Francis de Sales

Francis de Sales, bishop of Geneva and a Doctor of the Church, was famous for his patience and sweetness. With Jane Frances de Chantal he founded the Visitation order, and he wrote, above all, for lay people longing to pray.

His Introduction to the Devout Life, addressed to an ordinary laywoman he calls “Philothea,” democratized contemplative prayer in warm, homely images of gardens and flowers.

He taught the imaginative “composition of place” — being truly present within a Gospel scene — and the charming practice of gathering a “spiritual nosegay”: one thought, picked like a flower, to breathe in all day long.