Dear Friends,
At the kind invitation of the staff at St. Paul’s Church in Cambridge, MA we will gather together for our Badaliya Prayer on Sunday November 20, 2005 at 3pm in the small chapel in St. Paul’s Parish Center. Please join us in person or in spirit as we pray for peace and reconciliation in the Middle East and especially in the Holy Land.
Since both the Thanksgiving holiday and Christmas Holy days fall on the last week-end of the month we have adjusted the schedule to meet earlier in the month for each of those Badaliya gatherings.
As I write this letter I am aware of this special week-end that is celebrating the Beatification of our Brother Charles de Foucauld at St. Peter’s in Rome on Sunday, November 13th. So much of the spirit of Louis Massignon’s Badaliya prayer was guided by his friend and mentor, who he referred to as an “older brother”. His own letters to the Badaliya members included many references to Foucauld 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 this week on a French Internet site, that inspired my enthusiasm once again for a spiritual legacy that has far reaching implications for our own Badaliya 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 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 who 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, 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”.
August 30, 2005.
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 pagan 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 if, in her own heart, Nazareth is not a lived reality”.
Following is the shedule of events in Rome:
November 12th a gathering at the Trappist Monastery outside Rome.called Tre Fontane with Mgr. François Blondel, Bishop of Vivier, France, presiding over a meditation on the spiritual message of Father Foucauld followed by Adoration.
Sunday, November 13th at 10am, Beatification of Charles de Foucauld in the Baslica of St. Peters , Rome. (televised from 2am EST by EWTN and repeated at 9pm).
Mass of Thanksgiving, Monday, November 14th, 9:30am at Tre Fontane. Presider Mgr. Claude Rault.
You may also like to see the article in the NCR this week on Charles de Foucauld.
Let us pray in spirit with these events, that the seeds planted by Blessed Charles continue to bear fruit in abundance.
Peace to you.
Dorothy
Charles de Foucauld’s Prayer of Abandonment
Mon Père,
Je m'abandonne à toi,
Fais de moi ce qu'il te plaira.
Quoi que tu fasses de moi,Bishop
Je te remercie.
Je suis prêt à tout, j'accepte tout,
Pourvu que ta volonté
Se fasse en moi,
En toutes tes créatures,
Je ne désire rien d'autre, mon Dieu.
Je remets mon âme entre tes mains.
Je te la donne, mon Dieu,
Avec tout l'amour de mon coeur,
Parce que je t'aime,
Et que ce m'est un besoin d'amour
De me donner,
De me remettre entre tes mains sans mesure,
Avec une infinie confiance
Car tu es mon Père.