Colleen Carol Campbell: The Heart of Perfection

Colleen Caroll Campbell is at heart a story teller and that comes through in all of her books. Her previous well-liked book, " My Sisters the Saints" she interweaves her personal story, including the missteps, with the stories of six women saints who profoundly changed her life: Teresa of Avila, Therese of Lisieux, Faustina of Poland, Edith Stein of Germany, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, and Mary of Nazareth. Drawing upon the rich writings and examples of these extraordinary women, the author reveals Christianity's liberating power for women and the relevance of the saints to the lives of contemporary Christians.

" The Heart of Perfection" continues the interweaving of her story, her quest for her idea of perfection, into the stories of saints, this time male and female, looking for what perfection might look like for a fallen human being. I recommend both books. 

I copies the following from her book about Mere Angelique Arnauld (a lost member of my family, no doubt who was apparently no saint. She mingled obstinancy with a pretty rigid spirituality into a fairly toxic and divisive blend. It is known to history as Jansenism. Here is the excerpt:

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Crack open an old book about Angélique—a dusty one from the library’s back corner, preferably published before 1940—and you’ll find this seventeenth-century French abbess depicted as a cross between Caiaphas and Cruella de Vil. She’s scheming, stone-hearted, and defiant, the conniving leader of a group of renegade nuns whom the Archbishop of Paris famously labeled “as pure as angels and as proud as devils.” Dig more deeply into her story, though, and you’ll discover a sincere Christian who spent decades striving to reform herself and her church. Angélique never intended to foment heresy. She simply wanted to worship God her way, with her kind of Christians, without interference from her theological and moral lessers. She was an elitist, in other words. And that elitism proved her undoing. Its seeds were sown early, in the influential French family to which she was born in 1591.

Angélique was only seven when her grandfather cut a deal with France’s King Henri IV to have her named the abbess of Port-Royal, a Cistercian convent near Paris. The Arnaulds lied about her age on the documents they sent to Rome to gain official church approval. Angélique was then shipped off to Maubuisson Abbey to learn her catechism from its notoriously promiscuous mother superior, who lived there with some dozen children from different fathers and encouraged her nuns to take as many lovers as she did. By the time Angélique was installed as abbess of Port-Royal at age eleven, on the same day she received her First Holy Communion, she was so clueless about the Catholic faith that she had to borrow the abbey cobbler’s prayer book to find out that the sacrament she was receiving was the body and blood of Jesus. No one else had bothered to tell her. Angélique spent the next five years reading worldly novels, drifting in and out of depression-induced illnesses, and dreaming of running off to get married like her Protestant aunts while her mother and an older nun ran the convent for her. Port-Royal was a boisterous, profligate place: the scene of costume parties and lavishly decorated apartments occupied by a dozen nuns who couldn’t tell you what a sacrament was and overseen by a priest too busy hunting to learn the Lord’s Prayer.

When Angélique was sixteen, a Capuchin friar came to Port-Royal speaking of a humble King who left His throne to be born poor, all for love of her. His words lit a spark in Angélique’s soul and convinced her to dedicate her life to Christ. She plunged into prayer and penance, tortured by guilt over the religious office she had gained through fraud. When she told another visiting Capuchin that she planned to renounce her abbess position, he convinced her to reform her convent instead. So Angélique did. And no one—not her family, her fellow nuns, or the prioress accustomed to running things in her place—much appreciated it. Angélique persevered, though, leading her nuns by example to recover their monastic vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. The sisters gradually agreed to give up their private possessions and re-establish the enclosure that separated them from the outside world. They even backed Angélique as she defied her powerful relatives, who paid the convent’s bills, by barring the door when her enraged parents and some of her nineteen siblings stormed Port-Royal shortly after her eighteenth birthday. The Angelican reform had begun.  Campbell, Colleen Carroll. The Heart of Perfection: How the Saints Taught Me to Trade My Dream of Perfect for God's (pp. 62-63). Howard Books. Kindle Edition. 
 
Saint-Cyran eagerly took up the mantle in his place, adding his own rigid moralism to Jansen’s already grim theology. The result was a peculiar mix of moral perfectionism, theological fatalism, and resistance to church authority that would become known as the Jansenist heresy. Campbell, Colleen Carroll. Angélique had always been prone to extremes. And her family had always hated Jesuits. So when Saint-Cyran arrived around 1635 preaching Jansenism and dismissing its Jesuit detractors as too lenient on sinners, the forty-four-year-old abbess was all ears. That this supposedly grace-based theology came with a heavy dose of moral severity was even better. No longer did Angélique have a spiritual director balking at her extreme penances and spiritual grandiosity. Now she had one shoving her in the direction she already wanted to go. Saint-Cyran armed Angélique with a divine mandate for the disgust she always had felt toward the lackluster Christians who scandalized her as a child and blocked her reforms as an adult.
 
Angélique spent her final months battling physical pain, fearing for the future of her religious community, and continuing her feisty defense of the Jansenist cause that had consumed her for nearly thirty years. She penned one final letter from her deathbed soliciting sympathy from France’s queen mother, a descendent of Spain’s King Philip II, comparing herself to persecuted Spaniard Teresa of Ávila—minus Teresa’s emphasis on cheerful obedience, of course. Angélique then heaved her last, warning her nuns as she braced for God’s judgment that, “It is necessary to prepare for this terrible hour.” Just how terrible that hour was for Angélique we can’t know this side of eternity. What we do know is this: Despite her remarkable achievements—the reform of several convents, an impressive body of intelligent if flawed writings, and the founding of two branches of the Port-Royal community that comprised some two hundred nuns at the time of her death—Angélique died at war with the Church she loved. The religious community she spent her life working to build died only decades after she did, when Port-Royal’s dwindling ranks of rebellious nuns were evacuated in 1709 and their convent razed to the ground shortly afterward. As for the Jansenist movement, it heaved its last public gasp a few decades later with the rise and fall of the convulsionnaires, a group that took Jansenism’s killjoy ethos to sadomasochistic extremes by conducting graveside orgies in which they tortured each other with beatings, cutting, and crucifixions. It was an ugly end to a movement originally intended to purify the Church. Even uglier was how Jansenism’s pessimistic ethos seeped into Catholic seminaries, convents, parishes, and schools long after the movement’s official demise. For generations after Angélique died, Catholics who never knew her story would lose their faith, or nearly so, trying to appease the grim perfectionist idol she helped bring to birth.
 
Campbell, Colleen Carroll. The Heart of Perfection: How the Saints Taught Me to Trade My Dream of Perfect for God's (pp. 70-71). Howard Books. Kindle Edition.
 
Joy
It’s a provocative idea, but it has ample support in Scripture. We are told to “rejoice in the Lord” even in barren times (Hab. 3:18), to offer “shouts of joy” to the Lord (Ps. 5:12, Ps. 27:6, Ps. 32:11, Ps. 47:2, Ps. 98:4), to “rejoice and be glad” vulnerable to sin, error, and attack—when we forfeit it. Living with that paradox—that we need  the Church, yet suffer from the sins of its members; that we need to share the Gospel, even though the world will reward our efforts with ridicule and persecution—is hard. It’s easier to lapse into division and despair than to keep our hearts open to the joy of the Holy Spirit and those He wants us to reach with His love. But what if part of God’s will—a bigger part than most of us perfectionists realize—is that we cultivate joy? And if refusing to do so is a form of disobedience, a rejection of the Holy Spirit? It’s a provocative idea, but it has ample support in Scripture. We are told to “rejoice in the Lord” even in barren times (Hab. 3:18), to offer “shouts of joy” to the Lord (Ps. 5:12, Ps. 27:6, Ps. 32:11, Ps. 47:2, Ps. 98:4), to “rejoice and be glad”Campbell, Colleen Carroll. The Heart of Perfection: How the Saints Taught Me to Trade My Dream of Perfect for God's (p. 73). Howard Books. Kindle Edition. 
 
26). Jesus underscores this link between joy and charity in the Gospel of John, where He says that we draw near God and preserve our joy by loving others: “If you keep My commandments, you will remain in My love. I have told you this so that My joy may be in you and your joy may be complete. This is My commandment: love one another as I love you” (John 15:9–12).
 
Campbell, Colleen Carroll. The Heart of Perfection: How the Saints Taught Me to Trade My Dream of Perfect for God's (p. 75). Howard Books. Kindle Edition.