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So Should Your Lips be Sweetened with Your God

This Rock Volume 18, Number 5   May-June 2007     Reasons for Hope By Cherie Peacock   Letters   Peasant Girl to Battlefield Commander: St. Joan of Arc and the Hundred Years’ War By Christopher Check   Henry V: Not the Branagh Version   Brutality Replaces Chivalry as Church’s Influence Wanes   Further Reading   The Church Militant or the Church Belligerent?: How Fighting for the Faith Can Destroy Charity By Fr. Paul Scalia   So Should Your Lips be Sweetened with Your God   Further Reading   Love and the Skeptic By Carl E. Olson   If We "Create Our Own Meaning," Is Love Real?   Further Reading   How Do We Know It’s the True Church? Twelve Things to Look For By Fr. Dwight Longenecker   Damascus Road Drug Dealer to Catechist By Russell L.Ford   By the Book How Do We Explain the Passover "Discrepancy"? By Tim Staples   Eyes to See What Has Art to Do with Apologetics? By Michael Schrauzer   Truth be Told The Five Most Influential Anti-Catholic Books By Robert P. Lockwood   Quick Questions   Last Writes By Karl Keating    Subscribe    Permissions

If you love God heartily, my child, you will often speak of him among your relations, household and familiar friends, and that because "the mouth of the righteous speaketh wisdom, and his tongue talketh of judgment" (Ps. 37:30). Even as the bee touches nought save honey with his tongue, so should your lips be ever sweetened with your God, knowing nothing more pleasant than to praise and bless his Holy Name,—as we are told that when St. Francis uttered the name of the Lord, he seemed to feel the sweetness lingering on his lips, and could not let it go. But always remember, when you speak of God, that he is God; and speak reverently and with devotion,—not affectedly or as if you were preaching, but with a spirit of meekness, love, and humility; dropping honey from your lips (like the bride in the Canticles) in devout and pious words, as you speak to one or another around, in your secret heart the while asking God to let this soft heavenly dew sink into their minds as they hearken. And remember very specially always to fulfill this angelic task meekly and lovingly, not as though you were reproving others, but rather winning them. It is wonderful how attractive a gentle, pleasant manner is, and how much it wins hearts.

Take care, then, never to speak of God, or those things which concern him, in a merely formal, conventional manner; but with earnestness and devotion, avoiding the affected way in which some professedly religious people are perpetually interlarding their conversation with pious words and sayings, after a most unseasonable and unthinking manner. Too often they imagine that they really are themselves as pious as their words, which probably is not the case.
—St. Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life