French Algeria
December 1, 1916
The cloak of night lay over the shifting sands of the Sahara, concealing the arrival of a column of forty armed insurgents outside the walls of a remote hermitage. Their quarry was a holy man, an unassuming French priest and former soldier whom the rebels suspected of being an agent of the hated colonial authorities. A neighbor was bribed to betray the Frenchman to the waiting guerillas, who bound him at gunpoint and ransacked his stone house for weapons and valuables. The priest ignored his captors’ interrogations and prayed silently through the ordeal. After some minutes, a sound was heard in the distance—perhaps an approaching patrol of French troops or local militia? The rebels panicked and shot the priest in the head. The next morning his body was buried by the Tuareg Muslims among whom he lived.
Amidst the global fratricide of the First World War, when the trenches and killing fields were soaked in the blood of millions, the murder of one impoverished hermit in an isolated desert hut went unnoticed, just another unheralded tragedy of seemingly no consequence. Few would have predicted in 1916 that Charles de Foucauld would one day be recognized as one of the great spiritual masters of the twentieth century. At the time of his death, his spiritual writings were unpublished. Despite his best efforts, he had failed to attract even a small congregation of followers. He made not a single conversion among his Muslim neighbors.
Yet for Foucauld, these apparent failures were no cause for shame but an occasion for rejoicing. He wrote, “I should rejoice not in what I have but in what I lack, in lack of success and in penury, for then I have the cross and poverty of Jesus, the most precious possession the earth can give.” Like all the great saints, Foucauld’s life was attuned to a singular purpose—to imitate the life and death of Jesus Christ as closely as possible. His only ambition was that he “should cling to nothing but the will of God.”
Until this autumn, I knew next to nothing about Charles de Foucauld. I happened to be auditing a course called “Twentieth-Century Holiness” at St. Bernard’s School of Theology and Ministry. After devouring a short book of Foucauld’s selected writings as background reading for the class, I was deeply impressed. Despite all the vicissitudes of his eventful life, Foucauld found peace by surrendering his plans and projects completely to the will of Christ. I found myself burning for the kind of peace that Foucauld had found. Not that I was called to flee into the desert and live in solitude as he did! But I did sense that I was meant to encounter Foucauld’s spiritual wisdom during this season of my life. I can only compare the experience to the first time I read St. Augustine.
Foucauld’s way of life is remarkably countercultural because it represents the radicality of the Gospel lived to the fullest.
Indeed, Foucauld’s life story reads something like a modern-day retelling of Augustine’s Confessions. Born in Strasbourg, France, on September 15, 1858, to an aristocratic family and orphaned at a young age, Charles spent his early years drifting through life, aimless and absorbed in carousing, thrill seeking, and winning the esteem of his peers. He barely scraped by as a military cadet, racking up an impressive list of official reprimands for his extracurricular escapades. The turning point in his life came when he was deployed with the French army in North Africa, where he served with gallantry and distinction. Moreover, Charles became captivated by the harsh beauty of the Sahara Desert and the austere piety of the region’s Muslim inhabitants. This encounter with religion triggered in Charles a dissatisfaction with his dissolute lifestyle, and he embarked on an intense search for meaning. As Foucauld later recounted: “My exposure to this faith [Islam] and to the soul living always in God’s presence helped me understand that there is something greater and more real than the pleasures of this world.”
After a somewhat quixotic adventure mapping the North African desert, Foucauld returned to France and eventually embraced the Catholic faith of his youth. His conversion instilled a powerful new ambition to holiness. Of this time, Foucauld wrote, “As soon as I believed there was a God, I understood that I could not do anything other than live for him. My religious vocation dates from the same moment as my faith.”
Foucauld entered the Trappist order, renowned for the seriousness of its monastic observance. Yet it was not austere enough for Foucauld! He left the monastery and journeyed to the Holy Land, living for a time as a manual laborer in Nazareth in imitation of the “hidden years” of Jesus. Later, near the end of his life, Foucauld would reflect on the thirty years of Jesus in that small Galilean village, writing: “Jesus came to Nazareth, the place of the hidden life, of ordinary life, of family life, of prayer, work, obscurity, silent virtues, practiced with no witnesses other than God, his friends and neighbors. Nazareth, the place where most people lead their lives.”
In 1901, Foucauld was ordained a priest, despite his own misgivings. At long last, at age forty-two, after many years of trial and error, twists and turns, he discovered the true vocation God had planned for him. He began to develop a new model for contemplative religious life centered in a community of “Little Brothers of Jesus” who would live and work among the poorest of the poor. To this end, Foucauld returned to his beloved Sahara to dwell in the tiny settlement of Tamanrasset inhabited by the seminomadic Tuareg people. Foucauld’s holy and selfless life became a living witness. Every day he proclaimed the Gospel—not by learned sermons or catechesis but through solidarity, hospitality, and simple fraternal love.
Charles de Foucauld wrote that “I must never trouble about worldly position, celebrity, human esteem.” But Foucauld’s detachment from recognition and accomplishment was not an apathetic retreat into mediocrity. Nor was it the same as the Stoic philosopher’s serene indifference to life’s circumstances. Rather, Foucauld’s way of life is remarkably countercultural because it represents the radicality of the Gospel lived to the fullest. Foucauld’s way involved, in his words, the determination to actively “seek the lowest of low places and arrange my life so that I may be the last and most despised among men.” Of course, this brings to mind Jesus’ words when he was dining with the Pharisees:
When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do not sit down at the place of honor, in case someone more distinguished than you has been invited by your host; and the host who invited both of you may come and say to you, ‘Give this person your place,’ and then in disgrace you would start to take the lowest place. But when you are invited, go and sit down at the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he may say to you, ‘Friend, move up higher’; then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at the table with you. For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted. (Luke 14:8–11)
This teaching is in stark opposition to the powerful psychological tendency to classify ourselves and others as either “winners” or “losers” based on worldly success. Just consider the popular medieval image of the Wheel of Fortune: As the wheel turns, everyone on the rim (that is, everyone who has attached their self-worth to worldly wealth, power, pleasure, or honor) is either on their way up or on their way down. The only way to beat the cycle is to opt out—to get off the rim of the wheel. Charles de Foucauld did just that and in doing so he found complete freedom—the freedom to become a saint. He found genuine, lasting happiness and peace by embracing the “hidden life,” by conforming his will and his priorities to those of the man who dwells at the center of the wheel—that is, Jesus Christ. By surrendering all the contingent passing things men seek on the rim of the Wheel of Fortune, Foucauld was able to obtain the “one thing necessary” (see Luke 10:42).
Christ himself reminded his disciples that “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:24). Despite his lonely death, Charles de Foucauld’s life was spiritually fruitful. His writings continue to inspire countless believers, spiritual seekers, and several religious communities, including the Little Brothers and Little Sisters of Jesus.
This fruitfulness is possible precisely because Foucauld’s entire being was rooted in the words and example of his Master who, as the God-man, emptied himself completely. Christ labored as a poor workman from an obscure town; was scorned and misunderstood by his own neighbors and relations; was scourged and mocked by governors and kings; and, stripped of everything, submitted himself to a criminal’s death by slow torture. Foucauld knew that “the most fruitful hour of [Christ’s] life was that of his greatest abasement and annihilation, that in which he was plunged into suffering and humiliation.”
Amid the challenges, sufferings, and seeming failures of our own lives, the example of Charles de Foucauld can be, in Christ, a light upon our way. The road to the cross is the path of apparent failure that leads in the end to true and abiding life.
St. Charles de Foucauld, pray for us!