If we look back on the people in our lives who have helped us most in gradually becoming who God desires us to be, I think we will find that the most meaningful interactions were those of true personal presence. Being present to another person carries with it the unspoken but palpable affirmation that, simply stated, “It is good that you exist!” This is the starting point of love.
Think of the love communicated by looking at another person as they reveal something of themselves to you, no matter how trivial. Mutual shared attention, personal presence, and empathy are the building blocks of meaningful human relationships, and these relationships not only give meaning to this life, but also give us a window into the life to come, when we will be swept up in a constant exchange of love. Beneath the surface of a mutually attentive gaze flows the inexpressible but innermost truth and irreducible depth of human beings from one to another.
This is the power of the “heart-to-heart” spirituality handed on to us from St. Francis de Sales and St. Jane de Chantal. “Heart-to-heart” is not a flimsy or sentimental idea, but a real description of how our whole self—attention, affection, memory, and all the rest— comes together in connecting to God and others. This giving and receiving of ourselves transforms us, so much so that St. Francis wrote to his friend Antoine Favre, “I hold you for a friend without equal…and I feel I have become yours, to the point of believing myself another man than myself.”
This view of the spiritual life has some important effects for how we look at our own lives. So many of us look at making progress in our spiritual lives as always “learning to do better” and making our behavior closer to the ideal we strive for.
Salesian Spirituality would rather say that what growth really means is to increase our ability for mutual personal presence. We don’t just become self-sufficient and autonomous—instead, we find our own happiness increasingly bound up with the happiness of others. (Even the current research on the mirror neuron system gives a hint of how we actually “feel” other people’s suffering. This should be very much at home in Salesian Spirituality —a full human life includes our capacity to share life with others in impactful ways). The path to discovering ourselves runs, in a sense, through the very minds and hearts of those to whom we give ourselves in love and trust. Only these relationships of mutual care and unconditional regard can draw us out of ourselves and open us up to new vistas of meaning in life. The adventure of real transformation begins with our first act of consenting to see and let ourselves be seen by others.
Mr. Matthew Trovato, OSFS
Seminarian for the Oblates of St. Francis de Sales
