Thursday, November 06, 2008
going after the lost sheep
I was distancing myself more and more from you, my Lord and my life. My life, too, was beginning to become a death, or rather it was already death in your sight. And yet, within that state of death, you upheld me... All faith had gone but my respect and esteem remained intact. You showed me further graces, O my God: you preserved the attraction for study in me, for serious reading, beautiful things, a revulsion for vice and ugliness. I did evil yet I neither approved nor loved it... You granted me that vague uneasiness of a bad conscience, which though it may be asleep is not altogether dead.
I have never felt that same sadness, lassitude, unease except then. Oh my God, was it then your gift? How far I was from doubting it! How good you are! And while, by this invention of your love, you prevented my soul from drowning altogether, you kept my body safe: for if I had died then I should have been in hell... Those dangers of the journey, great and various as they were, from which you enabled me to come out as if by a miracle! That unchanging health in the most unhealthy of places, in spite of such great fatigue! Oh my God, how your hand was upon me and how little I was aware of it! How you protected me! How you sheltered me under your wings when I did not even believe in your existence! And while you were thus protecting me time passed by, you judged that the time was approaching to draw me back into the fold.
In spite of me you undid all the wrong attachments that would have kept me away from you; you even undid all the healthy bonds that would have prevented me from becoming all yours one day... Your hand alone carried out the beginning, middle and end in all this. How good you are! It was needed in order to prepare my soul for truth; the devil is too much master of an unchaste soul to let it enter into truth; you would not be able, my God, to enter a soul in which the demon of squalid passions reigned as lord. But you wanted to enter mine, Oh good Shepherd, and so you cast out your enemy yourself.
-- Charles de Foucauld (1858-1916), hermit and missionary in the Sahara
I have never felt that same sadness, lassitude, unease except then. Oh my God, was it then your gift? How far I was from doubting it! How good you are! And while, by this invention of your love, you prevented my soul from drowning altogether, you kept my body safe: for if I had died then I should have been in hell... Those dangers of the journey, great and various as they were, from which you enabled me to come out as if by a miracle! That unchanging health in the most unhealthy of places, in spite of such great fatigue! Oh my God, how your hand was upon me and how little I was aware of it! How you protected me! How you sheltered me under your wings when I did not even believe in your existence! And while you were thus protecting me time passed by, you judged that the time was approaching to draw me back into the fold.
In spite of me you undid all the wrong attachments that would have kept me away from you; you even undid all the healthy bonds that would have prevented me from becoming all yours one day... Your hand alone carried out the beginning, middle and end in all this. How good you are! It was needed in order to prepare my soul for truth; the devil is too much master of an unchaste soul to let it enter into truth; you would not be able, my God, to enter a soul in which the demon of squalid passions reigned as lord. But you wanted to enter mine, Oh good Shepherd, and so you cast out your enemy yourself.
-- Charles de Foucauld (1858-1916), hermit and missionary in the Sahara
