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Contradictions, sickness, scruples, spiritual aridity, and all the inner and outward torments are the chisel with which God carves his statues for paradise. —St. Alphonsus Liguori (1696–1787)
For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. —Romans 8:38-39 (RSV)
As a spiritual seeker, you surely have bumped into popular gurus who guarantee an end to all suffering if you embrace their teaching. “Make these four agreements,” says one, “and you will insulate yourself against adversity.” Another says, “Focus on the power of now and still the persistent, evil voice of your thoughts. Then, you will never again experience pain or hardship.” “Pray this arcane prayer religiously,” says a third, “and it will ensure your comfort.” The purveyors of these promises package their alluring messages attractively, and the books that convey them ascend to the top of the best-seller lists.
If you have tried their recipes, you may have discovered that for some reason they do not work for you. No matter how diligently you may keep the agreements, or try to focus on the now, or repeat the prayer formula, you still suffer trials, hardships, and pain. You may wonder why the magic of the gurus doesn’t work for you. You may have concluded that somehow you missed their disclaimers that said you do not meet the requirements necessary to receive their promised benefits.
But the reason that these popular guarantees against suffering fail has nothing to do with you. They cannot deliver their promises because they are true neither to the human condition nor to authentic spirituality. A quick survey of family and friends should be enough to convince anyone that suffering is a normal part of life. And even a casual study of the experience of the saints should persuade us that the serious pursuit of the spiritual life does not eliminate suffering but may even increase it. The saints did not try to shun adversity, but rather they embraced it as a way of drawing nearer to God. They did not allow a preoccupation with the present to blind them to eternal realities. They realized that the cost of giving themselves to God was high, and that trials and troubles were included in the price. The saints set their hearts on perseverance, not on avoidance of hardship. “Best make suffering a good friend,” they say, “for it will be your lifelong companion.”
Imagine a lovely woman who combined the organizational abilities of an Elizabeth Dole, the charismatic charm of an Oprah Winfrey, and the practical spirituality of a Mother Teresa, and you will create a living portrait of St. Jane de Chantal. A marvelous and gifted person, Jane excelled in each of a succession of callings—wife and mother, widow and single parent, and founder and spiritual director of a religious community.
She was madly in love with her soldier-husband, Christophe, Baron de Rabutin-Chantal. For nine years, from 1592 to 1601, Madame de Chantal devoted herself to him, administering Bourbilly, his large estate in central France and raising their four children. Widowed in 1601, Jane committed herself for the next nine years to remaining single, doubling as mom and dad for her children, managing her staff and farmlands, and all the while exploring ways of opening herself more fully to God. Then, under the guidance of her mentor and friend Francis de Sales (1567–1622), she gave her heart more fully to God. And in 1610, in collaboration with Francis, she founded the Sisters of the Visitation of Mary, a community of nuns that divided their time between prayer and serving the poor and the sick.
All of Jane’s experience and success in the eighteen years of her first two callings as a wife and widow prepared her for her third as a founder of a religious order. During the three decades before her death in 1641, she established and governed eighty-seven Visitation convents by appointing gifted women to lead them and crisscrossing France in arduous journeys to encourage the nuns in person. Appropriately, Jane became known as Mother de Chantal as she tenderly mothered her sisters as her own daughters. She showered them with affection and personal attention. She corrected them with gentleness, freely forgave their faults, and gave them plenty of space and time to improve at their own pace.
In her letters and talks, Jane communicated a common-sense approach to daily Christian living that she derived from the teaching of Francis de Sales and her own experience. The hallmarks of her guidance were the innocence, humility, and simplicity that come from giving yourself entirely to God and loving those closest to you with gentleness, forbearance, and service. In my view, Jane de Chantal’s refreshing idealism and evergreen practicality make her a leading candidate to be recognized as a doctor of the church, a designation of respect bestowed only on the very best teachers and exemplars of Christian virtue. She would be a worthy companion to Teresa of Avila (1515–1582), Catherine of Siena (1347–1380), and Thérèse of Lisieux (1873–1897), the only other women honored with that title.
St. Jane de Chantal was an extraordinarily successful woman, and our appreciation of her greatness expands exponentially when her achievement is viewed in relief against the trials that dogged her throughout her life. She endured loss, grief, harassment, bad spiritual direction, scruples, doubt, mental anguish, slander, impoverishment, opposition, and more—each serving as a chisel that chipped away her selfish attachments and shaped her in holiness. I admire St. Jane de Chantal for her strengths, but I admire her even more for her weaknesses, from which, with the aid of God’s grace, she carved her strengths by sheer perseverance.
A full-length biography would be required to catalog in detail the record of Jane de Chantal’s trials and temptations. In this portrait of her endurance, I want only to highlight several episodes that show how her spiritual stamina carried her through terrible times. I have chosen to tell about her response to the death of her husband, the persecutions she suffered as a widow, and the doubts and temptations that plagued her after she founded her religious order. I believe that those who face similar trials can find spiritual strength by reflecting on Jane’s behavior and imitating the perseverance she showed in these difficult circumstances.
During the nine years of their marriage, Jane bore Christophe six babies, four of whom survived their birth. As a married Catholic who appreciates the blessing of sexual love, I am thankful that the church honors Jane de Chantal as a saintly wife, for she and Christophe had a deep love for each other, and obviously enjoyed its intimate sexual expression.
Christophe served as a warrior in the army of King Henry IV and was often obligated to be at court or in the field. When he was home, the chateau at Bourbilly bustled with activity. Jane welcomed many guests and hosted frequent dinners and parties, all the while attending to the children and the business of the estate. But during Christophe’s long absences, she withdrew from all social involvements and lived quietly with her little family. In these calmer times, Jane began to sense somewhat vaguely an invitation to a closer relationship with God, which she expressed as prayer for her husband’s safety.
In 1601 Christophe left the king’s service and came back to stay with his family at Bourbilly. Then one day on a hunting trip, his companion’s gun accidentally fired and wounded him. Jane, who expected to deliver her fourth child at any moment, personally attended Christophe and begged God to spare him. But after nine days of agony, he died with her at his side.
Christophe’s death cleaved Jane’s heart. A part of her seemed to die with her beloved husband. She mustered her faith and courageously tried to deal with her extreme grief by busying herself with the care of her four young children and managing her chateau and lands. But her feeling of loss boiled within her. Soon she found it compounded by a swirl of doubts and temptations. “A few months after I became a widow,” she later recalled,
it pleased God that my whole being should be beset by so many different, distressing temptations that, if he in his mercy had not taken pity on me, I am sure I should have perished in the fury of that storm, for I could get almost no relief from this anxiety, and I lost so much weight that I became quite unlike myself—you would hardly have recognized me.
The temptations that hit Jane while she was mourning would crop up repeatedly throughout her life. She never specified the content of these troubling thoughts, except that she once described them as “suggestions of blasphemy, infidelity, and unbelief.”2 We know only that fear of displeasing God and doubts about faith, probably indistinct and formless, often tormented her. Later St. Francis de Sales would teach her ways of disregarding these temptations, but she was never able to shake them off completely. Now while grieving Christophe’s death, the best she could do was to endure them and get through each day, one at a time.
Amid these troubles, her growing desire for a closer relationship with God brought Jane some relief, but paradoxically it also contributed to her anxiety. “I was hearing God calling me so clearly,” she said,
that had it been possible, I would have left everything and fled into the wilderness, to embrace that vocation in the most thoroughgoing and perfect way, somewhere where I would have been well out of the way of any distractions. I really think that had it not been for the love of my four children obligating me in conscience to remain at home with them, I would have gone, alone and unaided, straight to the Holy Land, to end my days there as an anchoress.3
This alternation of doubt and faith that appeared in the early months of Jane’s widowhood became the persistent rhythm of her soul. The brightness of God’s call would dissipate the darkness of her doubts, but then, like nightfall after a beautiful day, the darkness would return. I believe that more than anything else the trial of this double-mindedness drew Jane de Chantal near to God and occasioned her holiness.
In 1602 Jane’s continuing anguish drove her to seek help from a friar who was giving spiritual direction to several of her acquaintances. This arrogant monk, whose name is unknown and thus unsullied, immediately insisted that she take him as her spiritual director and imposed on her a rigid and oppressive routine of prayer and self-denial. He also required her to vow that she would obey him, never seek direction from another, keep secret everything he told her, and never discuss her spiritual life with anyone but him. Jane had sought spiritual freedom and instead found herself under the control of a small-minded man who imprisoned her soul. Her scrupulosity magnified her pain by compelling her to obey him completely.
In the winter of 1602, another kind of imprisonment tested Jane’s endurance. Jane’s seventy-five-year-old father-in-law, Guy de Rabutin, a mean-spirited bully, demanded that she come to care for him at Monthelon, his chateau near Autun. If she refused, he threatened to remarry and disinherit her son and three daughters. So Jane steeled herself and moved her little family to his isolated and crowded house, embarking on what one contemporary biographer depicted as “a private purgatory that would last seven years.”4
Rabutin had taken one of his maids as a mistress and fathered five children by her. The woman, a roughhewn and irascible person, had assumed charge of the chateau. She delighted in telling Jane what to do and peppered her with verbal abuse. Humbly and without complaining about these trials, Jane cared for her father-in-law and the nine children. The persistence of her doubts and the burdensome spiritual regimen imposed on her by her director intensified the stress that she suffered.
Jane spent Lent of 1604 in Dijon, at the home of her father, Benigné Frémyot. He had invited her to come to hear the daily sermons of that city’s famous Lenten preacher, Francis de Sales, the bishop of Geneva. When Jane first saw Francis on Ash Wednesday, she recognized him as the man that God had promised as her spiritual director in a vision several years before. And Francis sensed that she was the woman destined to collaborate with him in founding the innovative community of nuns that was his dream.
For the next six weeks, Jane checked her eagerness to pour out her heart to Francis and engaged him only in light conversations. But as Lent progressed, her temptations to give up on God escalated to an intolerable level. By Wednesday of Holy Week, she felt compelled to seek Francis’ counsel. Although she unburdened herself to him with great relief, she did not give him a complete picture of her troubles because of concern to obey her director. In their visits and correspondence over the next several months, Francis gently encouraged Jane to abandon herself to God and pay no attention to her doubts. Finally, late in August he released her from the clutches of the friar and his onerous vows and became her spiritual director. “O Lord, how happy that day was for me!” she said. “I could feel my soul turn completely around and step right out of its inner imprisonment.”5 From that day, Jane experienced a greater measure of spiritual freedom and inner peace, but her troubling thoughts were only temporarily quieted.
Francis de Sales regarded Jane de Chantal as ideally gifted to join him in establishing a religious community of women. He appreciated her superior organizational, administrative, and leadership abilities. He esteemed her spiritual strengths even more. Simply devoted to God, brimming with love, eager to serve others, determined to persevere, merciful to a fault, eminently practical in all things—it seemed to Francis that God’s invisible hand had picked her as a leader of women and as the cofounder of his order.
By 1610 Jane was free to consider opening the first convent of the Sisters of the Visitation of Mary in Annecy. Her eldest daughter had married, her youngest had died, her daughter Françoise was to live with her at the convent, and her only son was entering the court of the French king as a page. Francis, who lived in Annecy, designed the community to accommodate women who were not able or suited for the rigors of the more traditional orders, but who felt called to embrace the religious life. Unlike other communities, the Visitation sisters were not separated from the world in a cloister, did not undertake severe forms of penance and fasting, and were not obliged to pray the Divine Office, the lengthy official prayer of the church. They prayed the shorter Office of Mary and worked to care for their poor and sick neighbors. Propelled by Jane’s charism and inspired by Francis’ guidance, within a few years the new order attracted many members and spread quickly to Moulins, Lyons, Paris, and then throughout all France. The road was not easy, for Jane had to deal constantly with poverty, inadequate housing, sickness, internal conflicts, slander, and opposition. When some complained that she was welcoming too many physically ill women into the community, she said, “What am I to do? I happen to like sick people myself.”
Jane’s hands-on maternal care for her sisters honed her skills as a spiritual teacher and director. Simplicity was the touchstone of her spirituality. She taught the Sisters of the Visitation simply to abandon themselves to God; simply to let the Holy Spirit guide them to pray without worrying about formal methods; simply to accept inconveniences and other involuntary trials and refrain from adopting severe penances; and simply to focus on God and avoid scrutinizing their problems. With her characteristic kindness, she helped many women overcome a wide variety of faults and stop being so hard on themselves. But Jane did not extend the same kindness to herself.
Early in their relationship, Francis told Jane that her temptations distressed her because she dreaded them. If she thought less of them, he said, they could not harm her. He summed up his counsel with this memorable example:
Recently I was near the beehives, and some bees flew onto my face. I wanted to raise my hand to brush them off. “No,” a peasant said to me. “Don’t be afraid and don’t touch them. They won’t sting you unless you touch them.” I trusted him, and not one stung me. Trust me, don’t fear these temptations; don’t touch them, and they won’t hurt you.
Easier said than done. Jane embraced this wisdom and applied it as best she could. But sometimes her doubts swarmed around her like bees, and while she did not touch them, their noisy buzzing still tormented her. And they buzzed louder and more menacingly as Jane aged. Through her last nine years, Jane felt that she suffered without relief from the same problems she had helped many of her sisters resolve. But she did not falter. Standing firm with the integrity of Job, she simply persevered. In 1641, the year of her death, she affirmed her unflappable decision to endure:
I’ve had these temptations for forty-one years now—do you think I’m going to give up after all this time? Absolutely not. I’ll never stop hoping in God, though he kill me, though he grind me into the dust of eternity [see Job 10:8-9]… . If I can keep from offending God in spite of all this, then I am content with whatever it may please him to allow me to suffer, even if I must suffer for the rest of my life. I want only to do it knowing that he wants me to, and that in suffering I am being faithful to him.
Unlike the gurus who offer freedom from adversity, the saints make suffering their friend. They embrace hardship as an instrument God uses to shape their character. St. Jane de Chantal’s constant trial of doubt and temptation was the chisel that cut away her self-concern and sculpted her spirituality. When hardship struck, she did not flinch but received it with a courageous faith. An observation of St. Louis de Montfort (1673–1716), a superb eighteenth-century preacher, accurately describes Jane’s endurance and points us down her spiritual path:
Don’t wince under the hammer that strikes you. Have an eye to the chisel that cuts you and to the hand that shapes you. The skillful and loving Architect may wish to make of you the chief stones of his eternal edifice and the fairest statues in his kingdom. Then let him do it. He loves you. He knows what he is doing. He has had experience. All his blows are skillful and straight and loving. He never misses, unless you cause him to by your impatience.
Think, Pray, and Act
The experience of St. Jane de Chantal shows us that trials are a normal part of the Christian life. As children of God, says St. Paul, we are coheirs with Christ as long as we share in his sufferings (see Romans 8:17). Use the following questions to identify your trials, challenges, and problems and to seek the Lord’s way to overcome them or persevere through them.
Think
Ask the following questions in order to take stock of your life circumstances. What trials am I experiencing? loss? addiction? illness? family concerns? relationship problems? other?
What have I done to eliminate the cause, solve the problem, or deal with the issue that produces each trial? pray? go to confession? get counseling or medical help? something else?
What else might I do to deal with the source of the trial?
Pray
Take a quiet half hour to pray about your trials. Read Romans 8:18-39. Notice that the Holy Spirit prays for you (verse 26) and that Jesus intercedes for you (verse 34).
Ask the Lord to help you deal with the root cause of the trial.
Ask the Lord to give you the grace to persevere in trials that he allows to continue in your life.
Act
Decide what possible steps you could take to resolve the matter behind the trials in your life.
For persistent trials, imitate the perseverance of St. Jane de Chantal. For daily strength and support, read and meditate on Romans 8:26-39.
The story of Jane de Chantal explains a lot about suffering.
While it is not the desire of our Heavenly Father to see us perish we can be sure that in all trials we have him to look up to and by so doing we become thankful and smile back at our worries and pains. It is our right to be happy in Christ