Hello, my friend. Come in. Sit down.
I'm glad you're back.
Last time, we sat together with Mary Elizabeth Lange --- a woman who built a school in the ruins of everything that was supposed to stop her. A free woman of color in antebellum Baltimore, who looked at the children no one else was teaching and said: not on my watch. I hope she stayed with you a little. She stayed with me.
Today I want to introduce you to another woman who built something the world didn't ask for. She lived two centuries before Mary Elizabeth, in the green hills of Burgundy, in a France that was tearing itself apart over religion and power and who got to decide what God wanted.
Her name was Jane Frances de Chantal.
She was a baroness. A widow. A mother. A woman who had lost more than most people lose in a lifetime --- and who somehow turned that loss into a door she held open for everyone else who had nowhere left to go.
She is the patron saint of forgotten people.
I think you're going to understand why.
I was there the day she closed up Bourbilly.
I want you to picture it --- not as something romantic or noble. It wasn't. It was a cold, exhausting, heartbreaking piece of work, and Jane Frances de Chantal did it largely alone, because that is what was required of her.
Bourbilly was not just a house. It was a castle --- a working feudal estate in the Burgundy countryside, and everything that implies. There were household staff who had served her husband's family for years. A steward who managed the accounts and the tenant rolls. Kitchen workers. Stable hands who knew every horse by name. Groundskeepers. A laundress. Women who had sat with her through her pregnancies, through the births that went wrong, through the grief that followed. These were not employees in the modern sense. They were people whose lives were woven into the life of the estate. And now she had to unwind all of that.
The tenant farmers were perhaps the hardest. They had been paying rent to her --- to Jane, specifically, because she had managed the estate accounts with a skill that had earned her real respect in the district. Now she had to tell them that the arrangement was changing. That she didn't know exactly what came next. That she was sorry.
I watched her go through her husband's things.
I won't dwell on that. But I want you to know it happened. A hunting accident had taken him four years earlier, and she had kept moving because the children needed her to keep moving, and the estate needed her to keep moving, and grief does not get to stop a baroness in early seventeenth century France. But now, closing the rooms, folding the things that still smelled like his life --- that was its own kind of reckoning.
She was twenty-eight years old when he died. She was thirty-one now, packing up everything they had built together, because her widowed father-in-law had written a letter. He was old. He was demanding. He lived at Monthelon, a day's journey away, and he wanted her there. He had made it clear that refusing was not a real option.
I don't think she was serene about it. I think she was tired. I think she was lonely in the specific way that competent people get lonely --- because everyone around her needed something from her and no one was asking how she was doing. And I think, underneath the fatigue and the grief, there was something that felt uncomfortably close to anger. Not at any one person. Just at the shape of her life. At the letter that arrived and had to be obeyed. At the fact that a woman of her ability and her care had no category in this world except widow and daughter-in-law and mother and obligation.
She locked the gate at Bourbilly and she left.
I stood there for a while after she was gone, looking at the closed shutters, the quiet courtyard, the dogs that had been rehomed to a neighboring estate. A living thing, put into suspension.
I have seen that moment many times in history. A door closing on everything a person built. And I have learned to watch carefully for what comes next.
Because sometimes --- not always, but sometimes --- the person walking away from that closed door is carrying something they don't know they have yet.
Jane Frances de Chantal was carrying something.
Let me tell you who she was before all of that.
Jane Frances de Chantal was born in Dijon, in January of 1572, the daughter of Bénigne Frémyot, a royalist president of the Parliament of Burgundy. Her family was educated, well-connected, and serious about both faith and civic life. Her brother André would eventually become the Archbishop of Bourges. Her uncle was a prior in a monastic order. These were people who understood that religion and responsibility were not separate things.
Her mother died when Jane was eighteen months old.
I mention that not as a footnote, but as a fact that shaped her. She grew up in a household run by her father, educated by her father, formed by a man who apparently did an unusually good job of it. She developed into --- and I am not just reaching for a compliment here --- a genuinely capable human being. Clear-headed. Warm. Possessed of an inner authority that the world around her didn't quite have a name for.
She turned down two suitors before, at twenty, she married Christophe de Rabutin, Baron de Chantal. They moved to Bourbilly and built a life. Hunting parties for the neighboring nobles. A household to manage. Children --- though the first two died shortly after birth, a grief that would have been familiar to almost every woman of her time, and no less devastating for that. Her older sister Margaret died, and Jane took in Margaret's three small children alongside her own. She had a son and three daughters of her own who survived. She managed the estate accounts. She cared for difficult neighbors. She dispensed alms. She nursed the sick in the district.
She was, by any measure, running things. And she was good at it.
Then came 1601. A hunting accident. Christophe was shot by a friend who mistook him for game. He died after nine days. Jane was twenty-eight years old, with four children and an estate and a grief she would carry the rest of her life.
She took a vow of chastity. She put the estate in order. She went to her father's house in Dijon for a time, because he asked. Then back to Bourbilly. Then the letter from her father-in-law arrived, and she closed up the castle and went to Monthelon, because he asked. She spent years in that arrangement --- managing his difficult household, raising her children, doing what was required.
And then, in 1604, her father invited her to come back to Dijon. There was a bishop visiting from Geneva, he said. He was preaching the Lenten sermons at the Sainte Chapelle. Worth hearing.
The bishop's name was Francis de Sales.
I was at those sermons. I watched Jane listen. And I watched Francis notice that she was listening in a particular way --- the way people listen when someone is finally saying something they have been waiting years to hear.
They became friends. Not a romance --- something rarer than that. A genuine spiritual friendship between two people of equal seriousness, which in 1604 was not exactly a common arrangement between a male bishop and a female baroness. Francis became her spiritual director. He told her to stop being so hard on herself. He told her to sleep seven or eight hours a night. He told her to avoid scruples and anxiety, because those things, he said, hinder a soul more than almost anything else.
She listened. And she began to change --- or rather, to become more fully what she had always been.
The idea of a new kind of religious community began to grow between them. Something different. Something that didn't require women to be young and healthy and unencumbered. Something that would go out into the world rather than turn inward behind walls.
In 1610 --- after years of correspondence, after her daughter Marie Aymée married Francis's younger brother Bernard, after more deaths and more relocations and more of the ordinary devastation that life in seventeenth century France delivered without apology --- Jane gathered with two other women at a small house Francis had purchased on the shore of Lake Annecy.
On Trinity Sunday, the sixth of June, 1610, the Congregation of the Visitation of Holy Mary was canonically established.
Jane had given her wealth to her children before she came. The circumstances of the little community were, as one account puts it, rather poor.
She didn't seem to mind.
I want you to understand what it meant to open that door.
In 1610, if a woman in France wanted to give her life to God in a formal, recognized way, the path was narrow and the requirements were strict. You entered an existing order. You were cloistered --- meaning you stayed inside, behind walls, away from the world. You adopted practices of austerity: fasting, physical mortification, long hours of silent prayer in the cold. And you had to be healthy enough to sustain all of that. Young enough. Strong enough. Unencumbered enough --- no small children, no complicated family obligations, no chronic illness dragging at you.
The system was not designed to be cruel. It was designed to be serious. But the effect was that a very particular kind of woman got in, and everyone else was turned away at the door.
Jane Frances de Chantal had watched that door her whole life. She had wanted to enter religious life herself and been told to wait, to defer, to attend to her obligations first. She knew what it felt like to be assessed and found --- not quite right. Not quite fitting the available category.
So when she and Francis de Sales began to imagine the Visitation Order, they imagined it differently. Radically differently, for its time.
The women who came to that little house on Lake Annecy were not the ones the other orders had accepted. They were the ones who had been turned away. Too old. Too frail. Carrying illnesses that made the austere life impossible. Some of them had tried other doors and been told no. And here was Jane, opening a different one.
When people criticized her for this --- and they did, because this is what people do --- she said something I have never forgotten. She said: What do you want me to do? I like sick people myself. I'm on their side.
I want to sit with that for a moment, because it is easy to read it as a polite defense and miss what it actually is. She is not saying I tolerate sick people or I make room for sick people out of Christian charity. She is saying I am on their side. That is identification. That is solidarity. That is a woman who understood, from the inside, what it means to be the person the system doesn't have a category for.
The order was also unusual in another way. For its first eight years, the Visitation women engaged in active public ministry. They went out. They visited the sick in the community, the poor, the homebound. This was not the model. The model was enclosure --- stay in, pray, be holy within your walls. What Jane and Francis were proposing was something closer to what we might now recognize as social work, wrapped in contemplative prayer.
The institutional Church looked at this and grew uncomfortable. When a second house was established in Lyon, the local archbishop made clear that the active model was not going to be permitted. Francis de Sales, to his credit, did not abandon the community --- but he did negotiate a compromise. The Visitation would become cloistered. It would follow the Rule of Saint Augustine. The women would stay inside.
Jane accepted this. She submitted, because that was what the moment required and she understood the terrain she was navigating. But I watched her accept it, and I want to tell you: the spirit of what she had built did not change. The welcome remained. The door remained open to whoever the other doors had closed on. The austerities stayed gentle. Francis wrote his great Treatise on the Love of God for these women --- a book that is, at its heart, an argument that tenderness is not a weakness in the spiritual life. That God is not best approached through severity. That the soul opens, like everything else, toward warmth.
That was the theology of the Visitation, even if no one called it that.
Not rigor. Not exclusion. Not the performance of a holiness that only the strong can sustain.
Gentleness. Welcome. I'm on their side.
In a religious landscape that was, in 1610, tearing itself apart --- Catholics and Huguenots, wars of religion that would eventually kill Jane's own son --- this was not a small thing to say. It was, in its quiet way, a different kind of answer to the question of what God requires of us.
Let me tell you what she built.
When Jane Frances de Chantal died in December of 1641, at sixty-nine years old, in the Visitation convent at Moulins, there were eighty-six houses. When she was canonized in 1767 --- a hundred and twenty-six years after her death --- there were a hundred and sixty-four. Each one a community. Each one a door that opened toward the people the other doors had not.
That is not nothing. That is a life's work made visible in stone and timber and human presence across the length and breadth of France.
But I want to talk about something harder to count.
Jane outlived almost everyone she loved. Her husband, gone at thirty-one. Her sister. Two of her infants. Her youngest daughter Charlotte, dead of illness. Her son Celse Bénigne, killed fighting in the religious wars on the Île de Ré --- a war between Christians, which is its own particular kind of grief. Two of her three surviving daughters. Francis de Sales, her great friend and spiritual anchor, died in 1622, when the order was twelve years old and Jane was fifty. She kept going. Vincent de Paul became her spiritual director after Francis died, and he later said that he had never met a soul of greater strength.
I believe him.
There is something I have noticed across the centuries, watching people build things that last. The ones who endure are rarely the ones who started from a position of ease. They tend to be the ones who have lost something --- who know, from the inside, what it means to have the ground shift beneath you. Who have stood in the cold outside a closed door. Who have been handed a category they didn't choose and had to find their way out of it.
Jane Frances de Chantal knew what loss felt like. She knew what displacement felt like. She knew what it meant to be competent and capable and still have no real category in the world that fit you. And so when the women came to her door --- the ones the Carmelites had turned away, the ones too old or too sick or too complicated for the existing structures --- she recognized them. Not with pity. With something much more useful than pity.
She recognized them the way you recognize someone from your own country when you meet them far from home.
I have been thinking about what she added to the world's spiritual imagination. Not the institution --- institutions rise and fall and get absorbed into history. But the idea. The idea that a community can be defined not by who it excludes but by who it includes. That the ones the system cannot accommodate are not a problem to be managed. That they carry something. That the door should open toward them.
This is not a new idea --- I have seen versions of it in almost every tradition I have watched across the centuries. But Jane gave it a specific form, in a specific time and place, when the alternative --- walls, enclosure, the performance of a holiness only the strong could sustain --- was the dominant model. She said there is another way. She said gentleness is a path. She said I'm on their side, and then she built eighty-six houses to prove she meant it.
Her patronage tells the story as plainly as anything. Forgotten people. Widows. Parents separated from their children. These are not abstractions. These are people the world has misfiled. People the system has no good drawer for. People standing outside closed doors.
She knew them because she had been one.
I have watched a great many people move through history carrying grief and obligation and exhaustion and the particular loneliness of being more capable than the world has room for. Most of them find a way to endure. A smaller number find a way to transmute what they carried into something useful. And a very few --- a rare, remarkable few --- manage to look at everything that broke them and say: this is exactly what I needed to understand what I was supposed to build.
Jane Frances de Chantal was one of those.
She walked away from Bourbilly with a broken heart and a set of obligations she hadn't chosen. And she ended up, thirty years later, having opened more doors than she could count.
I find that worth remembering.
I told you that the early Visitation women went out.
For the first eight years, before the archbishop of Lyon intervened and the walls went up, they moved through the community. They sat with the sick in their homes. They visited the poor. They showed up at the doors of people who had no one else showing up. From the outside --- from a certain angle, in a certain light --- it looked less like a religious order and more like what we would today call a social service organization. Women with a specific charism for going toward the people everyone else was going around.
They were not alone in this.
There was a man working in Paris at the same time, building something parallel, following the same instinct. If you have been with me for a while, you may already know his name --- Vincent de Paul. He and Jane were not strangers. After Francis de Sales died, Vincent became Jane's spiritual director. They knew each other's work. They understood each other's vision. Two people, moving in the same current, in the same fractured century, toward the same conclusion: that the measure of a community's spiritual health is what it does with the people it cannot easily absorb.
The Church, as I said, pulled the Visitation back behind walls. Vincent's work was eventually institutionalized too, in its own way. That is what institutions do --- they contain and regularize and make sustainable what began as something raw and urgent. It is not always a betrayal. Sometimes it is the only way to make something last.
But the impulse survived. It moved underground, the way water moves under stone, and it surfaced again and again across the centuries --- in the nursing orders, in the settlement houses, in the Catholic Worker movement, in the quiet army of people who have looked at suffering and moved toward it rather than away. Much of what we now recognize as modern social work has roots in exactly this tradition. Women, mostly. Going out. Sitting with the ones the system misfiled.
The system still misfiles people.
I want to say their names, or at least gesture toward them, because I think it matters to be specific. The person sleeping in the doorway of a building that used to be something else. The woman cycling in and out of the emergency room because the ER is the only door that cannot legally be closed to her. The man who came home from a war and found that nothing at home had a category for what he brought back with him. The teenager aging out of foster care on a specific Tuesday, with a bag of belongings and a list of phone numbers that mostly don't answer. The addict who has burned through every relationship that once held them, and is now burning through the ones provided by the state. The elderly woman in the apartment above the laundromat who has not spoken to another human being in eleven days.
These are not abstractions. These are people standing outside doors.
And here is what I have learned, watching this particular thread move through history: every generation produces people who respond to that sight the way Jane Frances de Chantal responded to it. Not with a policy. Not with a program. With something more primary than either of those things. With recognition. With the specific understanding that comes from having been, in some form, on the outside of a door yourself.
I like sick people. I'm on their side.
That sentence is still being said. Not always in those words. But the impulse behind it --- the refusal to look away, the insistence that the person standing outside the door is not a problem to be solved but a human being to be seen --- that is not a relic of seventeenth century France. It is alive. It is present. It is in your city right now, doing its quiet and largely unrecognized work.
Jane Frances de Chantal walked away from Bourbilly with a broken heart. She ended up building eighty-six houses. The thread she picked up is still being pulled.
I want to ask you something.
Not something difficult. Just something to carry with you when you leave here today.
Can you see them?
On your way to work tomorrow morning --- on the bus, or walking past the corner where someone has been sleeping for weeks now, or driving past the shelter you have passed a hundred times without quite looking at --- can you see them? Not as a problem in your peripheral vision. Not as something uncomfortable to navigate around. As people. People who had a Bourbilly once. A life with shape and weight and meaning. A door that closed on them, sometimes through their own choices, sometimes through choices made for them, sometimes through the particular cruelty of an illness that the world has very little patience for.
I am not asking you to fix anything today. I want to be honest with you about that. What Jane Frances de Chantal built took thirty years and cost her almost everything. You are not being asked to do that this afternoon.
But I am asking you to look.
And then --- when you are ready, in your own time --- to find out who in your community is already holding the door open. Because they are there. In every city, in every town, in places that don't get much attention and don't ask for much credit, there are people and organizations doing exactly what the early Visitation women were doing. Visiting the sick. Sitting with the lonely. Standing between someone and the worst version of what their life could become. Running the shelter. Staffing the needle exchange. Driving the meals. Answering the phone at two in the morning.
You don't have to run the organization. You don't have to volunteer every weekend. But you can know who they are. You can know the name of the shelter, the food bank, the mental health clinic, the recovery house. You can know what they need and whether you have any of it to give. You can be a person who, when someone else asks is there anything in this town for someone like that, actually knows the answer.
That is not nothing. In fact I think Jane Frances would recognize it immediately.
Awareness is the beginning of solidarity. And solidarity --- quiet, practical, unglamorous solidarity --- is what eighty-six houses looks like before it becomes eighty-six houses.
It starts with seeing.
Next time, I want to take you somewhere very different.
We are going to Constantinople. The fifth century. An empire under pressure from every direction --- theological disputes tearing the Church apart from the inside, barbarian pressure mounting on the borders, and a boy emperor on the throne who was, to put it gently, not quite equal to the moment.
His older sister was.
Her name was Pulcheria. She was fifteen years old when she effectively took charge of the Eastern Roman Empire, and she held it together --- through intelligence, through political skill, through a theological conviction she was absolutely prepared to fight for --- for decades. She was declared Augusta. She called church councils. She outmaneuvered generals and bishops and emperors. And she did all of it from a position the world insisted was decorative.
I was in Constantinople. I watched her work.
I think you are going to find her remarkable.
But for now --- stay with Jane Frances a little longer if you can. Stay with the image of a woman locking the gate at Bourbilly and walking away from everything she had built, not knowing yet what she was walking toward. Stay with the door she eventually opened, and the women who walked through it, and the quiet insistence that the ones the world has no category for are precisely the ones worth showing up for.
That idea is older than Jane Frances de Chantal. It will outlast all of us.
And it begins, always, with someone deciding to see.
Much love.
I am, Harmonia.