Art. 37. All this material care lavished on the sick congregants indicates with what zeal the Congregation will pay close attention to provide them with an infinitely higher form of care.
Statuts XIV, §2 Envers les congréganistes malades
The Youth Congregation existed to form the young men of Aix into a living group that would make a difference to the youth of Aix. The means to achieve this was to become firmly centred on living Gospel values. According to the principles Eugene writes in their Rule of life, he wants to lead the congregants from an experience of human kindness to a deeper appreciation of the meaning of God’s kindness.
The congregants were thus to share their time and resources wherever possible, but this kindness was to extend to prayer as well. If the signs of the illness of their confrere become dangerous, the sacrament of the sick was to be administered. On the day that this was happening, all the congregants were asked to go to their nearest church and to pray for their dying brother in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament.
Kindness is a language we all understand. Even the blind can see it and the deaf can hear it. ~ Mother Teresa
The language of kindness – c’est le langue de l’amour – it is the language of love. I love that Eugene is calling the youth to prayer, to prayer before the Blessed Sacrament, it is a call that he invites all of us to join in and it speaks to me most personally today.
I find that in this time and place, this part of the world at least when someone we love is sick and perhaps dying, for the most part they are taken to a hospital and they are cared for in some fashion or another. We go and visit them, care for them sometimes in small ways, and it may only be that we can be a presence with them. So we do that because we love them – it is the least and sometimes the most that we can do.
But always there is prayer and particularly prayer before the Blessed Sacrament. Often I think it is the only way we can give ourselves in that love for others. We cannot always “do”, but with God we can be. We can lift up the other to God, give that person to God because as humans that is a part of our DNA, to love and care for. It can be and it is often hard for us when the only thing that we can truly do is to give our loved one(s) to God. And in that is our only true consolation.
Incredible – that prayer becomes not just a way of handing over the other to be loved and cared for by God, but at the same time it is a way of allowing God to love us in our own poverty of pain. It becomes a way of receiving consolation and love. I see it as not one or the other but both. An aha moment here because: As we love we are loved.
This morning I picture Eugene – with the youth in Aix, teaching them, guiding them, growing them and I picture myself amongst them as today I pray for many and particularly the many who make up a part of this wonderful Mazenodian Family, with special thoughts for Tom Cassidy, OMI and Elaine Rankin. I know Lord that you know their names, more intimately than I, but I need to say them outloud as I give them over to you.