The enforced break turned out to be an important moment of reflection and clarification for Eugene. For almost a year he had been constantly occupied with every detail of the birth of the Missionaries of Provence. Now he was forced to stop and spend several weeks resting and reflecting. He also took the opportunity to make a personal retreat, which we will examine in the coming days and see how it became the occasion for some significant insights.
Divine Providence, knowing my spiritual needs, has permitted a slight excess of bodily tiredness to cause my health to deteriorate and my brothers’ charity to be unduly alarmed and require me to come into this desert place to take a little rest.
The doctor thought in this way to care for my health, and God, in all his goodness and mercy, was preparing me a means of salvation. I will try to profit from it and seriously examine my interior life, for my pressing tasks impede me, they really do not leave me the time, either when I am in town or on the missions for thinking about myself. And what is the result? That each day I get more miserable, and, never having donned many virtues, I am left with nothing but rags.
This is a distressing thought, for since I am destined to busy myself continually with my neighbour’s salvation, my position placing me continually in a multiplicity of relationships, if I do not have the talent, or rather, if God in his goodness does not do me the favour of letting me grow in virtue in the midst of this tumult of business and of sanctifying myself on the wing, I am a pitiable thing and certainly my affairs are in a real mess.
Retreat Notes, July-August 1816, O.W. XV n 139
I have often said that when I have gotten sick it has been God’s way of slowing me down and getting me to look at him and my life in him. Not that God causes me to get sick, but he does allow it and then uses that illness as an invitation for me to slow down, and look at my life, where I am going, who I am in him and him in me. A pause from the doing which I can be so very good at and taking the time to look and listen and to just be.
Here I see Eugene taking the time (which has been enforced upon him in his illness) and using it as such for the greater good – that is to allow God to work in him in such as way that is not always possible in the busyness of Eugene’s life. Eugene’s acceptance of the limitations (when forced to look at then that way) of his body and so taking the opportunity to feed his spirit. It seems to me that this is part of the reason that the CC&RR includes the necessity, the requirement that each Oblate spend time each year in retreat, it is a time to stop the doing, to allow him/herself to be taken care of so that all of the time is then to attend to the interior, the being. It can be a time of refocusing and renewal, of being nourished. This is what I did in the days leading up to last Christmas when I was sick and it worked for me. It turned out to be a time of many gifts.
Today is the Feast of Corpus Christi – the Feast of the Body and Blood of Jesus the Christ and so it is fitting – this posting for today. In the homily at Mass last night the homilist spoke of this being a verb – not a noun – of it being, not just a title. “It is in the sharing of the Eucharist – the giving and the receiving…” the body of Christ – where the interior and the exterior meet and become one, the incarnation of God. The action of seeing the Body of Christ in ourselves, in others, in everyone. It is never just one’s self alone, it is always with and in others, always shared. I think of the joy of being a Eucharistic Minister, the receiving in the giving and the giving in the receiving – “one and the other”.
Today I will go to Mass and be able to take in more of the homily because I can only come away with so much. I will go to Mass because of my need, not just a nice want, but a hunger for more. The Eucharist which some call the “kiss of God” , that joining in oneness with God, connecting us to each other. The Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ. O joyous feast day.