When Jesus began his public ministry, he announced: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring the Good News to the poor” (Luke 4, 18)
One Good Friday when the young and directionless Eugene looked at the Cross, he realized that he was poor, he was a sinner who had wandered away from God:
I looked for happiness outside of God and for too long with resulting unhappiness.
How often in my past life had my wounded, tormented heart taken wings for God from whom it had turned away!
…Can I forget the bitter tears that the sight of the cross brought streaming from my eyes one Good Friday? … they welled up from the heart, there was no checking them, they were too abundant I was in a state of mortal sin and it was precisely this that made me grieve.
He realized that he was poor and that Jesus had brought him the good news of salvation:
Blessed, a thousand times blessed, that he, this good Father, notwithstanding my unworthiness, lavished on me all the richness of his mercy.
Retreat Journal, December 1814, EO XV n.130
He founded the missionary Oblates in 1816 because he understood what it meant to be poor and in need of salvation, and wanted to bring the Good News to the poor who did not know God’s mercy and love.
We can thus say that our Oblate Rule is a shrine that preserves this ideal and helps us to live it as redeemed sinners: we recognize our poverty and allow ourselves to be transformed by God’s love and mercy.
This morning each paragraph, each phrase seems to awaken within me a desire to go deeper, to discover why Eugene’s words seem to strike me as much as they do.
Noticing that I have read Eugene’s words from his 1814 Retreat quite a few times and yet they have never become so alive as they are this morning: I am reminded of some of my experience(s) of God – not the same as Eugene’s and yet with such an effect that my life continues to grow and spiral downward within me so as to spiral upward through the chaos of the world around me. Transforming, enlivening and becoming more alive in ways I could ever have imagined and which are like the connecting dots in a drawing of my pilgrimage of life.
I wonder if Eugene realized the depths that the Scriptures had upon him as he wrote of “God lavishing on him all the richness of his mercy” in much the same way as is recounted in the parable of the prodigal son.
I remember hearing the Oblate Motto a few times before it sank into the depths of my heart’s understanding: that just like the poor I was sent to share my experience(s) of God with, I too was being evangelized by those to whom I was sent.
“It is as missionaries that we worship, in the various ways the Spirit suggests to us. We come before him bearing with us the daily pressures of our anxiety for those to whom he sends us (cf. 2 Cor 11:28). Our life in all its dimensions is a prayer that, in us and through us, God’s kingdom come.” (C 32)