Excerpt from Sainte Chantal a Study in Vocation
One of the things that gives me most distress, said Ste. Chantal in her old age, is to note how many persons talk about prayer and inward experiences and special graces, and how few of the practice of goodness and of definite self denial. The soul that is intent on the enjoyment of interior quiet and on soaring among angelic visions, rather than on complete surrender to obedience and poverty, does not know what it means to imitate Christ. 2 Touches such as these - and her letters and recorded sayings give many other instances - reveal the type of woman that guided and con trolled the contemplative Order of the Visitation for more than thirty years. She had a horror of all vain presumption in Spiritual things, and could not take to herself the comfort that might have lightened her long period of inward anguish, because to do so would be to assume that she had a place among a chosen few whom God has set apart. Further, it may be said that there is no stage of her career at which, consciously, she enjoyed success, or was, even momentarily, satisfied.
The human and intimate side of Jeanne de Chantal's life is a hindrance to clear comprehension of her; in S. Teresa.
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