Learning and Living Devotion
This morning, my wife and I began a prayerful reading of Introduction to the Devout Life , together. In the first sentence of the text, St. Francis de Sales defines devotion as "a virtue most pleasing to God's Majesty." The saint undertook to write the treatise so that others could grow in this most important virtue, and it is for the same reason that my wife and I seek to read and pray through it. St. Francis introduced the virtue of devotion by noting that there is "only one true devotion," but that there are many "false and empty" counterfeits. Yet, he continues, humans color devotion according to their own "passions and fancies." In a scathing manner, he writes that "many persons clothe themselves with certain outward actions connected with holy devotion and the world believes that they are truly devout and spiritual whereas they are in fact nothing but copies and phantoms of devotion." Ouch! As I read that single para...