24 January 2018
Memorial of Saint Francis de Sales, Bishop and Doctor of the Church
Ailments can be exterior to your soul, such as a need for money, or a feud with a friend, or a problem with your job. Ailments can also be interior to your soul, such as depression or bewilderment or temptation. In either case, the more you love God, the more you will look to Him for deliverance from these ailments. Meanwhile, you will strive for freedom calmly and deliberately, like a surgeon operating.
On the other hand, the more you love yourself over and against God, the more you will seek deliverance by your own hand, or by the hand of some other flawed human being whom you happen to fancy. Idiocy! This is why you are so impatient and troubled. You and every human being like you have failed before and will fail again. This is why distress and anxiety plague you. This is why you sometimes despair of ever being freed from your ailments, whether interior or exterior.
On this topic, St. Francis de Sales, whose feast we celebrate today, had this to say: “This unresting anxiety is the greatest evil which can happen to the soul, sin only excepted.” His point is that our desire to be freed from some evil or to attain to some good must not go unregulated. Otherwise, our soul will be tossed and torn by anxiety and distress, making it more and more vulnerable to temptation. The great saint’s solution? “Whensoever you urgently desire to be delivered from any evil, or to attain some good thing, strive above all else to keep a calm, restful spirit,–steady your judgment and will, and then go quietly and easily after your object, taking all fitting means to attain thereto.”