A Homily for the Twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time
Readings: Sirach 3:17-18, 20, 28-29  Hebrews 12:18-19, 22-24a  Luke 14:1, 7-14

We meet him first as a young man in the 1870s. He will not live to die an old man. 

He is a son of the aristocracy. How many viscounts can claim forebears who fought in the Crusades? Perhaps predictably, privilege has pilfered his ambition. His family has had to grease his way through Saint-Cyr, the prestigious military academy of France. Though it has been altered to accommodate his weight, he does look magnificent in the braid-decked uniform of a cadet. His mistress certainly thinks so. 

A classmate writes of this young man:

[I]f you have not seen [him] in his room, clad in his white flannel pajamas buttoned with frogs, sprawled leisurely on his divan or in a commodious armchair, enjoying a tasty snack of pâté de fois gras, washing it down with a choice champagne, then you have never seen a man really enjoying himself. 

At the end of his life, we meet him again, far into the mountainous interior of French Algeria, near an oasis called Tamanrasset. He is a Catholic priest and hermit. Accepted by the surrounding Muslim population, the only Christians he encounters are occasional French soldiers, some of whose officers still recall the earlier man. 

He had been a Trappist, a member of the most austere of Catholic monastic orders, for six years, but after receiving permission to follow Jesus more closely, to imitate him in his poverty and obscurity, he became a porter and servant for a community of religious sisters in Nazareth. He loved the seclusion, the simple obedience to commands. 

Yet he has left even that small comfort to live alone in the desert. He wants to establish a community of “little brothers,” those who also want to embrace absolute poverty and obscurity. None come. He writes in his journal:

My God, I do not know how it is possible for some souls to see you in poverty and themselves remain rich, to imagine themselves so much grander than their Master, their Beloved, and not want to be like him in all things—as far as it is possible for them to decide—and especially in your humbleness. I do not doubt their love for you, my God, but I think there is something lacking in their love—I, at any rate, could not imagine love without a longing, a compelling longing, to imitate, to resemble the Beloved, and especially to share all his life’s pains, difficulties, and burdens. 

In December 1916, he is dragged from his hut by a band of tribal bandits. They intend to hold him for ransom, but as a French camel corps approaches, a startled raider shoots him in the head, killing him instantly. On May 15, 2022, Pope Francis will canonize Charles Eugène, Vicomte de Foucauld de Pontbriand.

The Scriptures enjoin us to humility. Inside the word lies the Latin humus, meaning earth, ground or soil. To be humble is to have one’s feet on the ground, to be settled into the real rather than the imaginary. How did St. Charles de Foucauld, a scion of aristocratic privilege, come to so own the virtue? What crucial scene lies between the cadet and the martyr?

It is well worth our examination. 

As a young army officer posted to French Algeria, Charles de Foucauld was impressed by the piety of simple Muslims. He sensed that his own life of entitlement was empty. Returning to France and wandering the streets of Paris, Foucault wrote of 

the urge I felt to go into your churches—I who did not believe in you; my unrest of soul, my anguish; my search for truth; my prayer: “O God, if you exist, let me know of your existence.” 

By the fall of 1886, he was well on track to become what we would now call “spiritual but not religious,” shopping for a belief that made sense to him. And he had devised a strategy regarding the discarded Catholicism of his childhood:

[S]tudy this religion…put yourself under a teacher of the Catholic religion, a learned priest, and see what there is in it, and if you find yourself compelled to believe what it teaches.

So Foucauld visited the Church of St. Augustine to seek out its well-regarded Abbé Henri Huvelin. He found the priest in his confessional and asked him to recommend some spiritual reading, but the noted confessor and spiritual director refused to engage the young man on the level of the intellect.

I asked for instruction in religion: he made me get down on my knees and make my confession and sent me straight away to Holy Communion. 

Abbé Huvelin did not explain God to Charles Foucauld. Who among us could do that? He did not even take the time to answer the young man’s many questions. Instead, he convinced Charles of his need for God’s mercy, God’s love. 

A notion of God is quite distinct from an experience of God. The latter is almost always bound to awareness of our own sinfulness. Put another way, to know God is to know who we are not. God is not some idea we master, some notion we examine, comprehend and find to be credible. That could never be God! 

No, God only emerges when we humbly encounter our own indigence, when we realize, as Dante would put it, that

Midway in the journey of our life
I came to myself in a dark wood.
For the straight way was lost (Inferno, I.1).

Charles wrote of receiving those two sacraments of his withered Catholic faith:

When I think of it, I cannot stop myself from crying: and I do not want to stop the tears running down for, O God, they are so justified. What streams of tears should flow from my eyes at the remembrance of so many mercies! How good you have been—how happy I am! What have I done to deserve it? 

If you are a Christian who still wonders if it could all be true, who hopes that it is but is not yet sure, then you are a Christian who has not yet come to know, as Charles put it, echoing Augustine, “humility is the truth.” 

The sequence is not: I will understand God and then make a choice. No, it is this: I see my sin, which I did not see before. I can see it now only because someone comes to me, loving me despite my indigence. One could say that to find God is to know humility, though the converse is equally true: to know humility is to find God.

Is the complexity of modern life being rendered too simply? Yet Charles de Foucauld would not say that we have reduced his life to three simple scenes. Indeed, he would say that this is all there really is to life: our haughty indigence, our encounter with the God who is not us but who in his mercy loves and redeems us, and finally our knowledge that “we cannot possibly love him without imitating him.” 

The Rev. Terrance W. Klein is a priest of the Diocese of Dodge City and author of Vanity Faith.