Be Who You Are

Be who you are and be that well.

St. Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life

The Commemoration Day for St. Francis De Sales 

(and my birthday!)

“The measure of love is to love without measure.”

     “Have patience with all things, but chiefly have patience with yourself.  Do not lose courage in considering your own imperfections, but instantly set about remedying them—every day begin the task anew.”

     “Be patient with everyone, but above all with yourself… Do not be disheartened by your imperfections, but always rise up with fresh courage.”

     While some of you are familiar with the ideas of using Saints as role models-be they Eastern or Western- as examples of the spiritual life, looking up any of them who are connected to your birthday, might hold an inspirational message for you.

     I have always found solace and inspiration from “The other Francis” in the Catholic tradition.  Saint Francis de Sales is considered to be the patron saint of writers, and the one who founded the practice of offering spiritual direction and guidance to others. So, it has been a good fit for me! 

If the idea of a saint is too foreign a concept, then any noble and outstanding people who would be ethical and spiritual examples who were born on your same day can easily suffice!

A Birthday Reflection

     Life, as a whole, remains an unfinished process of risking and finding, reaching and discovering, learning and experiencing all the ways that make us human and that make life meaningful. Each year renews itself as a sacred invitation to wholeness.

     The lifelong journey towards authenticity and embodiment of divine principles requires that we receive wisdom from our experiences and that we learn active compassion for life’s challenges, tests, and trials.

     As both an invitation and a challenge, I need to assure myself daily that we are capable of taking an expansive view of our lives, and not get bogged down in details, isolated events, or petty emotional wrangling. Life is too short to allow one’s ego to triumph, or for the cares of the world to obscure the light, life, and love that comes from the many sources of divine dialogue: With nature, friends, pets, lovers, in soup kitchens, or standing up for justice. My goal is to learn how best to live fully in this soulful dialogue and with a full heartfelt correspondence between what is the Holy for me.

     Each year, when I spin the wheel of life, I take another step in the soul’s deathless journey, and I move ever so slightly forward in the process of greater self-discovery.

     This fearless inventory, if you will, finds its highest purpose in learning how best to live from God/Spirit perspective, so that is fully infused into my life, and finds its rightful residence, its sacred place, at the very core of my being.

An Aspirational Ideal:

Eugene Kennedy – On the Person Who is Living by The Spirit

     “The person living by The Spirit, gives time, energy, and all the other human responses that are appropriate to our needs– but does not make us feel as if we owe them anything. He/She may not seem pious by older standards, may not, in other words, have the mannerisms, or otherworldly looks of a supposedly holy people.

     That is all to the good, because it helps others to recognize their own possibilities and frees them from feeling that being good demands more than being fully themselves.

     He/She does not work miracles, talk in tongues, or seem in any way to need what we might, with kindness, call ‘sensational demonstrations’ of his relationship to The Spirit. 

A contemporary holy person does not make you feel that he/she has plans for you as much as they help you to discover your own (plans for yourself)

     He/She does not have all the answers for all your questions; in fact, he/she is just discovering many of the right questions himself/herself. He/She helps us ask these questions and then stays with us as we search out our own answers.

    At times, the most he/she can do is to make the hard questions bearable enough through his/her commitment to us as we try to answer them. 

     There are saints all around us in the world, loving it and redeeming it with the gift they make of themselves in the service of others.

     Sometimes, as it has been true of saints for centuries, they are in trouble with authorities, and sometimes they are involved in great controversy. That is because they have the most distinguished mark that a holy person can possess: – The mark of being alive both to eternal truths and to temporal affairs.”