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Monday of the Third week of Easter

Commentary of the day
Blessed Charles de Foucauld (1858-1916), hermit and missionary in the Sahara
Retreat Notes, Nazareth, Nov. 1897

"This is the work of God, that you believe in the one he sent"

The senses are full of curiosity; faith is content to know nothing, it... longs to pass its life motionless before the Tabernacle. The senses love riches and honour; faith holds them in horror... “Blessed are the poor” (Mt 5,3). She adores the poverty and lowliness with which Jesus covered his life as though with a garment that he never cast off... The senses take fright at that which they call danger, at all that might mean pain or death; but faith is afraid of nothing; it knows nothing can happen to it but what is the will of God: “I have counted every hair of your head” (Mt 10,30) and whatever God wishes will always be for its good. “All that happens is for the good of my elect” (Rm 8,28). Thus in everything that may happen, sorrow or joy, health or sickness, life or death, it is content and fears nothing. The sense are anxious about the future and ask how we shall live tomorrow, but faith feels no anxiety...

Thus faith illumines everything with a new light, different to the life of the senses, more brilliant, of another kind. Whoever lives by faith has a soul full of new thoughts, new tastes, new impressions; new horizons open up, marvelous horizons lit with a new light, and with a divine beauty surrounded with new truths of which the world is not aware. Thus whoever believes begins a new life opposed to that of the world, whose acts seem like madness. The world is in the darkness of night, the person of faith is in full light: this light-filled path on which we walk is not manifest to others. It seems to them that we want to walk like a madman, in emptiness.