Lift Up Your Heart: A 10-Day Personal Retreat with St. Francis de Sales

Review

SECTION ONE Fr. John Burns wrote Give Up Worry for Lent! for the reader who arrives at Ash Wednesday already exhausted — burdened by a mental habit that seems too entrenched to shift in forty days. His answer is disarmingly specific: stop trying to think your way out of worry, and instead take ten days inside the Salesian tradition. Drawing on St. Francis de Sales' Introduction to the Devout Life, Burns structures ten meditations as a mini-retreat, each one turning the reader's gaze from the object of their anxiety toward the God who holds it. The premise is that worry is not primarily a cognitive error but a spiritual posture — an implicit refusal to trust Providence — and that Lent is precisely the season when Catholics are invited to loosen that grip. The audience is any adult Catholic who has tried willpower alone and found it insufficient. Burns writes as a pastor, not a therapist, and that distinction is the book's quiet argument. SECTION TWO - **Created**: De Sales, as Burns presents him, begins from the conviction that the human person is made for joyful union with God, not for the cramped interior state that worry produces. The book affirms this original orientation by treating peace not as an achievement but as the soul's natural condition when it rests in its Maker — an affirmation of the imago Dei as a dynamic, relational capacity. - **Fallen**: Burns locates worry precisely within the disordered appetites that Aquinas describes under the irascible and concupiscible passions: the person grasps at control over outcomes that exceed any creature's competence. The book names this as a specifically spiritual disorder, not merely a psychological one — anxiety becomes a symptom of the will's refusal to yield what it was never designed to hold. - **Redeemed**: The ten meditations function as a structured invitation to passive receptivity, moving the reader from anxious self-management toward surrender — what the Carmelite tradition would call a posture before grace. Each day's meditation is an act of reorientation: the reader practices trusting Providence, and that practice, repeated across the retreat, begins to reshape the habitual posture of the soul. - **Justice (prayer)**: Burns trains the virtue of prayer in its most classical sense — sincere address to God that is not merely petitionary but adoring. By rooting each meditation in de Sales' own text, he teaches the reader to pray with a formed tradition behind them rather than from bare spontaneity, which is precisely how prayer becomes a stable virtue rather than an occasional mood. - **Prudence (foresight)**: The Lenten frame is itself a prudential act: Burns asks the reader to use forty days as a training window, anticipating the emotional and spiritual demands of daily life after Easter. This forward-looking structure trains the reader to see peace not as a feeling to be recovered but as a disposition to be built. SECTION THREE Chautard[^1], in The Soul of the Apostolate, cites de Sales directly on the spiritual retreat as an exercise whose absence cannot be compensated by any other means: 'Without it, it is impossible to lead the active life otherwise than badly... and work will always be an obstacle to us.'[^1] Burns' book is, in effect, a lay implementation of that Salesian principle, translated into a Lenten retreat accessible to readers outside religious life. Rodriguez[^2], in his treatment of the spiritual exercises, similarly notes that even a brief withdrawal for ten days — marked by holy reading, meditation on the mysteries of faith, and sustained mental prayer — carries an unusual capacity to reorder the soul's habitual dispositions.[^2] Burns works in exactly this tradition: the retreat form is not a modern therapeutic innovation but a recovery of a centuries-old ascetical technology for loosening the hold of disordered anxiety. ## References 1. Chautard, Dom Jean-Baptiste (n.d.). *The Soul of the Apostolate*. Part II, interior life and the active apostolate. — 'Without it, it is impossible to lead the active life otherwise than badly... and work will always be an obstacle to us.' 2. Rodriguez, Alphonsus (n.d.). *On Prayer*. Section on spiritual exercises and retreat. — 'retiring for ten days... employ themselves during this time, in the reading of holy books, and in other spiritual exercises.'

✓ Strengths

• ✓Burns grounds the Lenten journey in a specific spiritual tradition — the Salesian school of devout humanism — giving readers a theologically located practice rather than a generic anxiety-management program.
• ✓The ten-day retreat structure borrowed from de Sales' Introduction to the Devout Life disciplines the reader's attention daily, training the will toward adoration before cognitive reframing of worry has any chance to take hold.
• ✓By anchoring peace in surrender to divine Providence rather than in personal competence, the book names the deepest root of anxiety: a disordered attempt to bear what only God can carry.
• ✓The Lenten frame situates worry-release within the broader arc of penance and conversion, so that the reader experiences emotional freedom as a fruit of ascetical practice rather than as a therapeutic technique.
• ✓The mini-retreat format makes contemplative prayer accessible to lay readers who would not otherwise encounter the Salesian tradition, lowering the barrier to interior silence.

⚠ Considerations

• ⚠The description does not indicate whether Burns engages the somatic dimension of anxiety — the body's own signals of fear — which Aquinas treats under the passions (I-II, qq. 41-44); a purely intellectual or volitional approach to worry may underserve readers whose anxiety has physiological anchoring.
• ⚠A ten-day Lenten sprint risks cultivating a transient emotional relief rather than the stable habit of recollected prayer that the Salesian tradition actually calls for; Burns would need to address the question of maintenance if the fruits are to persist beyond Easter.