Nine days after his previous instructions to Fr. Mie, Eugene’s patience with this missionary’s misplaced zeal begins to wear thin.
I told you positively to do only one mission when you left Marseilles and I even fixed a limit, as I wished you to take some rest before undertaking the retreat of Fuveau which was to precede ours immediately. You however plunge yourselves into a maze from which you can no longer extricate yourselves. There are only two of you and you take on work enough for six. You go from one region to another, separating from each other, contrary to the will of our Rules which are well known to you, and you do not even think of taking the least moment of rest nor making your companion take some himself. In vain I write you to stop, to catch your breath, you keep on just the same.
Letter to Pierre Mie, 11 October 1826, EO VII n257
“Beware the barrenness of a busy life.” Socrates
How easy it is for us to get caught up in “the mission” (or at least our view of it), to run off on our own as if we each of us know better than others. I dare say it is a temptation which can assail any of us. It seems to have taken me a lifetime to realise that on my own, I can get nowhere really fast. I think of some of my times with my spiritual director. Sometimes it could be so very easy (and so dangerous) to tell myself that I know better than than him or her, that on my own and through my limited self that I know better who is God and what “god is really calling me to”, etc. etc. What I need to be able to do is to surrender myself, to follow the rules (as Eugene mentioned the Rule of the congregation), to cede to a greater wisdom than my own and to be a small part of something much greater than myself. This is not the surrender of an army losing to another army, but rather the ‘letting go of self’ just as we do with God so that we can freely enter into the embrace of love and a place of being.
I think that perhaps this is all a part of my moving slowly and inexorably towards my day of ‘commitment’ (because that crowds my mind so often) and there is a certain joy in that. I can only thank God for all that I am given and rather than running after more perhaps this day I might just sit and be where I am.