Around the age of 24 Eugene entered a period of self-searching, a journey that reached a high-point one Good Friday:
So I had looked for happiness outside of God, and outside him I found but affliction and chagrin.Blessed, a thousand times blessed, that he, this good Father, notwithstanding my unworthiness, lavished on me all the richness of his mercy.
Let me at least make up for lost time by redoubling my love for him. May all my actions, thoughts, etc., be directed to that end.
What more glorious occupation than to act in everything and for everything only for God, to love him above all else, to love him all the more as one who has loved him too late.
Retreat Journal, December 1814, E.O. XV n.130
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You can have a “Saint Eugene speaks” app on your ipad by going to http://myapp.is/Eugenespeaks ON YOUR TABLET and following the instructions
Last week – the day after St Eugene’s feast day – there was the “once a month evening Mass” at Galilee Centre. As we have been rereading St Eugene’s transformation this past week, I keep in mind that Fr Roy used the Mass as an opprtunity to share with us the prayers from the Mass to celebrate his Sainthood, as well as Fr Rolheiser’s words of reflection on St Eugene. As we have been rereading St Eugene’s transformation this past week, it has been helpful seeing both the changes along with Fr Rolheiser’s term of “human saint.
And yet I am also reminded that we are ALL called to be saints and yet we are all human… with the story of Bob Lax, a friend of Thomas Merton telling him that he should be aimimg to be a saint .”Lax said: “All that is necessary to be a saint is to want to be one. Don’t you believe that God will make you what He created you to be, if you will consent to let him do it? All you have to do is desire it.”… (quote from Rocco Palmo’s blog “Whispers in the Loggia”, but of a homily by Greg Kandra)
I don’t think that I “desire” it enough.
And I certainly … don’t …
DARE!
I find myself this morning looking at Eugene’s last phrase “….to love him all the more as one who has loved him too late.” I wonder what Eugene meant by that last phrase – he was young when he wrote it, his life is not yet over. Was there meaning in it or just a phrase?
I find myself struggling with a sense of what now? To be becoming so alive – how do I live that out? How do I simply “BE” – in order to do? It feels a little like I spent most of my life doing – because that is what one did and then to find life and all that it implies – to find passion – to be filled with desire. I feel a little as if I have been told to let go of it and just be. I seem to be missing something here, what am I not understanding? That seems to be a big “dare” in my life and for sure not the dare that I felt called to step out into. I might be getting “giving up” confused with “letting go”. The word trust comes to mind and like Anda’s “dare” is trust. I wonder if I truly trust in God (I say I do but perhaps I do not). The only surety that I hang on to right now is that I cannot give up and turn away as did the rich young man in the gospel.
Anda spoke of how we are all called to become saints, as did Eugene. How does that happen? For once I truly question this whole thing of “being” which for a while I thought I understood, and which I thought was true, but which at this time I have absolutely no idea of what it really means. What have a really let go of up till now – I do not have a nice comfortable ready answer to that. The forest seems to be getting in the way of my being able to see the trees.