Oh how happy are they who keep their hearts open to holy inspirations! For these are never wanting to any, in so far as they are necessary for living well and devoutly, according to each one’s condition of life, or for fulfilling holily the duties of his profession. For as God, by the ministry of nature, furnishes every animal with the instincts which are necessary for its preservation and the exercise of its natural powers, so if we resist not God’s grace, he bestows on every one of us the inspirations necessary to live, to work, and to preserve our spiritual life…When we are at a loss, and human help fails us in our perplexities, God then inspires us, nor will he permit us to err, as long as we are humbly obedient.
— St. Frances de Sales, Treatise on the Love of God
My spiritual director steered me towards St. Frances de Sales and I’ve come to love his writings very much. His most approachable (and probably most well-known) book is Introduction to the Devout Life, which is very much like it sounds: a practical how-to on cultivating holiness regardless of your station in life. How, someone wrote him, can someone who is not a cleric or part of a religious order hope to become holy? Can a soldier, merchant, or housewife aspire to saintliness?
Of course, wrote St. Frances. We take that sort of thing - the universal call to holiness - almost for granted these days, but it wasn’t necessarily the case for a lot of people who tended to see The Church as the place where holy people went, and The World for the rest, sort of schlepping along as best as can.
St. Frances responded to this letter with the Introduction, which lays out the case for attaining holiness wherever you happen to be, and more importantly, lays out the ways to do it. It is a very practical little book, though obviously bits and pieces are very much a product of it’s early 17th century setting. It is a gentle little book, and it served me very well for spiritual reading. I finished it quickly, but returned to it a second time. Ordination was drawing closer and I was preparing to make a general confession beforehand; St. Frances de Sales was an enormous help.
His other major work, Treatise on the Love of God is full of the same sorts of insights, but is a pretty dense work. I’ve been consuming it one chapter at a time as part of my morning holy hour and am about two-thirds of the way through it now. If you only read one thing from the spiritual father of the Salesians, make it the Introduction, but if you want to spend time studying the love of God from a spiritual master, take a run at the the Treatise, but festina lente. Make haste slowly.