(Editor’s Note: As I write this piece, I remember our confreres in the Western Sahara, in Turkmenistan, and in the many island of the Sulu Archipelago who spent their entire lives in “mission” understood only in terms of “Nazareth”.)
"Nazareth" for Charles de Foucauld means sharing the life of men and women, like the Son of God, that lead an ordinary, everyday human life.
People who patiently live and work in many Muslim areas are beginning to understand the meaning of the “hidden life” of Jesus in Nazareth. By contemplating on Jesus in Nazareth, they begin to touch the mystery of Jesus’ ordinary and unknown life in Nazareth.
Charles de Foucauld in his almost solitary life in the Sahara concluded that the “fuga mundi” was not the destiny. Like the other great founders of Religious movement (Francis of Assisi, Iñigo Loyola, Francis de Sales, etc.) he understood that this world where the Son of God lived is good, and that it is good for us to live in it too, profoundly, to the point of dying in it so as to transfigure it like "the grain of wheat that falls into the earth and dies".
“Nazareth” is understood not as a “hidden” life that is the opposite of what is visible. It is, rather, an insistence on the need to be in the world and to undertake fully the work of a witness in the world. Charles de Foucauld makes it clear that Francis of Assisi wished to imitate Jesus' public life, while he himself wants to imitate his hidden life. But this imitation of the hidden life is in no way a non-response to the world or a withdrawal from mission.
It is a different type of witness and proclamation. For Charles de Foucauld, it is a question of bringing Christ to "those who do not know him" "preaching not with words, but by example". For him, "the hidden life has not been imitated": it is actually the life he wants to lead in the Church, and his disciples with him. In no way is it hiding as an end in itself, but a striving for fruitfulness: the grain of wheat must die if "it is to bear much fruit".
Charles de Foucauld wanted to transform the death of Jesus as a death to self and a death "to all that is not Jesus". It is witness and proclamation that involve two important points. The first is that of time and of patient waiting. And the second is a sense of goodness.
He spoke of his task in the Sahara as a work a time "of preparation, of the first tilling". Then he spoke of a “sense of patient waiting” with Jesus who, in speaking of his daily duties, said: "All this is to arrive at Jesus Christ, God knows when, perhaps after a few centuries".
If one axis consists in that sense of waiting and great patience which is the opposite of a craving for immediate and spectacular conversion, the other axis can be defined by the sense of goodness. It is a simple goodness, without undue concern for conversion, a "goodness without ideologies", very close to that expressed by Levinas, which is always addressed to a specific human being in his daily life, a friendship in return for friendship, which gives rise to trust.
The acceptance of long delays and a long-term mission, and the desire to strictly respect the culture and convictions of others, could be expressed in what de Foucauld told a layman from Lyons: "Banish the militant spirit from our midst". This term, stressed by de Foucauld, is used by him in its etymological sense: the old soldier does not want to "take up arms" but to engage only, he says, in the "apostolate of goodness". And at the secular level, de Foucauld asked his friends, as he wrote on 21 February 1915 to Massignon, to co-operate in "progress" and "in increasing the material well-being" of the peoples among whom they lived: "There is in this an impulse to give, a collective activity to be organized and private initiatives to be determined, helped and encouraged".
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