* * * * * (August 12, 2013: Jane de Chantal, wife, mother, and founder) * * * * * “Love and serve the LORD, your God, with all your heart and all your soul. Keep the commandments and statutes of the Lord.” In the Introduction to the book Saint Jane Frances Fremyot de Chantal: Her Exhortations, Conferences and Instructions, Katherine Bregy wrote: "In our many-sided modern life, where the activities and aims of the nun and her secular sister so often overlap, is there so great a chasm that what uplifts the one shall not uplift the other? It is good to remember that Jeanne Francoise de Chantal was a woman of the world, a successful wife and mother and administrator, before she entered the convent; that, in fact, it was the wise and loving woman who developed gradually into the loving and wise saint. Her life was one of rich experiences, on the natural as well as on the supernatural side. And so in essence – if not always in detail – her message will be found as applicable to women in the ‘world’ as to those in ‘religion’. ‘Be gentle, kind, cordial and united together, having only one heart and one soul. Bear with one another, love one another and thereby it will be known that you are true servants of God and true daughters of our Blessed father.’" (page XIV) From a talk given by Elizabeth Stopp, “A Portrait of a Saint: Twenty-Five Years On,” reprinted with the second edition of her book Madame de Chantal: Portrait of a Saint, she remarked: “So if I were now to try and summarize what I see more clearly about St. Chantal, and would therefore do my best to emphasize after this lapse of time, I would try to carry the factors in the earlier life of Jeanne Francoise, Baronne de Chantal, more fully into the analysis of the later life and of Mere de Chantal, who, as I pointed out before, did always continue to sign herself ‘Jeanne Francoise Fremyot.’ This would lead me to even more emphasis on her quite astonishing capacity for development in every succeeding state of life, and her success, by the grace of God, in the intimate and painful process of ‘unselving,’ as Gerard Manley Hopkins called it, of cooperating creatively with this self-reduction, while becoming all the time more fully, more truly, herself in our Lord’s image. The development and transformation, if you like, of her motherliness, in the mothering and nourishing of the soul and personality of those who were prepared to give themselves unreservedly to God in religious profession, or in the family situation in marriage, or in the loneliness of widowhood. She allowed her rather complex self-regarding in the life of prayer to be reduced to childlike simplicity, her own great power of love to be gradually transformed into willing only God’s will and loving Him alone.” There is so much that we can glean from the example of this remarkable woman. She was a devoted wife and mother. She served God with all her heart and with all her soul as best she could in a variety of vocations in a very practical, down-to-earth way. As a disciple of Jesus she learned the importance of both following and leading. She continued to grow and develop throughout the course of her entire life, with all the twists and turns contained therein. Above all, what enabled her to become a loving and wise saint was her commitment to being a wise and loving woman. How can we emulate her way of loving and serving the Lord today?
Posted on: Mon, 12 Aug 2013 12:00:00 +0000
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