The 31 year-old Henri Tempier, who had lived 3 years of intense community life in Aix, now found himself at ND du Laus with one Oblate student and one postulant. Zealous missionary that he was and obedient religious, he still suffered on the human level and asked to return to Aix. This letter that he wrote to Eugene gives us glimpses of his loneliness
My dearly beloved Father,
Your letters give me life, your words are a balm which soothes my heart; it seems to me that when I have the happiness to receive one of them and to read it, that I am close to you, that I hear you. Oh! that the illusion could become a reality!
He suffers because Eugene is experiencing difficulties with some of the diocesan priests in Aix, and he would like to be there to support him.
I would then be able to go to Aix immediately to soften a little the troubles that you speak about in detail. I sense how your heart is put to all kinds of tests.
Then he feels guilty because he has added extra burdens to Eugene by complaining about his own situation in Laus:
But how could I have increased those difficulties by writing you things that have possibly grieved you? I don’t know: it must be that I have a hard heart. Oh! I insist that such is not the case, and that I would never want to grieve someone who is so good, so kind to me.
So, attribute my relating of our miseries to an excessive sorrow I feel from being separated from you and see in that my lack of virtue whereby I lose the merit of all I do. I don’t think I have said anything which might be contrary to the spirit of submission. If i have asked a little too strongly to be relieved of my duties, it is always according to your will, for I insist that I want only what you desire. I wanted to tell you all these things because, even though you already know them, I still love to write to you.
Letter from Henri Tempier to Eugene de Mazenod, 20 July 1819,
Oblate Writings II.2, n. 16
Eugene found it impossible to replace Henri Tempier without compromising the quality of the missionary work in Laus and its religious spirit of unity with Aix. He was to remain there for over four years, and from time to time he asked to return to Aix. The reply was always the same, as we see in this letter of 1822 in which Eugene was replying to the same request:
What I wished in beginning this letter was to tell you, my dear friend, how touched I was by the sentiments you expressed to me in such an edifying manner in your last letter. I recognized from the first page the true religious, the honest man, the good heart, my dear Tempier through and through. I thank the good God unceasingly for having brought us together and I pray him to fill you more and more with his spirit for our greater common good.
You ought to feel yourself that I cannot possibly yield to your wishes…
All these things together make you realize well enough that it is not possible, for the moment, that I recall you definitively to my side…
Letter to Henri Tempier, 22 August 1822, O.W. VI n.86
Our present Rule of Life touches on this:
“We will find our support in friendship and in fraternal life, in apostolic commitment to all, in self-denial and in prayer”
CC&RR Constitution 18
“Friendship needs no words – it is solitude delivered from the anguish of loneliness.” Dag Hammarskjold
Wow – there is so much in this today. I love too how all of it is broken down and framed. Henri, after 3 years of intense community life in Aix. I had a wonderful intense and rich experience of community life up at Madonna House. And when it came time for me to leave (and even though in my heart I knew that God was calling me to be elsewhere) it was incredibly hard. I missed being an integral part of the daily life of the people I had come to love so dearly and who had played such a tremendous part in loving me back into being. I missed the teaching and the learning, I missed the rich spirituality and I so missed “being a part of” it all. For with community we/I come to life, with the love and the support (not leaning on or feeding off of) we walk alone together.
Henri’s naked honesty in his love of and sorrow for is without pretense. It is stated as truth and he allows his pain to sit out there rather than covering it up, even as he realizes that Eugene will recognize both. He shares himself out of love. A few weeks ago at church a friend of mine approached me and told me that I did not seem to be myself – that she was not seeing the ‘joy’ that she is used to seeing as a part of me. I explained that a part of my journey right then was being in a hard place, where I needed to be and that I would be okay. I just needed to be there at that time. And then as I had the day before I again sat down before/with God and cried (inside) about the dry arid land I seemed to have found myself in. I cried that I didn’t know where I was going or why, just that I was missing God somehow. I also told God that I did not expect that anything would change because of my cries (unless of course God felt that perhaps I really had struggled enough), but that I just needed to be able to state what I felt happening. And I know that God heard my cries, and I know that God held me and called me beloved. Still I continued to be with my community and go to church and go to class and be where I was supposed to be.
And I so loved Eugene’s honesty and love in his letter back to Henri. He said how much he needed to hear from Henri and what a gift from God Henri was in his life, but how he too needed to listen to God and do what he must, for God and for their community. He raised it all up somehow. I am reminded of a small prayer from Richard Rohr which says: “May all I have be a naked but enduring hope in God.”