Blessed and soon to be sainted in 2022 Charles de Foucauld failed in his efforts to found a religious community during his lifetime, and he experienced much sorrow and pain and spiritual darkness and obscurity even regarding his own work. How close he is to my own experience.
But in a letter of December 1, 1916 –never posted– “the universal brother” wrote these words: “When we can suffer and love, we can do much, it’s the most that we can do in this world: We feel our suffering, but we don’t always feel that we love and that’s an additional suffering! But we know that we want to love and to want to love is to love.”
In way I take Blessed Charles’ words to be similar to the pious sentiment of “offering it up.” What? The phrase indicates that we ought to connect our sufferings to those of Jesus Christ. He knows that our suffering does have meaning and for it to be fruitful, that is, to be generative of something new, we give our suffering and pain to God the Father. We are meant to give our sufferings Jesus Christ so that he can do something useful with them. St. John Henry Newman has written a brilliantly inspired discourse on the interior sufferings of Christ in which he posits that the interior sufferings were indeed much greater. (https://www.newmanreader.org/works/discourses/discourse16.html)
Father James Brent, O.P. teaches us the basis of this practice. The video is a beautiful way to connect to a venerable spiritual practice.
Happy feast day of Blessed Charles de Foucauld!
