Even though I attended St. Francis de Sales High School in the late sixties, it wasn’t until I came under the warm magnetic field of the Oblates in the 1980s that I began to fall in love with the Saint Francis de Sales, the Gentleman Saint.
I had always loved his famous quote, “There is nothing so strong as gentleness, nothing so gentle as true strength.” It had hung in the music room of my grade school, named after another great saint, Saint Vincent de Paul. But after working with the Oblates, who had blessedly come to Denver, CO for a decade, I could see how deeply true it is that true strength reveals itself in gentleness, forgiveness and, sometimes, laughter so uncontrollable you nearly fall off the table.
Decades later at our fiftieth high school reunion, several of us gathered our favorite quotes of Francis de Sales and read them together at our Mass. I wasn’t the only one who had come to know and love him in the intervening years.
This past year has brought still more opportunities to know him. With the Double Salesian Year, commemorating the 400th anniversary of the death of Saint Francis de Sales, and the 450th anniversary of the birth of Saint Jane de Chantal, came Pope Francis’ Apostolic Letter, Totum Amoris Est. Yes, even the most superficial dive into the life and writings of Saint Francis reveals a Christian for whom EVERYTHING pertains to love.
The section entitled “Wind and Wings,” right in the middle of the letter touched me to my toes. I’d never heard of an “apodan,” apparently named by Aristotle, but that little short-legged bird owns my heart now. These little birds, Saint Francis tells us, have such weak and short legs that “it’s as if they did not even have them.” If they fall to the ground they have to stay there because their little legs don’t give them the traction they need to get a running start to take wing.
So they’re completely dependent on a gust of wind to pick them up. Once airborne, they must be ready to flap their wings so that the thrust of wind will continue to propel them higher and higher. Eventually, they’ll be flying on their own but only because they’ve learned to surrender to being helpless on the ground until the wind finds them and sends them to the skies.
I’ve given the word “surrender” a lot of thought these past many years. None of us lives a long (and grateful) life without losing a lot. One of the more intense losses for me was my generally good health, which tilted precariously in the wrong direction in 2007 when a staph infection tried to kill me. Within the space of thirty minutes, I went from getting ready to go to lunch with a friend, to screaming my lungs out in the emergency room.
There began my descent into the valley of the shadow of death. The infection had found its way into my prosthetic hip, which had to be removed, and replaced with a spacer until antibiotics cleared the infection. Twice during those interminable months, the EMTs arrived at my house to pick me up and take me in the ambulance to the emergency room because the pain was more than I could stand.
Like the little apodan, I was utterly helpless to assist them in lifting me. I learned to trust that I would be lifted carefully, with absolutely no help from me. Likewise, in the months of my recovery, my life or death was completely out of my hands. I was forced to surrender my life to God.
It's surrender that saves us. Surrender - kenosis - takes an immense amount of grace. But consider the apodan, says Saint Francis de Sales. It has the grace to wait for the wind (and we would say Spirit) to lift it up. It’s in surrender that we learn to Live Jesus.
Kathy McGovern
Kathy McGovern is a well-known scripture teacher in the Denver area. She publishes a weekly scripture column for parish bulletins. Subscribe at www.thestoryandyou.com
She has also authored a new Stations of the Cross book for Twenty-Third Publications, Walking with Jesus on the Way to Calvary: Praying the Stations of the Cross with Perseverance, available here.
