You will live in whole-hearted obedience
toward all those who share the authority of Christ in his Church
and have responsibility over you.
Little Sister,
This will be one of the most serious and exacting points of your commitment. Think about it carefully before you start off on a path where you will not be able to compromise or hold anything back.
Already by your vocation to religious life you are in God's hands and totally dependent on him.
For a little sister this state of total dependency on God must be carried to the extreme. For Brother Charles of Jesus obedience meant the most perfect expression of self-surrender to Love, and throughout his writings he never tires of repeating the words Christ said to those he made his representatives on earth:
Anyone who listens to you, listens to me. Luke:
Think it over carefully, because this form of obedience will often be one of the most difficult things that Love will ask of you.
You will have to give up the possibility of organizing your own life and you will have to do something that you have probably never done so far: bend your will to that of another person whom you consider neither very capable nor very holy. It is through her sharing in the authority of Christ present in his Church that the Will of God will be expressed for you.
For your obedience to be truly an act of love, you must obey intelligently and wholeheartedly. Try to understand what you have been asked to do, and do your best to meet the thought of those who make present the Lord's Will for you. That way you will be sure of doing the Will of your beloved Brother and Lord Jesus.
"There is no greater proof of love than to do the will of the one you love."(Brother Charles of Jesus.)
In a time when so many people want to dispute authority and decide for themselves, you must remain in the avant-garde and at the same time be childlike and docile towards the Church. You may hear others speaking disrespectfully about the representatives of the Church and taking lightly what they say. You, however, must be attentive to their words and have for the Holy Father and the hierarchy of the Church a love like that of a child for his father.
People around you may question the wisdom of certain Church directives. You must accept them humbly, loyally and with confidence because as quoted before, Jesus said,
Anyone who listens to you listens to me.
Only by such obedience will you be able to fulfill your vocation, which is one of love.
"The more we are united to the Church, the more we are united to the Holy Spirit who animates her, the more we will love him whose body she is, our beloved Lord Jesus." (Rule of the Little Brothers).
Without this obedience, even your most lofty desires for holiness and love will come to nothing because they will lack a supernatural outlook.
Why do you call me "Lord, Lord" and not do what I say? (Luke 6:46)
Through obedience you will unite your will to the Will of our beloved Lord and remain in his Love and Friendship:
You are my friends if you do what I command you. (John 15:14)
Like Christ you will sometimes have to struggle to conform your will to the Will of your Father in heaven. But if your love is real, you will have all the strength needed to say with Jesus:
Father, Your Will be done, not mine. (Luke 22:42).
You must seek to be the least considered
and treasure the lowest place, becoming totally
poor in spirit, holding nothing as your own
Are you really aware that to be a true follower of Brother Charles of Jesus, you must be a living witness of his thought and of his desire to be totally poor, humble and lowly?
Like Brother Charles of Jesus, you will have to live as the poor do and among the poor, in line with the Gospel.
You will have to be very true and honest about this, because those who see you will think of Brother Charles. Sometimes you will be surrounded by his popularity and the love that his friends had for him. It would not be right for you to bear his name or to be called his daughter if you disappointed them by loving poverty and humility in another way than his. To fail to live this form of poverty is to betray his thought. You have only to refer to his writings:
"My Lord Jesus, how quickly someone will become poor who, loving you with all his heart, cannot accept to be richer than his beloved. How quickly he will become poor who accepts with faith your words,
If you wish to be perfect, go and sell what you own and give the money to the poor.
Blessed are the poor, for whoever has left his possessions for me will be repaid a hundred times over now in this present time and, in the world to come, eternal life.
"My God I do not know how it is possible for some people to see you in poverty and for them to remain voluntarily rich. As for myself I could not imagine love without a longing, a compelling longing to imitate, to resemble the Beloved."
"Our love can be measured by how closely we imitate the one we love.
"To be rich, to live in comfort among my possessions while you were poor, deprived, living in misery under the burden of heavy labor -- I just could not do it. O God, I could not love like that."
"I must always seek the very lowest place, so as to be as little as my Master, so as to be with him, to walk behind him step by step, arranging my life so as to be the least of all, the most despised of men. To embrace poverty, abjection and suffering.
"Set up home as did Jesus at Nazareth, obscurely, poorly, humbly, as a hard working laborer. Imitate as closely as possible the humble and hidden existence of the Divine Workman of Nazareth, living only from the work of his hands.
"Let us always keep before our eyes Jesus, the one and only Model, the Carpenter, the Son of Mary, remembering that any material possessions over and above what he had would only show how different we are from him, how different our desires from his own.
"Let us empty our hearts of the love of material things, by interior poverty, by the complete emptying of the soul which must be detached from all that is not God and Jesus, using material things only for the love of God and in obedience to God, according to his Will, always ready to have less rather than more, to suffer want rather than to lack nothing so as to be more like him who did not even have a stone upon which to lay his head and for whose garments lots were drawn.
"Not to be concerned over health or life any more than the tree is concerned over a leaf that falls."
Do you want to live this total poverty for love of Jesus? Like Brother Charles of Jesus, do you really want to be the least considered, do you want to love abjection?
Kneeling before Pope Pius XII in 1944 we introduced ourselves officially as Little Sisters of no importance at all, Little Sisters whom no one would even think of taking into consideration. We presented our Fraternity as a working Congregation belonging to the social class of poor people and of ordinary manual workers, with no other aim than to follow our beloved Brother and Lord Jesus along the path of humility and lowliness.
Our Constitutions and their commentary are full of paragraphs like these, all inspired by Brother Charles of Jesus:
"Love poverty and abjection and desire them with all our might, so that like Jesus our Beloved Brother and Lord, we may have the joy of being humiliated, ill-considered, and treated as worthless for love of him.
"Practice the virtue of poverty by taking the poverty and abjection of Jesus as our example. For love of us he chose the lowest place, was born in a stable, had no where to lay his head, died stripped of everything on a cross while soldiers cast lots for his clothes, and was buried in a borrowed tomb.
"Be happy each time we have to cut back on a necessity and suffer from poverty, which we will prefer to all the goods of the earth. We will rejoice much less over what we have than over what we lack.
We should not possess dowries or investments or any other means that dispense us from living in the poverty of small craftsmen who eke out their living day by day as Jesus did.
Esteem highly manual work, in union with Jesus the Divine Workman, Son of Mary and adoptive son of Joseph the carpenter.
Love with special preference those who are humble and thought little of, remembering that the smallest act of kindness and love shown to the least of his brothers is always addressed directly to Jesus. They are JesusŐ suffering members, so always be very welcoming, full of respect and love and even more thoughtful and attentive to them.
Share the life of poor people. Live in the same kind of houses, eat the same kind of food, wear the same clothes, travel in the same class, receive the same hospital care, and be buried like them. Like Jesus who made himself last of all and servant of all, do not let ourselves be waited on. Rather keep the most lowly and the most unattractive occupations for ourselves.
Within the fraternities, we should always want to be less than others. Be ready to accept humiliations without trying to find an excuse for our faults even if we are reproached unjustly, unless the honor of God or the cause of charity are directly at stake. Remember the meekness and humility of Jesus who was silent before his judges and had only prayers for his tormentors.
Try to be humble in thought, word and action. Humble with the lowly as with the great, in the face of success as in the face of failure, on receiving praise as on receiving scorn. Always be very gentle and tolerant and avoid passing judgment on others.
Through the virtue of poverty seek not so much the material hardships of exterior poverty as the lowliness of the humiliation and disregard that go with it, and deeper still, the self-dispossession of interior poverty, making us long to be more like Jesus each day.
Do you realize, when you have read these texts, just what your vocation requires? You will have to forget yourself; you will have to claim nothing as your own. Otherwise, instead of living your vocation, you would just be admiring it as an ideal. You must follow through and be consistent, especially when you yourself are directly concerned.
Certain people form an idea about religious dignity. You, because of your vocation, will have to take a stand which does not correspond to their ideas, and this will be difficult, for these people may be among your close friends, among those whose advice you trusted. They will probably accuse you of foolishness, and like Christ you will sometimes be a cause of scandal.
And you will have to hold fast on account of your vocation!
As a Little Sister of Brother Charles of Jesus, you are called to live a form of poverty that may not be that of others. In the name of Brother Charles, you will have to safeguard and defend your ideal from those who have not yet understood all the love contained in this desire for poverty and abjection, directly inspired by the mystery of Christ's Incarnation and Passion.
You will have to hold your ground because you have chosen to give your life among the poorest and the most forsaken. How would you be able to be understanding and loving if you did not share a little in their sufferings and in their poverty? How could you bear to live in ease and comfort, lacking nothing, while they lack everything, and not be the least bit disturbed by their condition?
You will have to hold fast, and you will hold fast if you keep your eyes on your One and Only Model, Jesus the workman, Son of Mary and son of the carpenter Joseph. Jesus who was born, loved and died in the most abject conditions, who so completely chose the lowest place that no one has ever been able to take it from him; Jesus, destined to be despised by the authorities, the Pharisees, the priests and rulers of the people; Jesus who was a scandal for the Jews and folly for the Gentiles.
Do you want to follow him as far as that?