Eugene reflects on the experience of his ordination to the sub-diaconate, particularly his thoughts during the Litany of the Saints. Although he is not yet an “Oblate”, it is the language of joyful and generous oblation that dominates his descriptions of ministry – which he invites his mother to participate in.
Yes, it is really true that when I was making my prostration lying flat on my face, as the whole Church earnestly entreated God to deign to send his Spirit with all his gifts upon us, I begged him for my part to bless you and convince you totally that in offering your son freely to the sovereign Master of the Universe, you would not be losing him but rather gaining him for all eternity.
It would be impossible to try now to convey to you any idea of the joy the Lord poured into my soul that happy day. The kind of happiness one experiences at that moment is ineffable, and you must not think that this is perhaps because afterwards there are only vague and superficial traces left behind, on the contrary.
This state in which the grace of ordination places you is stable and permanent, staying habitually in the soul, but as it is wholly divine, it cannot be put into words and all forms of expression fall short. There is a kind of spiritual plenitude, there are swift movements towards God, there are delights that flood the soul. What can I say? I repeat, there is a tremendous happiness that one experiences in a very vivid way, but which one cannot describe to oneself, let alone to others.
After such an experience, don’t talk to me about the beauty of sacrifices, etc., etc. God in heaven, where is the sacrifice in giving practically nothing to get everything? So strong was this feeling on the day of my ordination that I asked God, by the intercession of the Blessed Virgin and all the Saints, who at that very moment were being invoked on our behalf, to deign graciously to pour out on me the fullness of his mercies and to let me make over to him my liberty and life, which were already his own on so many different counts. How true were the words that the Bishop addressed to us as he received our vows, that to serve God is to reign! …
Letter to Madame de Mazenod, 6 January 1810, O.W. XIV n. 66
Wow! Talk about soul sharing! Dear Eugene you undo me! The state that you have described so beautifully even while saying it was indescribable, is not totally unknown perhaps to some of us who have not been ordained. I wonder if it is not a gift of God’s very self to us when we accept from God a call to live in the way that has been chosen for us at the inception of our birth. The way that will most surely bring us home to him who breathed life into us for no other reason than to share His very self with us. I do not know what it is like to be ordained a priest in the same way that Eugene was or that many are today. I do not know what it is like to give yourself fully to God through another as it is in marriage or in giving birth to a child as it’s mother. And yet I seem to know of what Eugene shares.
“This state in which the grace of ordination places you is stable and permanent, staying habitually in the soul, but as it is wholly divine, it cannot be put into words and all forms of expression fall short. There is a kind of spiritual plenitude, there are swift movements towards God, there are delights that flood the soul. What can I say? I repeat, there is a tremendous happiness that one experiences in a very vivid way, but which one cannot describe to oneself, let alone to others.” I recognize on a deep level what Eugene is trying to say. Is this our connection with each other as members of the body of Christ? As members of the communion of saints? There is joy as my heart, my soul, my very being recognizes and somehow shares in what Eugene expresses. It is a shared joy that touches me in way that I cannot give words to, I can only experience it. One way of life is no lesser or greater than another, for I cannot say that God loves me, or anyone else more or less than another. God loves me as God loves me and that is surely most perfect and more than can ever be measured (even while I might sometimes try to measure but cannot). So we are left to celebrate the greatness perhaps of each other, to celebrate and imitate in some ways the yes of each other.
Today, this morning I celebrate with Eugene his ordained state, as I celebrate with my friends their married state, as I celebrate with some of my friends their [and mine] single state. Eugene writes in his letter to his mother “deign graciously to pour out on me the fullness of his mercies and to let me make over to him my liberty and life, which were already his own on so many different counts … to serve God is to reign!” Today we celebrate the Feast of Christ the King. “Christ the King … serving God … reigning” Those words are not always so popular today and yet they fit as much as they did years and ago and even before then. St. Bernard of Clairvaux wrote: “…Jesus is my Lord … To me he is God; to me he is the Lord; and I declare: I will have no king but the Lord Jesus! Come then, Lord, rout them by your power and you will reign in me, for you are my king and my God.”