Jesus in the Wilderness ~ desert warfare
“the Spirit sent him out into the wilderness … and he was in the wilderness forty days, being tempted by … Continue reading Jesus in the Wilderness ~ desert warfare
Tag: Contemplation
Means of Ascetical Training for Priests
Prayer is the proper element of the spiritual life, and love of prayer is a prominent characteristic of a good priest
Continue reading Means of Ascetical Training for Priests
Wilderness & Paradise
In recent years some odd theories have been put forward which, in order to highlight the noteworthiness of an active turning to the world and a ‘secular Christianity,’ have deemed it vital to simultaneously bring monastic solitude into disfavour. The ‘contemplative’ life of a religious is found to be of ‘Greek origins.’ Striving with temptation in the wilderness today, is seen as a peculiar and antiquated artefact of a prominent heretical movement of the 2nd-century Christian Church which was called gnosticism, or perhaps some other heretical group. Solitude is revealed as essentially incompatible to the Christian message and life which are generally communal. Simply put, in this context the whole monastic ideal suddenly becomes theologically questionable.
So how seriously should these idiosyncratic theories be taken? Should they influence a religious to embrace an entirely defensive and apologetic standpoint toward our monastic vocation? Or do we have to whilst remaining true to our vocations as hermits, monks and nuns, find ways of living unmonastically in order to defuse and negate this criticism? Do we need to show beyond a shadow of a doubt that we, hermits, monks and nuns are all intrinsically ‘secular’ too and that our monastic style of behaviour —or conversatio morum— is in actual fact our facing in the direction of the world and not in fact, away from it?
We are not claiming to resolve this intricate question of the religious’ relation to the modern world. Before that question can even be tackled, the religious must have a concrete perception of what they themselves are supposed to be. If they set about, by compromising themselves they will not be able to avoid ambiguity and compromise in considering his relationship to the world.
Monastic theology is not merely a search for a few specious texts in Scripture and the Fathers which will excuse or justify the monastic vocation. It is rather a study and meditation of revealed truth which enables the religious to understand how they, in a most special way, can respond to the call to follow Christ in the wilderness.
Two studies by Protestant theologians, show that the theme of a call into the wilderness, a vocation to recover the paradisiacal life after suffering temptation with Christ in desert solitude, is but a variant of the fundamental themes of all Biblical theology: the pascha Christi, the call of the People of God out of Egypt, through the Red Sea into the Desert and to the Promised Land; the theme of the Cross and Resurrection; dying to sin and rising in Christ; the theme of the old and new man; the theme of the fallen world and the new creation. Not only is a Christian withdrawal to a ‘desert solitude’ excusable, licit and even praiseworthy, but the whole theology of the second Gospel is built upon the theme of Christ in the desert.
The study by Dr Ulrich Mauser is limited to the biblical use of the desert theme, especially in the gospel of St. Mark. Dr George Williams in his survey of biblical, patristic, medieval and radical Protestant thought, gives us a remarkably interesting picture of a ‘Paradise-Wilderness’ concept running through the entire history of Christian spirituality and playing a most important part not only within monasticism but also in Protestantism and particularly in the universities and seminaries founded by the Protestants in the ‘wilderness’ of the North and South Americas. Both these books are of significant importance to men and women religious, and we will attempt to give a brief survey of their contents here, evaluating their consequences for a monastic theology relevant to our own needs.
The Eremos, the desert wilderness ‘where evil and curse prevail,’ where nothing grows, where the very existence of man is constantly threatened, is also the place specially chosen by God to manifest Himself in His ‘mighty acts’ of mercy and salvation. Obedience to a divine call brings into this dreadful wilderness those whom God has chosen to form as His own people. The convocation of Israel in the wilderness of Sinai is the story of God leading men on what appears to be a ‘march into the open gates of death’ (Mauser). God places Israel in a seemingly impossible situation where, however, He reveals His name to His chosen, and thus places them directly in communication with Him as a source of unfailing help. On the basis of this free relationship rests the covenant of God with His people.
Failure to trust Yahweh in the wilderness is not simply an act of weakness: it is disobedience and idolatry which, substituting the golden calf for the ineffable name, seek to shorten the time of suffering by resort to human expedients glossed over with religious excuses. Only a free act of grace can restore the violated covenant by reawakening in the people a true sense of the meaning of their desert vocation. They must recover their understanding that the desert calling implies a complete and continual dependence on God alone. For Israel, the desert life was a life of utter dependence on a continued act of grace which implied also a recognition of man’s own propensity to treachery and to sin. We know how the prophets urged Israel under her Kings and at the time of the Babylonian exile, to remember the desert time of espousals and to anticipate a new Exodus which would restore the authentic relationship of bridal love between Israel and her God in a ‘renewed wilderness time’. We know that this theme was taken over in the Pauline writings.
Dr Ulrich Mauser shows that this is the message of John the Baptist at the opening of the second Gospel. The fact that the Baptist preaches ‘in the wilderness’ is of theological significance in Mark, for whom ‘the wilderness is a theme full of theological implications and not primarily a locality.’ John is in fact announcing what the prophets announced before him: One who is to come from God will appear in the wilderness and initiate the final work of salvation. Israel must go out to meet this one in the wilderness in an act of sincere repentance which acknowledges her whole history as one of disobedience and infidelity. The Baptism of John is a sign of recognition that God’s people are under judgement. Even Christ is baptised, thus showing His willingness to ‘endure God’s judgement’ and indeed to die for the sins of the people. Immediately after this, Jesus goes out to be tempted in the desert, for ‘only Jesus fully realised what it meant to go out into the wilderness: it meant the determination to live under the judgement of God.’ His going out into the desert is then the necessary outcome of His baptism.
For all others, baptism is simply a gesture of temporary repentance. They return to the cities. But Jesus goes on into the wilderness as the sign that His baptism is fully serious, and that He is ‘the only true penitent whose return to the desert is (not merely a token gesture) but unfeigned’. One might argue that Christ’s stay in the desert is itself only a temporary retreat, a pause for thought and recollection in preparation for his active mission. Not at all; ‘The forty days,’ says Dr Mauser, are not ‘a period passed forever once Christ starts his public ministry,’ but as in the case of Moses and Elias, the desert retreat ‘sounds the keynote of his whole mission.’
Mauser then traces the development of the wilderness theme throughout the whole Gospel of Mark. ‘Mountain’ and ‘Sea’ are variants of the ‘wilderness’ in Mark. Invariably all stories of Jesus, in Mark, which have an ‘epiphany character’ take place in the ‘wilderness’, that is to say ‘on the mountain’ or by or on the sea. The underlying concept of Mark is in fact the confrontation between Jesus and Satan in the wilderness, the overcoming of the powers of evil in the world by the struggle in the desert, the agony in the garden and death on Calvary. Hence the whole Gospel of Mark is, for Dr Mauser, a development of the struggle of Jesus and Satan in the desert. To live in this state of struggle with the adversary of God, and to sustain this conflict in direct and complete dependence on God Himself, is the ‘wilderness life’. Even if one lives this confrontation far from the actual desert, one is in fact living ‘in the wilderness’ and ‘with Christ in the desert’. We see here the basic idea of all monastic theology firmly rooted in the second Gospel.
What of ‘contemplation’? The Gospels do not use the expression ‘contemplative life,’ but the idea is expressed in other language. Christ is transfigured on the mountain, i.e., in the wilderness. The cloud, which would later have such fruitful destiny in Christian mystical literature, is since Exodus a permanent feature of the desert tradition: the ‘visible form of the governing, guiding yet hidden form of Yahweh’s presence’. The desert life is not only darkness and battle, it is also light and rest in the Lord who is our only help. ‘The epiphany of the glory of God is an indispensable element in the desert tradition.’ In fact, says Dr Mauser, the transfiguration is the sign of the Father’s approval of the obedience of Jesus in His desert vocation, His fidelity to a life of persistence in the desert.’
This persistence will of course lead finally to death, because the mountain of Calvary is the culmination of the desert vocation. ‘Jesus’s determination to persist in the desert … finds its conclusion in His decision to suffer and to die.’ Why? Because the very secret of life itself is that by renunciation one overcomes death and suffering (Mark 8:35) and enters upon life everlasting. The disciples of Christ who are called in a very real sense to follow Him ‘in the wilderness’ do not really understand the meaning of their calling. They are to a certain extent blind to the teaching of their master and to the significance of His life. The real cause of this blindness is their incapacity to surrender totally to their own desert vocation. ‘The unwillingness to endure tribulation and persecution, the care for security in the world, in one word the unwillingness to suffer — prevent the disciples from seeing and accepting all the implications of Christ’s teaching in their own lives.’
Even the apostolic mission of the followers of Jesus is marked with the sign of the wilderness. They are, in fact, called ‘on the Mountain’ and this, for Dr Mauser, is the ‘indication of (the) basic condition of their mission’. When they are sent out to preach in Mark 6.8 ff, the instructions given them are similar to those given to Israel at the beginning of the desert journey. In one word: the disciples of Christ are to be kept alive by nourishment from God, and they must not waste time and energy caring for themselves. The miraculous feeding of the multitudes in the wilderness in Mark 6 represents at once the convocation of the new Israel in the desert and the messianic and eschatological rest of God’s people with their King in the desert which has become His Kingdom and where He feeds them with His might in the new manna, the eucharist.
From this brief resumé we can see at once that Dr Mauser has given us a monastic reading of Mark’s Gospel which is more thorough and more solid than almost anything we have in monastic literature since the Fathers. As monks we owe him thanks for a treatise in biblical theology which sums up the whole meaning of our own vocation to follow Christ in the wilderness, in temptation, to the cross, strengthened by His epiphany in the ‘cloud’ of contemplation, nourished by his eucharist and by the hope of the ‘eschatological rest’ with Him in the paradise of the transformed and flowering desert which is His Kingdom.
The intricate relationship between the themes of desert and paradise is developed in a fascinating manner by Dr George Williams. The Church of the martyrs believed that the desert had become the arena, the sandy place where they fought the beasts and overcame the adversary of God in their agonia. Then the monks went out into the actual desert as Christ had done and their monastic struggle with temptation became a ‘martyrdom’ in witness to the faith, in obedience to Christ, in direct dependence on God for the grace without which one could not resist. This struggle was rewarded and the Church of martyrs and monks became also a ‘provisional paradise’ in anticipation of the eternal Kingdom.
These themes are quite familiar to anyone who has read the monastic Fathers. But what is particularly interesting about Dr Williams’ book is the way in which he traces the development of the wilderness-paradise theme through the medieval universities (with their traditional autonomy from outside control) to Protestant sectarians who sought refuge in the ‘desert’ and ‘paradise’ of the New World, and who there built seminaries and colleges as ‘gardens in the wilderness’. Dr Williams sums up his thesis in these words: ‘Many major and minor movements in Christian history have been in substantial degree the history of the interpenetrations of the biblical and post-biblical meanings of the wilderness and paradise in the experience of God’s ongoing Israel’.
Besides exploring the wilderness-paradise theme in the Bible, especially in the prophetic writings, Dr Williams gives special attention to Qumran and to Christian monasticism. Qumran was an ‘apocalyptic community that imitated the ancient sojourn in the wilderness of Sinai’, seeking to prepare the way for a priestly and a royal Messiah (two Messiahs in fact) by a paradisic covenant and communal life. The aim of Qumran is summed up in a phrase that has most fruitful implications for monastic theology: ‘the purity of paradise truth recovered within the fellowship of a disciplined wilderness encampment sustained by the Spirit’. Williams traces the themes of desert and paradise through Christian monasticism, shows the gradual interiorisation of this theme in the mystical literature of the Middle Ages, especially of the Victorines. He demonstrates that it persisted in the spirituality of the Mendicants and in the Universities, and quotes many texts from radical Protestantism which have the authentic ring of ancient monasticism, except that they apply to sectarian communities rather than to conventual families living under monastic vows.
These texts incidentally offer much food for thought to anyone interested in ecumenical dialogue with Protestant visitors to our American monasteries. They show how completely a theme which is fundamental to monastic theology was taken over in the theology of radical Protestantism in the seventeenth century and hence entered into the formation of the Christian ideal of North American culture that grew up out of the Puritan colonies of New England. These words of John Eliot, a seventeenth-century New England Puritan, might equally well have come from one of the Trappist founders of the Abbey of Gethsemane: ‘When the enjoyment of Christ in his pure Ordinances is better to the soul than all worldly comforts, then these things (the hardships of the wilderness) are but light afflictions.’ Roger Williams is said to have practically ‘made an incantation of the word wilderness.’ Kentucky, we know, is still haunted by the thought of that ‘wilderness road’ through the Appalachian Mountains, over which the settlers came from Maryland and Virginia, including those Catholics who gathered around Bardstown where the first Cathedral west of the Alleghenies was dedicated in 1816. Bishop Flaget of Bardstown invited the first monks to North America.
In conclusion, one very important aspect of Dr Williams’ book must not be passed over in silence. He is acutely aware, as too few Americans still are, of the criminal wastefulness with which commercial interests in the last two centuries have ravaged and despoiled the ‘paradise-wilderness’ of the North American mountains, forests and plains. The struggle to protect the natural beauties and resources of this country has not ended, and it is by no means to be regarded as an eccentricity of sentimental souls, bird watchers and flower gardeners. The disastrous storms of the thirties in the south-western dust bowl finally brought home more or less to everyone that conservation of soil and natural resources was an absolute necessity. Yet this does not prevent wastefulness, stupidity, greed and sheer destructive carelessness from going on today. So Dr Williams says, in words that monks above all should be ready to understand and appreciate: ‘Ours is the age of the bulldozer as much as it is the age of the atomic bomb. For good or ill, we need no longer conform to the contours of the earth. The only wilderness that will be left is what we determine shall remain untouched and that other wilderness in the heart of man that only God can touch.’ Anyone who reads the book will find this theme developed with its theological and religious implications. Meanwhile we might reasonably draw at least one obvious lesson from it. If the monk is a man whose whole life is built around a deeply religious appreciation of his call to wilderness and paradise, and thereby to a special kind of kinship with God’s creatures in the new creation, and if technological society is constantly encroaching upon and destroying the remaining ‘wildernesses’ which it nevertheless needs in order to remain human, then we might suggest that the monk, of all people, should be concerned with staying in the ‘wilderness’ and helping to keep it a true ‘wilderness and paradise.’ The monk should be eager to preserve the wilderness in order to share it with those who need to come out from the cities and remember what it is like to be under trees and to climb mountains. Surely there are enough people in the cities already without monks adding to their number when they would seem to be destined by God, in our time, to be not only dwellers in the wilderness but also its protectors.’ This judgement may, admittedly, reflect a personal preference. The two books discussed here certainly show that even a monastic life in an industrial setting can also find a theological basis in the Bible and monastic tradition provided it is in fact a true ‘wilderness life’ in the spirit of the theology of the apostolate in the Gospel of St Mark.
Continue reading “Wilderness & Paradise”
Bl. Charles de Foucauld OCSO: Christ’s Witness in the Desert
A life made of contemplation, prayer and service to the least of Charles de Foucauld (1858—†1916), beatified on November 13, 2005, in the presence of the “blue men” of the desert, those Tuareg whom he had loved so much and for whom he had canceled to become the last of the poor. With the boundless Saharan horizons and their absolute silence, broken by the prayers that the Tuareg intoned five times a day, it had been love at first sight. It was the desert that brought him back to the path of faith, that made him discover that restlessness of the heart finds peace only in the hours of prayer, at the foot of the Eucharist. Precisely this yearning pushed him where no religious had ever gone – to Hoggar, in the deep south of Algeria – to bear witness to universal faith and peace. Like Jesus in Nazareth, he wanted his presence to bear witness only to goodness and brotherhood.
In the hermitage of Beni-Abbès, in the province of Oran, on the border with Morocco, he had placed these signs: “If anyone wants to be my disciple, renounce himself, take up the cross and follow me”; “Do everything to everyone, with the only desire to give Jesus to everyone”; “Live today, as if you were to die tonight, martyr.” And when the First World War, crossing over from the European continent, armed the hand that killed him right in his hermitage of peace, that death was simply the most consistent outcome of a life that, after his conversion, had been pure praise of God, putting himself totally back into his hands, until he dissolves like the grain of wheat, which however here we see reborn even in the desert and becomes still life for those who know how to take up the arduous example. [1]
The way of conversion
Charles de Foucauld was born in Strasbourg on 15 September 1858 to a noble French family, but in 1864 he was shocked by an incident: within a few months he lost both parents. Taking care of him and his sister Marie is his maternal grandfather, Charles-Gabriel de Morlet, who after the Franco-Prussian war moved to Nancy, opting for French nationality. Here Charles completed his secondary studies and then attended the Jesuit school in Paris, in the rue des Postes. He will say later, recalling those years: “I think I have never been in a more deplorable state of mind. At 17 I was only selfishness, vanity, impiety, desire for evil: I was like outside of myself” and sadly admits that, “of faith, there was no trace left in my soul”. [2] Upon graduation, he takes the exam for the military academy of Saint-Cyr, where he enters in 1876, and two years later we find him at the cavalry school of Saumur.
In both environments he stands out for his indiscipline and transgressions, for the games packed evenings of card and girls, for the quality of the cigars he smokes and the expensive clothes he wears. In 1880 he reached the desert for the first time which would later captivate him. He is in Algeria with the 4th Hussar Battalion — 4e Régiment de Hussards—, already with the rank of lieutenant, but once again the transgression prevails: he has brought a lover from France, with whom he lives more uxorio. When the colonel finds out about the affair, forces him to put an end to it or to leave, Charles, who is not the type to give up, returns to France. But when, in the spring of 1881, he learns of the insurrection in Bou-Amama, in the southern Sahara, he cannot resist the thought of his comrades fighting without him. He leaves for Algeria, reaches the front and during the battle is noted for both his courage and solidarity.
He now has the desert and its inhabitants in his heart, to the point that he asks for a license to undertake a trip into the sub-Saharan regions, enabling him to study them thoroughly. He was only 24 years old: the unknown now dominated his future, he now felt that he was born to inhabit that desert, that he was there to listen to the silence that filled those vast horizons. Settling in Algiers, he begins to prepare for the exploration of Morocco, a closed country and wary of foreigners. But first he had to learn Arabic, so his desire for knowledge re-emerges —neglected during his school years— and he begins to go to libraries, to take private lessons, to consult those who could help him. He meets Oscar Mac Carthy, an old explorer who had traveled extensively in Africa: without escort or luggage, regardless of material comforts, with pockets full of notebooks and handwritten papers. Oscar tells him that the biggest problem is the choice of disguise, as it is impossible to enter that hostile country without hiding one’s status as a Christian. Only two ways of dressing would have made him go unnoticed: Arab or Jewish. Charles opts for the latter style and, having chosen a rabbi as a guide, leaves Tangier on June 20, 1883.
The trip allows him to create a scientific work —both geographic, military and political, Reconnaissance au Maroc—, [3] but it is also an opportunity to undertake a “reconnaissance” inside his own soul. He returned to France profoundly changed and, after having tried in vain to forget those places, in September 1885 he left for Algeria, where he traveled kilometres and kilometres, to listen to the voice of the desert in the silence of the night, to look at the immensity of the starry sky, to understand the reason for the charm that emanates from that country made of sand and light. In particular, he is struck by the faith of Muslims and their constant invocation to God; those prayers confront him with his lack of faith and so, after years spent suffocating that nostalgia, it comes to the surface stronger than ever: it recognises the mistakes of the past and tries to answer the questions that are multiplying in him.
God, who also knows how to manifest himself through unusual ways, waited for him one evening at the home of a cousin, arranging for him meet Abbé Henri Huvelin: a man of great faith, capable of speaking to souls and recognising their pain. He immediately understood what the restless eyes of that young man were asking, but he did not press and waited. At the end of October 1886 he was in the confessional, in Saint-Augustin, and Charles went to ask him to instruct him, because he had no faith. Abbé Henri Huvelin made him kneel and invited him to confess to God; then he gave him the Eucharist. From that moment Charles de Foucauld found peace, which now transpired from the smile and from the words, from the letters that more and more often spoke of God, from the life he led in his sister Marie’s house and from the search to discover God’s call. he made a trip to the Holy Land and, while crossing the streets of Nazareth, meditating on the words of Abbé Huvelin —“Our Lord has so occupied the last place that no one has ever managed to steal it from him” (p. 116) —, he had the clear feeling of being called to the hidden life, in all humility.
Brother Albéric and the call of the desert
Back in Paris, in March 1889, one last problem remains to be solved: which religious order is most suitable for him? He makes several retreats, spends months in prayer and finally feels that he is drawn to the Trappists so that, having given all of his possessions to his sister, he reaches Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, where he is admitted to the noviciate with the name of Brother Marie-Albéric. Despite the hardness characteristic of La Trappe, Charles stands out for his helpfulness, austerity, thoughtful judgment, but above all for his humility, which is reflected in his every gesture and in the words he writes to his sister: “For me, everything continues to go really well. From day one, my life goes on smoothly. And my soul, how’s it going? I was just not hoping for it: the good Lord makes me find in solitude and silence a consolation on which I did not count. I am constantly and absolutely with him and with those I love”. [4] Doing God’s will was his only desire, and that very will now asks him to leave Notre-Dame-des-Neiges and settle in the most remote monastery of the Trappists in Syria. He returned the call of solitude in the desert, the charm of those silent places, to live in greater poverty, near the Holy Land, where the Son of God had worked and suffered.
He leaves Marseille on June 27, 1890, heading for the Cheïkhlé Trappe —a monastery lost in the mountains, with about twenty Trappists—, where he continues his noviciate marked by work in the fields, meditation, reading and prayer, until the day of his religious profession. February 2, 1892. But brother Albéric, who wants to follow an even more demanding rule than the Trappist one, has the inspiration to found a small congregation that traces the life of Jesus as much as possible: only in this way does he consider it possible to witness the love of God in abandoned countries and where the Gospel is ignored. To do this, however, he must leave the Order he has just entered. He talks about it with his confessor, Dom Polycarpe, and writes the doubts that haunt him to Abbé Huvelin. The old spiritual director knew well that it was impossible to hold him back when he felt inside “the mysterious call” and therefore, after various correspondence exchanges, he authorised him to follow that project of a solitary and totally hidden life, but rejected the written rule for the foundation of the Little Brothers of Jesus, considering it impossible due to excessive severity.
It was February 1897 when he left Brindisi [5] to reach the Holy Land with a ticket given to him by the Trappists and, once he arrived in Nazareth, he went to the Poor Clares to have a place as a servant. The abbess, mother Saint-Michel, knew very well whom she was standing in front of and treated him like a sacristan: he would sleep in a hut in the shadow of the monastery, receive a piece of bread a day, and have plenty of time to pray. It was exactly what he was looking for, and the hermit life he managed to lead made him deeply happy, it allowed him to apply his rule to the hours of day and night, marked by intervals of work and prayer. The following year, Mother Saint-Michel sent him to Jerusalem to deliver a letter to those Poor Clares. He arrived totally exhausted, with his feet blistered and sore from the long journey and mother Élisabeth du Calvaire decided to hold him back for some time in order for him to recover. Confident of his great intelligence as well as of the immense faith of that man; he who had presented himself as a beggar, the abbess managed to convince him, with the help of the Abbé Huvelin, to embrace the priesthood. At the beginning of August 1900, Charles thus returned to Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, where Dom Martin had been waiting for his arrival, Dom Martin made Charles complete his preparation for the priesthood at the Grand Séminaire for the clergy in Viviers (Ardèche). It was a year of study, prayer, seclusion, but also of reflection, during which he discovers that he is called not only to the pure hiding of Nazareth, but to live that form of life by bringing the Eucharist to the wildest districts, among the “infidels” and the souls who have been forgotten the most or who are lost.
On June 9, 1901, he was ordained a priest and remained among the Trappists awaiting the answer: he had asked to settle between Aïn and Touat, in one of the French garrisons without a priest, and be authorised to aggregate some companions to practice the adoration of the Most Holy Sacrament. In September he takes leave of the Trappists of Notre-Dame-des-Neiges and lands in his Africa, taking with him only the necessary to build the chapel and a few books. The French soldiers, knowing that the well-known explorer, already their comrade, had come to the desert to respond to such a noble and admirable call, welcomed him with enthusiasm and wanted to escort him to Beni-Abbès. [6] Here he buys land where water passed and begins, with the help of the fusiliers, to build a hermitage, starting with the chapel where he would exhibit the Eucharist. [7] He spends many hours of the day and night in meditation or adoration, lying at the foot of the altar; the rest of the time he dedicates to the soldiers, who go to see him for advice, to be blessed or simply to listen to that man who inspired peace and holiness. He welcomed them into the “terrain of fraternity” —as he had defined it—, listened to them and then accompanied them to the boundary which, marked by the stones, represented the space of the enclosure.
The “Christian marabout” who loved the North Africans
The inhabitants of Beni-Abbès began to look at the “Christian marabout” —in the al-Maghrib al-Arabi (المغربالعربي) Maghrebi Arabic lexicon it means ‘holy man‘ and hermit— both with a mixture of fear and admiration. But, little by little, they came closer and closer to the hermitage, and he willingly sacrificed something of that contemplation, the breath of his soul, to receive them fraternally and help them where he could. He opened his home to unpredictable nomads, to reprobate slaves and to those who needed shelter. He did this in order to accustom “Christians, Muslims, Jews and idolaters, to consider me their brother, their universal brother. Everyone is beginning to call this house “fraternity,” and this gives me great pleasure” (p. 238). And for that purpose to come true, he used up all that he had in order to free some young slave.
The life he led in the desert was made up of little sleep, a lot of work, of consolation for the afflicted, of very little food, but above all of contemplation and prayer before the source of his love for him, the humble tabernacle. Through the witness of charity, humility, fraternity and forgiveness, Charles de Foucauld tries to follow the Gospel and to bring Jesus among those Muslims, whose conversion seemed to Charles, to be something that was beyond the bounds of possibility. The undertaking was difficult, but a sign came when a young Tuareg woman, during the massacre of the Paul Flatters mission (1880–81), not only treated the wounded, but opposed their killing. Wasn’t this Christian charity? The one that makes all human beings love, without exception? Now Charles no longer had any doubts: he would go among the Tuareg, the nomadic “blue men” of the desert, to bring them the message of universal brotherhood and Christian love. With the help of commander Laperinne, he began a visit to the Ahnet, Adrar and Hoggar regions, to get to know the six great components of the Tuareg people and to get closer to their language.
In the spring of 1905 he moved to the heart of the Hoggar, precisely to Tamanrasset, a village far from the main centres, in the middle of the mountains, inhabited by the gag-rali. From that period there remains a photo, now universally known, with Charles at the door of the hut, dressed in a white tunic that on the chest has a red heart sewn on it which is surmounted by a cross [8]. He studies Tamacheq, the Tuareg language, enabling him to translate the Bible into their language, and then attempts to make the first approaches with his nomadic neighbours by entering the gardens where they work, talking to them, distributing medicines and small gifts, such as needles, which the women had so desperately needed. In the spring of 1907 he was offered to join Captain Dinaux’s mission of peace and civilisation, and Charles, who saw this trip as an opportunity to deepen his knowledge of the Tuareg language, accepts. In every village or encampment he promised a penny for each verse, for the songs of love or war, for the ancient or recent poems of the Tuareg peoples.
In a personal note extract we read: “We left Father de Foucauld on an ‘expeditionary‘ tour in the Hoggar, in company with Captain Dinaux. This officer, was keen to continue the work of Laperrine, met Moussa Ag Amastane, chief of the Tuaregs in the Hoggar and sixteen of his notables. On the June 23, 1905, the grand aménokal of the Hoggar made amends for his attitude over the last two years and, as a sign of submission to France, agreed to pay the tax. In addition, he offered to accompany the captain on his expedition, which resumed on the following 10th of July.”
To understand these moments he had tried to grasp every word lost in the desert and had made a small piece of his heart out of it, feeling part of that country. He was convinced that God’s will was being fulfilled through his stay in the Hoggar and through the drafting of a glossary, [9] to which he was dedicating time and energy as an essential element of communication and mutual understanding. He had made himself small and poor, annihilating himself in a hidden life, in order to bring the evangelical witness to those peoples whom the desert had long hidden. He knew that he would not win them over with preaching, but only with the presence of the Eucharist, with example, penance, universal fraternal charity. He was not mistaken, and when suddenly the “Christian marabout” fell seriously ill, the Tuareg took care of him by bringing him the little goat’s milk they had, in order to make him heal. He managed to recover and continued to move from one hermitage to another, made trips to France, at the insistence of his sister who wanted to see him again, suffered the pain of two serious losses: those of Father Guérin, his spiritual director, and of the Abbé Huvelin, who both died in 1910.
Meanwhile, the Tuareg, hit by drought, had migrated to Asekrem, a mountain town in the Hoggar, where Charles followed them, building a new small hermitage in order not to leave them. “This is a beautiful place to worship the Creator. May his kingdom settle here! I have the advantage of having many souls around me and being truly lonely on the summit. The soul is not made for noise, but for recollection, and life must be a preparation for heaven, not only through meritorious works, but also through peace and recollection in God “(p. 422). These were his thoughts as he received the Tuareg families in a cabin that looked more like a corridor, and shared with them what little food he had. His greatest concern than he was to make himself useful and relieve that people, whom he loved so much, from the inferior condition in which he had lived for years. For this reason, in May 1913 he embarks on a trip to France together with Ouksem, a young Tuareg of noble origins. He did not know that Providence was allowing him go home for one last time only.
Returning to the beloved desert, he too was overwhelmed by the serious repercussions that the First World War also had in the colonial territories. He then decided, despite the danger represented by the (السِّنُوسِيَّةُ) Sanousiyya —is a Tuareg tariqa (Sufi brotherhood) considered to be rebels who attacked the French army— not to abandon Tamanrasset, but simply to take refuge with some of his proteges in a more fortified place, where he continued to live in prayer and solitude, before the Eucharist, completing the translation of the Tuareg poems. “We live in days when the soul feels the need to pray. In the storm that blows over Europe one perceives the nothingness of the creature and one turns to the Creator. We stretch our arms towards the sky, like Moses during the battle of his gods, and, where man is powerless, we pray to Him who can do everything”(p. 477), he wrote a few days before being killed by some rebellious Tuareg.
It was December 1, 1916, when Charles’s earthly life was brutally cut short. But his universal brotherhood, born at the foot of the Eucharist and concretised in words, gestures and loving service to the least, was carried away by the wind, together with the sand of the desert, and reached growing men and women who, fascinated, they tried to follow him in that exceptional adventure. [10] They are those petits frères and those petites sœurs [11] and the many lay associations which, in various forms and denominations, are inspired by that charism and live in silence among the least in the world, trying to be, like their founder, witnesses of the Gospel with a presence made of loving and warm solidarity.
May Our Lord God through the intercession of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, Blessed Charles de Foucauld’s great devotion, make us worthy of the heritage ! Amen. recite 3 x Ave Maria!
Continue reading “Bl. Charles de Foucauld OCSO: Christ’s Witness in the Desert”
St. Mary’s Hermitage 