The community meeting had been successful, except for one member.
Only Father Martin, who has no more courage than he has common sense, finds it difficult to reconcile the work that he has been given and the regularity that I demand.
The world will not be won with apostles of this kind.
If I had been like that at 25 years of age, I think I would have begged God to let me drown in a lukewarm bath as a punishment for such cowardice.
Letter to Hippolyte Courtès, 6 March 1831, EO VIII n 386
The zealous Eugene, who burned passionately with his love for the Savior and wanted his Oblates to share this among themselves and among the most abandoned, could not understand anyone’s lack of passion and zeal
I have always secretly admired Eugene’s passion, his zeal, his daring and his courage. Those qualities that God seemed to fill him with – no different than those of St. Paul, and I am not sure that Fr. Martin was so blessed!
I myself am a passionate person, and sometimes I struggle not to demand, to ask for and expect that same degree of life from those around me. I also realize as I sit here that I sometimes use that passion and daring to try to hide my own insecurities, my own fears, my own brokenness; to walk through them, to walk in spite of them.
Again this morning Eugene is a model for me, an example, an inspiration. He handled the community problem by pulling the men back together into a stronger community, so that as community they would go out and share their love of the Saviour with those who were most abandoned. He did it using the Constitutions and Rules, their Rule of Life, bringing them back to a ‘regularity’. His ‘demand’ was no different than that of any other founder or superior or father. He went back to the root of why they were there together, who they were serving, what giving their all to God could look like.
Basic and good sense and practices – exactly what we find in the Old Testament and in the New. Jesus was a ‘star’ at this.
It was not what he did, but how he did it. That is what I want to imitate, to follow; what I want to strive to be like.