the Visitation of Holy Mary. This religious order was founded specifically for women who were older or later vocations and would not be accepted elsewhere or who could not live the stricter monastic life of other cloistered nuns.

She struggled with dryness in her own prayer and had been through a period of depression after the death of her husband. But in her writings, she is very gentle and patient - just like her spiritual director St Frances de Sales. They both emphasised simplicity, humility, gentleness, accepting trials in a spirit of resignation to God’s Will rather than doing grabs penances or gestures. There’s a beautiful quality of strength and character to the spirituality of both these saints.

She suffered a lot with depression and mental health after the death of her husband, mistreatment by her father in law, as well as during opposition she had establishing her religious order. Yet through all this she remained kind, gentle and charitable. Even as the religious superior she struggled with interior darkness, spiritual dryness and depression - yet with her nuns she was always patient and loving.

You can get the sense from her quotes that she was a mystic herself. In spite of all her suffering, depression and struggles she had the fortitude to patiently continue in loving God as a wife, mother and nun. This patience comes out in her writings and prayers, and is something I find incredibly inspiring.

Her emphasis on choosing to love God no matter what, desiring union with Him, prayer as an emptying of yourself and uniting yourself to God, our own nothingness, our need for faithfulness no matter what, and ultimately love for Jesus as the reason for everything - are all things we can learn from her and be inspired by her. Being a Catholic is hard, loving God and others is also hard, but we have the grace to strengthen us to do it. No matter what happens in life, so long as we remain faithful to whatever God has called us to do, if we remain patient, gentle and loving then God will be with us.

“Yield yourself fully to God, and you will find out what form your martyrdom will take! Divine love takes its sword to the hidden recesses of our inmost soul and divides us from ourselves."

—St. Jane de Chantal

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Disclaimer

Please note. I am a Catholic layman, not a qualified theologian or philosopher. What I say and write here are my own personal thoughts and ideas, although I always try to conform my writings to the Magisterium of the Church.

I- with firm faith believe and profess everything that is contained in the symbol of faith: namely,

I believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is seen and unseen. I believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, one in Being with the Father. Through him all things were made. For us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven: By the power of the Holy Spirit, he was born of the Virgin Mary, and became man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered, died and was buried. On the third day he rose again in fulfillment of the Scriptures; he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son. With the Father and the Son he is worshipped and glorified. He has spoken through the Prophets. I believe in the one holy catholic and apostolic church. I acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. I look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.

With firm faith I believe as well everything contained in God's word, written or handed down in tradition and proposed by the church--whether in solemn judgment or in the ordinary and universal Magisterium--as divinely revealed and called for faith.

I also firmly accept and hold each and every thing that is proposed by that same church definitively with regard to teaching concerning faith or morals.

What is more, I adhere with religious submission of will and intellect to the teachings which either the Roman pontiff or the college of bishops enunciate when they exercise the authentic Magisterium even if they proclaim those teachings in an act that is not definitive.