Strong Gentleness

Founders’ Day Mass: Salesian Reflection
Eliot Brody
St. Francis de Sales School, Class of 2025

Âdaptation of Eliot’s reflection given at Founders’ Day Mass

You may have seen me running around campus with the cross country team, performing on the stage with St. Francis and St. Ursula musicals, or even up there in the balcony with Singing Blue (hi guys).

I’ve benefited from my time here, especially from introducing me to St. Francis de Sales and his book The Introduction of the Devout Life. I like Chapter 8.

In this chapter he writes, “Let us go on with the company of our brethren gently, peacefully, and kindly … on no pretext whatever suffer your heart to admit anger.”

I linked this to our motto, Suaviter et fortiter - gently and strongly

Oxymoron, how is it possible to be gentle and strong? 

Gentle makes me think bunny, small and certainly not strong. Strong makes me think big, imposing.

But we’re not called to be imposing.

St. Francis is the gentleman saint, he believes a gentleman is never imposing. That’s the dichotomy we have to embody, that somehow we need to be strong, but gentle. 

What if we combined the two? We talk some about gentle strength, about being strong in ways that aren’t overt or imposing, but I want to talk about the converse.

Strong gentleness.

What St. Francis is saying in that quote (“let us go on with the company of our brethren gently, peacefully, and kindly…on no pretext whatever suffer your heart to admit anger”) is that we need to be strong in our gentleness. Firm in our conviction to never admit anger.

It’s hard.

Never admit to anger, no matter what? Seems an impossible task. How can we expect to treat our brethren gently, peacefully, kindly no matter what? Everybody gets angry.

That’s where the strength piece comes in. To avoid anger is to be gentle, and being gentle, truly gentle, requires great strength. It’s this strong gentleness that St. Francis asks us to embody.

In my personal experience, this is difficult to really do. I’ve been a boy scout for a number of years I led my troop on campouts more than a few times…Let's say I'm stronger sometimes than I am others. 

Sometimes, when a scout under my leadership doesn’t complete the task I asked, I can be gentle. I hope most of the time I’m gentle.

I’ll admit sometimes I'm not. But what makes the difference is effort.

Just like training is required to build physical strength, training is necessary to be strong in this sense.

In order to improve in situations that require strong gentleness, to perform with utmost respect for your peers, you have to try. 

So practice. Train your gentle strength.

Like St. Francis writes, “on no pretext whatever suffer your heart to admit anger.” Okay, that might be a little hardline.

But, give it a shot!

See what happens when, instead of getting all up in someone’s face after they call you dumb, you practice a little strong gentleness and let it go. This might avoid some shoving.

And while you’re at it, read The Introduction to the Devout Life. Admittedly I haven’t, but doing research for what exactly I wanted to focus on here, it’s definitely seeming like a good read that I myself will for sure look into.

Thanks everyone!