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Cry the Gospel with your Life - A talk given at the Methodist Church in Edmonton , North East London![]() I find it appropriate then to share with you something of the life of Charles de Foucauld and how we Little sisters who have been friends with members of this community for so many years are inspired by the witness of his life. Charles wanted to shout the Gospel – God’s word - from the rooftops not by his words but by his whole life. Jesus was the Word, the Word of the Father. "And the Word was made flesh and lived among us" Charles helps us deepen our understanding of what Incarnation means. This became the passion of his life. He wrote: ‘Everything must be enfolded in love… I have lost my heart to this Jesus of Nazareth.’I suggest we jump in at the deep end, and from the start, get a glimpse of the radicalism of Charles. What was motivating him from within? He writes in one of his meditations: “A man can have no greater love than to lay down his life for his friends” 'I desire with all my heart to give my life for you. I ask you with insistence for this; however not my will, but yours be done.’Charles was led through the different stages of his journey, to an extraordinary resemblance to the Lord Jesus. This resemblance is all the more striking if we take into account his life’s itinerary. Charles was born into a happy family but orphaned at the age of six; he and his young sister were brought up by their elderly grandfather. He lost all faith in God during adolescence, influenced by his voracious reading of authors who put in doubt the existence of God. He threw away a huge inherited fortune on high living and pleasure during military school where he was bored stiff. After a period in the army, which included dismissal for presenting his mistress as his wife, he undertook as a personal project, a daring exploration of Morocco, then a closed country, disguised as a Jewish rabbi, gaining for himself a medal from the French geographical society. He was touched by the faith and also deep friendship and trust, he encountered among the Muslims and Jews during his travels. All the time he was searching for something more. His was a religious quest in earnest. Somewhere deep within, he was allowing himself to be led and touched by God. On his return to France, entering the church of St Augustine in Paris at the age of 28 he was invited to confess and receive communion. This moment of grace changed him for life. He wrote to a friend: ‘As soon as I believed that there was a God I understood that I could do no other but to live for him alone: My religious vocation dates from the same moment as my faith. The Gospel showed me that everything must be enfolded in love’ I have lost my heart to this Jesus of Nazareth crucified 1900 or so years ago and I spend my life trying to imitate him.’Here we are already at the heart of his vocation. He is a man who, to quote from Fr Huvelin, his spiritual director: ‘made of religion a question of love’. This burning search for the one he loved never left him. It was a long interior journey which led him to the limits of himself. In March 1887 at the time of his conversion a single sentence in a sermon, made a deep impression on him: ‘Jesus took the lowest place in such a way that no one has ever been able to take it from him’.When he made his pilgrimage to the Holy land at the end of the following year, this reality of the Incarnation, that God, the all Holy one, could become as one of us, bowled him over. The God he was seeking took on the human face of Jesus of Nazareth. Charles writes: ‘Walking the streets of Nazareth, which Our Lord, a poor workman walked before me I discovered, the humble and hidden existence of the divine workman of Nazareth’.From then on Charles never stopped trying to tread in the footsteps of this Jesus, his only model. His 7 years in a Trappist monastery in Syria at Akbes in the midst of an Armenian, Turkish and Arab population, helped him to empty his heart of all that was over-human so that it might beat for God alone and Jesus could become, as he writes: ‘the unique necessity of his life.’ For me this single-mindedness, having one ultimate goal and aim in life, is another key to his holiness. His future journey in life takes many sudden turns but his focus on seeking to do what God wants, is the unifying thread. Love and humility go hand in hand. Humility for Charles is rooted in the mystery of the Incarnation. When meditating on the feast of Christmas, he writes: ‘The Incarnation takes its source in God’s goodness. But there is something else, something so marvellous, that it shines like a dazzling sign: it is the infinite humility that such a mystery contains. God, Being itself, God the infinite becomes man, the least of men. So I too want to seek the lowest place of all, to be little like my Master.’This gives Charles’ way of loving a special colour. In Akbes however Charles had not yet found the Nazareth he was longing for. Despite the poverty of the monastery he realized that the ordinary families who lived in the shade of the monastery were living another kind of insecurity, something closer to what he imagined Jesus lived in Nazareth. He decided to leave the monastery and to continue his quest. He returned to the Holy Land to the town of Nazareth where Jesus himself had lived. He wrote ‘I long for Nazareth’ There he worked as an odd-job man for the Poor Clares, and lived in a hut in their garden spending many hours before Jesus in the Eucharist. God spoke to his heart. He was like a lover waiting on his beloved and never growing weary even through times of darkness and struggle. He also spent hours meditating the Gospel, often writing his meditations, that we must remember when we read them that they were never meant to be read – they were his own intimate journal. The words and deeds of Jesus were transforming him from within and caused him to raise new questions. Love leads to wanting to share. He meditated on the Good Shepherd and thought of those who seemed the farthest away. He remembered the people of Morocco where he had once explored and been so struck by the Muslim faith of the people. He longed to go and share with them the good news of the Gospel. He accepted to be ordained and as Morocco was still a closed country he decided for Algeria and settled in the small oasis town of Beni Abbes near the Moroccan border. His way would be marked by Nazareth, to be with, to be alongside. His poverty is very concrete. Not only did he wish to be with the poor but he chose to live like the poor. Not only did he give himself for the poorest, but his originality lies in being poor with them and like them. Charles’ poverty is related o Nazareth. It is not a spiritual idea, it is a choice in life, that touches every aspect of it, material and social. We read in the Gospel: ‘He went back with them to Nazareth and was subject to them’ Charles writes for the Brothers: ‘You are to go back to live the life of poor workers who live from their work, in Nazareth.’From Beni-Abbes,! He wrote to his cousin, His house was open to all, and his interest and concern was the same for whoever called, for all the people around him, of his time and world, be they soldier or officer, landowner or cultivator, rich man or slave. The spirit was moulding him. He became ‘approachable and very little’. |
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