Badaliyya 010
January 08, 2014
Feast of the Epiphany of the Lord
Dear Friends,
As I write this letter I am aware of the special Feast of the Epiphany of the Lord to the Magi. And on this occasion, I would like to present once again the person of Blessed Charles de Foucauld as the image through which the new Epiphany of the Lord can be made manifest to the ‘Gentiles’ of our age.
Dear Friends,
As I write this letter I am aware of the special Feast of the Epiphany of the Lord to the Magi. And on this occasion, I would like to present once again the person of Blessed Charles de Foucauld as the image through which the new Epiphany of the Lord can be made manifest to the ‘Gentiles’ of our age.
Fr. Charles Foucauld is the friend and
guide of Fr. Louis Massignon’s Badaliyya
prayer. Fr. Massignon referred to Fr.
Charles to as an “older brother”. His own letters to the Badaliyya members
included many references to Fr. Charles and the prayer of Adoration before the
Blessed Sacrament was included in every gathering, as it now is for every
gathering of Blessed Charles’ many lay and religious fraternities world wide.
I am quoting from a series of articles that appeared during his Beatification on a French Internet site that inspired my enthusiasm once again for a spiritual legacy that has far reaching implications for our own Badaliyya prayer.
Bishop Claude Rault who serves in the Algerian Sahara writes: “Charles de Foucauld was not a “perfect” human being, far from it. Nevertheless, his radical choice in service of God and his “beloved Jesus”, his desire to join with the farthest away and poorest of peoples, his hours spent in prayer in Adoration before the Blessed Sacrament, his days spent in welcoming everyone who came as a “brother”, his spiritual wandering in quest of his vocation, and so many other aspects of his personality that make him close to us and accessible, at last, a saint within our reach, even if he remains... inimitable! And yet, there are religious families of men and women born from the profound intuition of Charles, “little brothers” and “little sisters” spread out in the most remote corners throughout the world.... These spiritual children of the “universal brother” have made their priority the poorest populations, the most abandoned, farthest from society, sometimes to the limit of the possible....
I am quoting from a series of articles that appeared during his Beatification on a French Internet site that inspired my enthusiasm once again for a spiritual legacy that has far reaching implications for our own Badaliyya prayer.
Bishop Claude Rault who serves in the Algerian Sahara writes: “Charles de Foucauld was not a “perfect” human being, far from it. Nevertheless, his radical choice in service of God and his “beloved Jesus”, his desire to join with the farthest away and poorest of peoples, his hours spent in prayer in Adoration before the Blessed Sacrament, his days spent in welcoming everyone who came as a “brother”, his spiritual wandering in quest of his vocation, and so many other aspects of his personality that make him close to us and accessible, at last, a saint within our reach, even if he remains... inimitable! And yet, there are religious families of men and women born from the profound intuition of Charles, “little brothers” and “little sisters” spread out in the most remote corners throughout the world.... These spiritual children of the “universal brother” have made their priority the poorest populations, the most abandoned, farthest from society, sometimes to the limit of the possible....
There are also thousands of priests,
religious and laypersons who have discovered through his message a way of
living the Gospel more fully to the ends of the earth, in fraternal sharing,
caring for the smallest among us, and in silent adoration. There are finally
all those who have discovered the grandeur of this personality and its
spiritual dimension that do not belong to his spiritual family nor even to his
religion. Blessed Charles, who through his trials and errors, his thirst for
solitude and for relationships, his great love of God and of his neighbor,
still shows us today the way to universal brother/sisterhood! He invites us to
leave our frivolousness, our reassuring boundaries, and our small spiritual
comfort, to rise to the numbers of challenges that he confronted without always
succeeding. It is up to us to continue the path that he outlined for us”. .
Brother Charles lifelong inspiration was what he called his “Nazareth”, living the hidden life of the worker, Jesus of Nazareth, before his public ministry began.
Monsignor Maurice Bouvier, postulator of the Cause for the Beatification of Brother Charles, member of the Priest’s Fraternity Jesus-Caritas, described the process in detail and wrote: “Nazareth has a permanent message for the Church. The New Alliance does not begin in the Temple, nor on the Holy Mountain, but in the small house of the Virgin, in the house of the worker, in the places forgotten by the people of Galilee, from which no one would expect anything good. It is only from there that the Church will find a new beginning and healing. She will never provide a true response to the revolution in our century against the powers of wealth and consumerism if, in her own heart, Nazareth is not a lived reality”.
Let us pray then that the seeds planted by Blessed Charles continue to bear fruit in abundance.
Paz y Bien.
Brother Charles lifelong inspiration was what he called his “Nazareth”, living the hidden life of the worker, Jesus of Nazareth, before his public ministry began.
Monsignor Maurice Bouvier, postulator of the Cause for the Beatification of Brother Charles, member of the Priest’s Fraternity Jesus-Caritas, described the process in detail and wrote: “Nazareth has a permanent message for the Church. The New Alliance does not begin in the Temple, nor on the Holy Mountain, but in the small house of the Virgin, in the house of the worker, in the places forgotten by the people of Galilee, from which no one would expect anything good. It is only from there that the Church will find a new beginning and healing. She will never provide a true response to the revolution in our century against the powers of wealth and consumerism if, in her own heart, Nazareth is not a lived reality”.
Let us pray then that the seeds planted by Blessed Charles continue to bear fruit in abundance.
Paz y Bien.
Bapa Jun Mercado, OMI
(Note: The letter borrowed heavily from a similar letter by Dorothy Buck of Badaliyya USA)
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