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The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." *
DIEU d'apres Foucauld10/01/2006 23:05:09I noticed recently that Pope Benedict beatified Charles de Foucauld, the spiritual inspiration for several orders who live with the poor, and who himself lived alone as a Christian hermit among Muslims in Algeria. He was shot by local raiders during World War I. As I've been doing research on modern Muslim-Christian relations, I was curious to explore the language that this fellow took up. I found a little book of his in French, The Gospel Presented to the Poor Black People of the Sahara (L'evangile presente aux pauvres negres du Sahara), which consists mainly in twenty one short lectures about the Christian faith. Who knows what he ever did with these. As an exercise in my French and because I like it a lot, I translated the first section (called "God") as follows. We are going to show you the religion of God, the religion that God taught to people. To begin, pray God to bless us, together with all people in the world, and for all of us who know Him, love Him, and obey the religion that he has given us. Our Father... (recite the Pater Noster en the common language). My God, make it that all people go to heaven. Amen. The beginning of the religion is that there is a God and an only God. To Him all glory and all praise. He is infinitely perfect, all powerful, eternal, creator and master of all that is. There is nothing He did not make, and He made everything. He has need of nothing and He has created the creatures with pure kindness, that they may share with each other the richness of his joy and of his glory: (like a rich harvest in the house of the poor, not because he needs them, but to give them happiness, by pure kindness). God is pure, immense spirit; He sees all; He knows all, that which was that which is, that which will be, that which can be. God is infinitely good; He loves us, not because we are good, but because He is good: He is like the father of all people, who created all to give us happiness in heaven, those who hear His words, follow His commandments, and practice His religion. In being Father of all, and loving of all, He wants them to love each other, to regard each other as brothers, and to live all in the same peace and the same affection that any good father would want among his sons. It is therefore a great responsibility to love all people as brothers and like oneself, and it is impossible to please God if one lacks love for a single person, like a son cannot please his father if he lacks in love for a single one of his brothers. The first thing must be believed is that there is one God. The first thing that must be done is to love God with all our heart, with all our love, with all our spirit, and with all our strength. The second thing that must be believed is that God loves all people very much, like the best of fathers loves his children. The second thing that must be done is to love all people as ourselves and as our brothers, because God loves us like His children, and He commands us to do this. These two things, the love of God and the love of people, are the foundation of the religion of God. They are expressed very well in the following prayer that God Himself has taught us: we ask for the love of God, and we ask it for all people: Our Father, etc... We ask God now and always, ask Him day and night, that we and all other people that are on earth love Him with all our heart, with all our love, with all our spirit, and with all our strength, and that we love our neighbor as ourselves. Amen. Our Father. My God, make it that all people go to heaven. It is important to realize, though, that despite his inclusive tone and his refraining from preaching (other than by living simply) during life, the next chapter makes clear that Foucauld has clear ideas about the superiority of Christianity over and against other faiths. In the following section he writes, (again, my probably faulty translation) Therefore all the other religions are not the religion of God, but are false religions, and all those, after Our Lord Jesus, who are said to be prophets are not prophets. In a passage included in Orbis's new edition of Foucauld's selected writings, he refers to the influence that Muslim spirituality had in reawakening his own faith. This is something, incidentally, that I strongly resonate with in my own journey. Of course, he was encouraged to shrug them off. In its beginnings my faith had a good many obstacles to conquer. I had doubted so much that I didn't believe everything in a day. First it was the miracles in the Gospel that I considered unbelievable. Then it was that I wanted to mix in passages of the Koran with my prayers. But God's grace and my confessor's advice cleared away the fog. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
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