Hi friends,
I hope that your holiday season was peaceful. I got to see some family, but I also had other family visits disrupted by the new covid variant floating around (like most everyone else, it seems). It was a quieter Christmas than I expected, but that’s okay. December, on the whole, was good. I finished book revisions, I’m enjoying spending a lot of extra time with my kids during their winter break, I have somehow managed to cobble together this email despite all the extra kid time, and we’re happy and healthy and hoping that 2022 brings some new blessings.
“Great opportunities to please God come along rarely, but turning life's ordinary deeds into moments of great praise to God can happen frequently.” - St. Francis de Sales
I’ve spent the last year and change writing a book in which saints feature heavily, reading about the lives of the saints and studying their writings. As I’ve explored the communion of saints, there are a handful I’ve become unexpectedly close to. One of them is Francis de Sales, a French nobleman-turned-priest from the late 16th century. Being the oldest son of one of the noblest families of Savoy, Francis was expected to become a magistrate, and so he received an excellent education, attending the best schools and taking lessons in dancing and riding and fencing. He didn’t live up to his family’s expectations, though. Following a personal crisis of despair, he dedicated his life to God with a vow of chastity and decided to become a priest rather than follow the path of an advantageous marriage and political-military career which his father had set forth for him.
Francis was particularly known for his spiritual insight, and people wrote to him often asking for counsel. He responded to these many letters with individual attention, essentially performing spiritual direction via correspondence, and some of these letters were collected in his book Introduction to the Devout Life. I started reading this book during Advent, and was struck by how practical Sales’ spiritual advice is. Salesian spirituality is characterized by a sort of inspired common sense. Francis believed that holiness was a vocation for all, not just clerics and people called to religious life, and Introduction to the Devout Life is particularly written for “those who are living in towns, at court, in their own households, and whose calling obliges them to a social life.” He also believed that the devout life is not separate from the duties of one’s life but is in fact lived out through those duties. As Francis tells us, “In practicing any virtue, it is well to choose that which is most according to our duty, rather than most according to our taste.” There’s a difference between the virtues we would like to be called to and the virtues to which we are actually called, and we reach heaven by being honest about the difference.
I started reading Introduction to the Devout Life during Advent, but I didn’t actually finish reading it. Every year I want Advent to be quiet and peaceful and prayerful and every year it is the exact opposite of that. I am, as Francis de Sales said, obliged to a social life. I have two school-age children and a very large extended family and December is never peaceful. To take an example from the Gospels, it is much less Mary and much more Martha: cooking meals, wrapping gifts, driving family to and from the airport, making the beds and stripping the sheets and making the beds again as people come and go, stretching the limits of my introverted self’s sociability. This year’s stress is compounded by covid: worrying about family members who have gotten sick, watching my kids for symptoms of illness, trying to find enough at-home tests for everyone. As I write this, I’m sitting by the Christmas tree in my living room at 5 am, a muscle in my neck twitching uncontrollably from the sheer stress of the last week.
I love being a mother and I love being a wife, but I didn’t spend my childhood assuming that vocation for myself. As a teenager, I spent at least as much time contemplating religious life as I did contemplating marriage. I definitely made the right choice for myself; I can’t imagine my life without my husband and children. They lead me to holiness and joy and pleasure and I love them beyond all reckoning. But I do feel like I have a temperament that is well-suited to religious life, and I truly don’t think I would have been unhappy as a cloistered nun. A life of quiet and secret devotion – a life of prayer – still holds deep appeal for me. Sometimes I still feel pulled to that kind of virtue even though, as Francis de Sales reminds me, motherhood requires virtue of a different kind. I sometimes want to look for holiness in places that don’t match the needs of my life, hence the yearly frustration that accompanies Advent.
Shortly before Thanksgiving this year I read a book called The Domestic Monastery. It’s a slim, pretty volume; I was able to sit down and read the whole thing in less than an hour. From the title, I thought it would be about how to make one’s home more like a monastery, which sounds like a dream. It turns out that it wasn’t about that at all. It was about all the ways in which domestic life is already monastic, less a how-to guide and more a love letter to the domestic life. The home is like a monastery, removed from the world. Our children are like the monastic bells; their peals pull us into charity. The domestic life is also the work of love: “Raising small children, if it does with love and generosity, will do for you exactly what private prayer does.” This is not to say that we don’t all need private prayer, but it is to say that private prayer is not the only place we can encounter God. The book reminded me of Francis de Sales and his ideas about the devout life being accessible for everyone. I can’t stop to pray five times a day like a nun, but I can stop to help my children a hundred times a day like a good mother, and that’s almost the same thing.
One of the tarot cards I’ve been spending a lot of time with lately is the Eight of Pentacles. In my many conversations I’ve had with folks about tarot, I’ve gotten the impression that the suit of Pentacles is not anyone’s favorite. It deals with themes of mundanity and the everyday and what it means to live in a body. It’s about the stuff of life that we often find boring. But I find the Eight of Pentacles to be so aspirational. I have a theory that it’s one of the most mystical cards in the deck. The Waite-Smith’s depiction is of a craftsman (not an artist, a distinction which is important) performing his work. It’s so simple, so boring, and so very holy. It is work, but it is also prayer. It reminds me of this quote from Rowan William’s book The Way of St Benedict: “. . .all of time can be sanctified – that is, that the time we may instinctively consider to be unproductive, waiting or routine activity, is indispensable to our growth into Christian and human maturity.” The Eight of Pentacles reminds me that the contemplative life is not separate from the everyday life, that they are in fact the same.
I’m not big on New Year’s resolutions. By January 1st I’m usually wiped out by the holidays and more ready to climb into bed for a few weeks than change my life. I think we ask too much of ourselves during the winter. We are animals and we are made to rest during the cold months and so midwinter doesn’t feel like the best time to make big life changes. But I’m starting the year with these ideas in mind: Francis de Sales’ ideas that the spiritual life is for everyone, imagining my life as a domestic monastery, putting myself in the place of the man in the Eight of Pentacles who contemplatively crafts his wares. I don’t want to change my life but I want to find more holiness in the places where I don’t always think to look for it, to find virtue and eternity both in the smallest moments of each day.
This is a lovely synchronicity. I started my day with a meditation from the Celtic Daily Prayer Book: "I ask not to fly from the world but to be involved with the world. I am in the world but also in the presence..." Like you I have sometimes felt the call of a more cloistered, contemplative life, but I am called to be here, involved in the world. And - perhaps not coincidentally - the Pentacles are my favourite suit! Happy new year to you and your family, I am so looking forward to your book.
I just found your newsletter and have been consuming it voraciously. This post has given me so much to think about. I’ve felt aspirational toward the Eight of Pentacles myself - a desire to gain peace and serenity through the daily routine of good work. The idea of the domestic monastery brings a new dimension of value to the day to day of raising small children for me - I may pick up the book. Thank you for the lovely writing and wonderfully fresh perspective.