An Affinity of Life and Character

Fr Marie-Eugène and Père Jacques are two great Carmelite figures of the twentieth century who have a remarkable affinity, both in their character and in the trajectory of their lives. By way of introduction, we can note a number of points in common. They were contemporaries: Henri Grialou, the future Fr Marie-Eugène, was born in 1894 and Lucien Bunel six years later. They were born into poor but devout families, and grew up in a France that was hostile to the Church and highly anticlerical. From a young age, each of them perceived a call to the priesthood. And as young boys and teenagers, they were captivated on reading the autobiography of the future St Thérèse who would remain important for them all their lives. In fact, when Thérèse was beatified in 1923, Fr Marie-Eugène would say that he had prayed for that more than for anything else. He recognised the greatness of her doctrine in her discovery of Mercy and her emphasis on a God of Love.¹

Around the time of their ordination to the diocesan priesthood – for Henri just before, and Lucien just afterwards – they each received a powerful call from God to enter Carmel. An encounter with John of the Cross was the catalyst in both cases. But as star preachers of their respective dioceses, they weren’t easily released by their bishops. Refusal after refusal created a painful, persevering wait. When finally they were able to enter Carmel – Henri in 1922, and Lucien in 1931 – they distinguished themselves for their holiness which overflowed the cloister, and for some remarkable achievements for the Order: Père Jacques oversaw the founding of a Carmelite school, of which he was headmaster and which gained a national reputation; and Fr Marie-Eugène founded the Secular Institute Notre-Dame de Vie and produced some of the greatest Carmelite writings of the twentieth century.

In terms of character, there was a remarkable affinity as well. Fr Marie-Eugène would have recognised this when he first met Lucien. They met three times, during which “the good Fr Eugène”, as Père Jacques used to refer to him (cf. Ph, p. 132),² was the providentially placed guide to help Lucien discern his vocation to Carmel. The first meeting was in July 1928 in the parlour of the Carmelite Monastery of Le Havre. Lucien was torn in two directions: wanting the intense prayer of the Trappists but knowing his own apostolic gifts. Fr Marie-Eugène showed him that the life of a Carmelite friar embraced the two, and he spoke to him of the place of prayer in Carmel (cf. Ph, p. 128). Lucien was enthused by this. He came back a few days later with further questions. Fr Marie-Eugène was delighted to see his seriousness in wanting to live the Carmelite life to the full.

In their third meeting, a year later, at Le Petit-Castelet in the south of France, Fr Marie-Eugène showed his great gifts as a spiritual director in trying to calm down Lucien who was aghast on receiving a letter from the bishop who was still refusing to release him from the diocese. Lucien was railing against his fate which he described as a “horror” and “terrible” (cf. Ph, p. 132). Fr Marie-Eugène helped him to see it as the work of Providence and the will of God, at least for now (cf. Ph, p. 132), and restored Lucien’s perspective of faith in his long wait that would end two years later.

Both men were also incredibly strong characters. They were born leaders and quite fearless. Fr Marie-Eugène was a captain in the First World War; Père Jacques was in the Resistance in the Second. Fr Marie-Eugène would later write a character description of Père Jacques, in terms that could apply just as much to Fr Marie-Eugène himself: a “generous soul” with an “imperative need for the absolute” (Ph, p. 128); a “soul made for heroism” (Ph, p. 129).

With characters like theirs, if they had relied solely on human nature, with its rootedness in original sin, they could have ended up dominating other people. Instead, they had great compassion and tenderness. They began with human strength and subsequently grew into divine, Christlike strength. But to make that bridge, they had first to consent to be weak, which brings us to the mystery of strength in weakness. In this contribution, then, I would first like to look at this theme in Fr Marie-Eugène’s writings – which will give us some of the theological basis – and to look a little at how he lived it in the last few weeks of his life when he was ill with cancer. Secondly, to look at how Père Jacques lived out strength and weakness in the final year of his life when he was a prisoner during the war. And finally, to examine one short work by each of them: to compare selected passages to see how they each approached the mystery of strength in weakness in Jesus during the paschal mystery.

Part I – Fr Marie-Eugène: “Surrendered to the Grace of God”

A number of important insights on weakness can be found throughout Fr Marie-Eugène’s major works, I Want to See God and I Am a Daughter of the Church. There are two kinds of weakness – which I’ll term “good” and “bad” weakness. These are not Fr Marie-Eugène’s terms but are simply used here for convenience. The “bad” weakness, so to speak, needs to be overcome and transformed into strength, so that we are in a better place to dispose ourselves for spiritual transformation and to become more capable of entering into the nights of sense and spirit that can bring us ever closer to union with God. The “good” weakness is itself a springboard to union with God. The goal is the same but the strategy, inevitably, differs.

The “Bad” Weakness…

Fr Marie-Eugène points out that the soul is especially weak at the beginning of the spiritual life (cf. IWSG, p. 250).³ We do, of course, need to preserve the spiritual life – for example, with perseverance in prayer, so that aridity and distractions don’t stop us in our tracks, and the tempter succeed in making us give up prayer (cf. IWSG, p. 244). We can also think of strategies involving a certain discipline in life, the practice of virtue, frequenting the sacraments and so on. And alongside this is the help that God himself gives us. Fr Marie-Eugène quotes Teresa, saying that the Lord grants us favours in order to strengthen us when we are weak, so that we may be able to follow the example of Christ in our sufferings (cf. IADC, p. 607).⁴ And he points out that the Holy Spirit comes to help us in our weakness (cf. IADC, p. 381; Rm 8:26). In the case of prayer, he says, we must – while relying on the Spirit – still remain in interior solitude and keep our eyes fixed on God (cf. IADC, p. 381), thus cooperating with the Holy Spirit and allowing him to help us. In all this, then, we see a collaboration required between ourselves and God to tackle the weak points that could be obstacles to continuing or progressing on the spiritual journey.

The “Good” Weakness…

But where we sense the heartbeat of Fr Marie-Eugène is where he speaks of what I’ve termed the “good” weakness: a desirable weakness, the kind that attracts God’s strength and mercy and is at the heart of Thérèse’s “spiritual childhood”.⁵ In fact, this is not weakness as such, but a disposition that comes after we become aware of our weakness: an embracing of weakness so as to depend on God. Thus, he quotes Thérèse: “It’s so good to feel that one is weak and little” (LC, p. 74; cf. IADC, p. 399).⁶ We note that this is not saying: just to be weak and little, but to know it and especially to feel it. As Fr Marie-Eugène expresses it perfectly: this feeling of poverty “creates [in Thérèse] a constant need of God” (IADC, p. 401). He uses various words to describe this disposition of weakness: spiritual childhood, poverty, humility, littleness, dependence on God, confidence in God.

There is more than one way of becoming aware of our weakness: through perceptive attentiveness; or, without any special insight, in cases when it is more than obvious (!); or sometimes the Holy Spirit shines a light for us when we can’t see our weakness for ourselves. And this weakness can be seen in our sins, our faults, our imperfections. The kind of thing that St Teresa calls: “one day of humble self-knowledge”.⁷ And we all have plenty of those days…

An example from the life of St Thérèse was when, during her final illness, she expressed momentary impatience with two of her sisters in the community. Afterwards, she at first felt humiliated; but instead of lingering on that, which would have kept the focus on her own failings, she quickly owned her weakness and turned to God; and then, she says, “the vessel of divine Mercy overflowed for me!”⁸ This kind of experience, with its attendant sense of humiliation, is obviously a bit uncomfortable, which may well be why Fr Marie-Eugène emphasises Thérèse’s words: that we “must consent to remain always poor and without strength”, and that “this is the difficulty”.⁹ Human nature likes to feel strong; there’s a certain feel-good factor about feeling strong. So it has to be a work of grace to choose to feel weak. And it will be worthwhile.

There is also another, more mystical way in which we may feel our weakness. Fr Marie-Eugène said that at certain times in his life he felt that he was being seized by the Holy Spirit, or “as if pushed by the shoulders by a force that was driving [him] forward” (RR, p. 102).¹⁰ This is when we don’t so much feel our weakness as such, but rather we experience it by way of contrast with feeling the strength of God. These experiences of the Holy Spirit may well explain why Fr Marie-Eugène said, “St Thérèse felt the mildness of [Mercy]; I feel its power” (RR, p. 136).

“My power is made perfect in weakness”

In a climactic passage of I Am a Daughter of the Church – on the effects of the night of the spirit – Fr Marie-Eugène explores what is arguably the key passage of the Scriptures on strength in weakness: 2 Corinthians 12:7-10. This is where St Paul complains of a “thorn in the flesh” (v. 7). Scholars suggest this refers to something impeding his ministry; but what it is matters less than the dynamics of the prayer. The Lord answers Paul: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (v. 9). And even though this means that Paul’s trial is not lifted, he understands immediately and at once begins to glory in his weakness and he concludes: “when I am weak, then I am strong” (v. 10).

Fr Marie-Eugène sees this as a perfect illustration of how the Lord purifies us: God, he says, “always fortifies and sustains” (IADC, p. 479) the soul while still leaving us with our human nature as sinners because this keeps us in humility. Therefore, as humility attracts mercy, “the living fountain of mercy” remains ever active within us (cf. IADC, p. 479).

Fr Marie-Eugène then goes to the essence by saying that the soul now has a capacity (cf. IADC, p. 479) to receive God’s charity. This “capacity” is the perfect expression: because when St Paul relates in 2 Corinthians these words of God, “my power is made perfect in weakness”, he is not talking about a certain quality or type of power, but a completeness. The word he uses in the Greek is teletai, implying going to the end, to full capacity.¹¹ So God’s answer could be paraphrased as: “My power fills up your weakness – or your weak self – to full capacity.”

This is extremely encouraging. It reminds us that when we are at our lowest ebb, with no fight left in us – then we can surrender it all to God. This is not giving up in the face of adversity, but rather surrendering to God all our weakness, which then, like a magnet, draws down – attracts – the power and strength of God; this is a hallmark of the teaching of Thérèse. So, when St Paul says, “when I am weak, then I am strong”, this is not some clever play on words but a reality: if we consent to being humanly weak and offer that up to God, the Lord will fill us with his strength. In this way, then, being weak means becoming strong.

“In helplessness and faith”

In the last few weeks of his life, when Fr Marie-Eugène was dying of cancer, he was so weak that he wept, and he said, “How I understand St Paul: it is when one is weak that one is strong!” (RR, p. 135). Needing someone to hand him a straw before he could drink, he continued: “There is my strength, it is in my weakness! I have become like a three-year-old child.” And he added: “Sanctity is not in human strength, it is in weakness” (RR, p. 135). He even went on to say, speaking of his Secular Institute: “Notre-Dame de Vie is dejection in helplessness and faith” (RR, p. 139).

These words may look very negative at first sight, but they come from his being imbued with the lesson of Gethsemane. Fr Marie-Eugène especially wanted those who were young and strong to nourish themselves on Gethsemane, not to rely on their own strength – which comes naturally when one is robust – because he realised so viscerally that Christ’s triumph came from his apparent defeat. He also knew, with the deepest conviction, that God works powerfully in human weakness. As he said plainly, towards the end of his life: “Sanctity is the strength of God, the weakness of man” (RR, p. 135). Fr Marie-Eugène surrendered himself totally to God, and right at the end of his life, not long before his death on March 27, 1967, he said: “If I had had to choose a motto, it would have been: ‘Traditus gratiae Dei’ [‘Surrendered to the grace of God’]” (cf. RR, p. 143).

Part II – Père Jacques: Strengthened and Transformed from within

If we look now at the Gethsemane experience of Père Jacques, we at once see a totally different context, as Père Jacques wasn’t surrounded by delightful members of Notre-Dame de Vie but by Nazis. One sign of human weakness, and they might have been straight onto him like a pack of wolves. What we see in Père Jacques, then, is an outward sign of human strength that is increasingly transformed radiantly from within, where strength and weakness were playing out according to the inner workings of grace. All of Père Jacques’s strength, both human and spiritual, would be needed in the last year of his life when he was a prisoner. He passed through three types of prison, each one corresponding to ever greater difficulties, alongside which there was a corresponding development of his own experience of strength and weakness.

In the French Prisons – Strong and in Control

We begin with the arrest of Père Jacques, along with the three Jewish boys he had sheltered in the Carmelite school where he was headmaster. There is a well-known film Au revoir, les enfants, the title being his words of farewell to the children of the school who gathered round as he was led away. One person who was watching Père Jacques being led out of the school thought to himself (not in the film but in reality) that not even the Gestapo would be able to cower a soul of such calibre (cf. Ph, p. 337).

Père Jacques was first taken to the nearby prison of Fontainebleau. The purpose: to be interrogated by the SS Commandant Wilhelm Korff, notorious for carrying out torture (cf. Ph, p. 347). But he never tortured Père Jacques, almost certainly because of the great dignity before him. In session after session of interrogation, he couldn’t break Père Jacques’s spirit. There is actually a record of at least some of their exchanges, because they were taken down verbatim, and a person privy to the records shared some of the account with the Carmelites (cf. Ph, p. 346).

We can just imagine the two men facing each other across the table, and Père Jacques keeping up the direct, penetrating gaze of the headmaster. One of the questions Korff asked Père Jacques was what he thought of Nazi laws. Père Jacques replied: “I know only one law, that of the Gospel and of charity” (FM, p. 96).¹² He also offered to be shot if it could mean taking the place of a husband and father (cf. Ph, p. 346). Finally, in the face of what may have been a threat, Père Jacques replied: “You don’t frighten me and nor does death” (Ph, p. 346)! Korff couldn’t believe his ears. He was used to seeing people terrified and cowering. No one, just no one, would say to this dreaded interrogator, “You don’t frighten me.” So he brought the interrogations to an end and wrote his report. It was full of admiration, practically a character reference! He wrote: “That is a man! What a man!” But he had to find something negative to say, so he added: “He has only one defect: he is not a Nazi” (Ph, p. 347)!

It was decided to send Père Jacques to a general prisoner-of-war camp. Before departure, the Carmelite provincial came to visit him, offering him a wad of banknotes to try and bribe his way out. Père Jacques refused and said: “There must be priests in the prisons” (FM, p. 98). And so he was sent to Compiègne. This camp was overseen by the SS but was still fairly lenient. There was a chapel, and religious services were allowed, as was catechism. Père Jacques was given charge of this, and soon it wasn’t just the Catholics but also the atheists and the Communists who were hanging on his every word. One day, three SS officers came along and were shocked to find hundreds of men at what seemed to be a religious rally. The officers ran up to Père Jacques and demanded to know what he was doing. He replied that he was teaching catechism which was permitted. One of the officers retorted: “That! That’s catechism?” (FM, p. 101). They’d only allowed it because they thought it was going to be boring! So they dragged him off to the Commandant who forbade him to preach. And it was decided to move Père Jacques on – to Neue Bremm, near Saarbrücken, known as a death camp.

In the Punitive Death Camp – Strengthened by Union with Christ’s Sufferings

This was a camp designed to break men’s spirits and to break them physically. Word had gone before Père Jacques that he was a priest; in any event, it was clearly to be seen as he was still in his Carmelite habit. So the sadistic Commandant, whose name was Hornetz, singled out Père Jacques for special treatment by making him trudge round and round a large pool of water, for hours on end, with an eighteen-foot beam over his shoulders, in a parody of Christ’s Passion (cf. FM, p. 103). He expected Père Jacques to get so exhausted that he would collapse, especially as the prisoners were given hardly anything to eat.

Instead, he could not have given Père Jacques any ordeal that would have given him more of a sense of union with Christ’s sufferings. Père Jacques didn’t falter, and he looked so strong and dignified that Hornetz began to admire him (cf. Ph, p. 384). But while Hornetz, like Korff before him, saw only human strength, one perceptive prisoner noted that, day by day, Père Jacques was becoming “radiantly transformed”.¹³

This camp prevented any kind of solidarity or morale-building as prisoners weren’t allowed to speak to each other all day. This was having its intended effect of creating isolation and dejection. So Père Jacques began a ministry of the smile. To everyone he came across, he gave a radiant smile. The smiles were returned. Morale started to lift. Men he passed in the prison yard would whisper praises of God.¹⁴ The Christian spirit began to live in the camp.

Père Jacques even revolutionised the infirmary and was helping those in deepest need. So when, after just a few weeks, he heard that he was being moved on again, he approached Hornetz and asked if he could stay. Hornetz was amazed: no one would want to stay at Neue Bremm! But the answer was “no”, and Père Jacques was moved on again.

In the Concentration Camp – Coming Through the Darkest Night

The destination was Mauthausen, near Linz in Austria, one of the Nazis’ worst concentration camps. This is where Père Jacques was brought to utmost weakness, both physically and interiorly, which has more than an echo of the Toledo imprisonment of John of the Cross, and all that John has written on the worst experiences of the dark night. This terrible camp was like the reign of evil on earth: where doing harm was approved of, and doing good to help someone could lead to the death penalty. It goes without saying that no practice of religion was allowed.

On arrival, Père Jacques slipped under the radar as a priest, giving his profession as “ecclesiastical teacher” (FM, p. 114; cf. p. 110). After a month, he would be assigned to a satellite camp known as Gusen I, where he was put to work in the stone quarries; this was the most backbreaking work imaginable, and there was hardly a morsel to eat. The men were collapsing and dying of exhaustion, easily replaced by the next trainload of prisoners from all over Europe.

This is where Père Jacques became so physically weak that he could have succumbed to death. He kept up his strength by meditating on the sufferings of Christ, and also on the sufferings of Thérèse (cf. FM, p. 108). Why Thérèse? We know that she suffered atrociously in her illness, but we also know her dispositions thanks to the powerful book known as the Last Conversations in which her sister, Mother Agnes, noted down their conversations when Thérèse was on her deathbed. These contain encouraging thoughts and strategies, both psychological and spiritual, for coping with intense suffering.

Père Jacques would have remembered how Thérèse spoke of the ability to cope with pain by living in the present moment: “I’m suffering only for an instant. It’s because we think of the past and the future that we become discouraged and fall into despair” (LC, p. 155); and she spoke of suffering “from minute to minute” (LC, p. 170). Thérèse also spoke of trusting God to give her the strength she needed in her weakness: “I’m suffering like a little child […] I’m too little to have any strength through myself” (LC, p. 145); “God gives me courage in proportion to my sufferings” (LC, p. 149); “God will give me strength; He’ll never abandon me” (LC, p. 124; cf. p. 164).

In addition to the physical sufferings, however, Père Jacques was now suffering in a way that he hadn’t in the previous camps: up to now, he had always had a ministry, a strong sense of purpose. This time, there was no one to minister to: in his surroundings, he was the only person who spoke French. He was just one anonymous prisoner next to another, hewing away at the rock day by day. And so, the sense of purpose that had kept him going at Compiègne and Neue Bremm was gradually being eroded.

One day, when he was in this extreme suffering and newly arrived in Gusen I, a name came to him of someone who could help him. And in himself he cried out: “St Thérèse…”. And he made this prayer to her: he asked her to give him a sign of her protection over him, which would also be a sign of her receiving him into the camp (cf. FM, p. 108). This part of the prayer is very interesting: it’s as though he was saying that this was her camp, her mission field, to which she could welcome him.

That very day, a Polish prisoner, called Valentin Pienka, who had the list of prisoners for allocating some of them to different areas of work, was running his eye down the column when he came across the words “ecclesiastical teacher” (FM, p. 110). He recognised immediately that this must be coded language for “priest” (cf. Ph, p. 422). So in the evening, he sent one of the French prisoners, Henri Boussel, over to Block 17 to find a certain Lucien Bunel. This, then, was the day of Père Jacques’s prayer to Thérèse (cf. FM, p. 108). And right at the end of the day, he suddenly heard his name being called. And a Frenchman, Henri Boussel, came over to him and welcomed him (cf. Ph, p. 423). Père Jacques soon learned that the French prisoners had no priest and they needed him to come and minister to them. Père Jacques just knew that Thérèse had sent this man “to receive him” (Ph, p. 423). And this was the beginning of his mission – or, rather, her mission – in the camp.

Pienka saw that Père Jacques was very weak indeed, so he moved him to a munitions factory where he could sit down all day and regain his strength. Père Jacques’s job was to inspect rifles for quality control, and he became diligent at… sabotaging them! But more importantly: often, the men coming to him with their rifles for inspection were actually men queuing for confession (cf. FM, p. 113)!

In the months that were left before the liberation of the camp, Père Jacques would hear innumerable confessions, including from Polish prisoners as he also spoke Polish; he held meetings with seminarians who were in the camp (cf. Ph, p. 431) and gave clandestine talks in the barrack blocks; he was so popular that even the Communists got him to give them talks. He spoke on topics such as: how to live in the camp according to gospel values (cf. Ph, p. 432, n. 1). When his health began to deteriorate with what would later be diagnosed as tuberculosis (cf. FM, p. 123), which would kill him four weeks after the liberation of the camp, he didn’t think of himself but carried on ministering to others – distributing food, helping the sick, and going without sleep so he could hear more and more confessions.

The weaker Père Jacques became, the more he expended himself, exemplifying the words of Thérèse: “To love is to give everything. It’s to give oneself” (PN 54:22).¹⁵ He drew strength as if from nowhere – of course, from God’s grace but also, without any doubt, from his ideals of the priesthood, on which he had written, in 1921:

Jesus makes [me] understand the happiness of suffering in union with Him on this earth […], of being so inflamed with love for Him that those who come close to me may themselves be affected by it. And that is the life of a Priest. To forget everything, to give up everything, even one’s life, for others. To exist only for others, to make Jesus known and loved by them… (Ph, p. 48)

And when he died, on June 2, 1945, Père Jacques was attended to by a priest who just happened to be assigned to Lisieux (cf. Ph, p. 477, n. 1).

Part III – Jesus and the Mystery of Strength in Weakness

We can turn now to Christ in his Passion. In their writings, Père Jacques and Fr Marie-Eugène often contemplate Christ through the lens of strength and weakness and shed light on different dimensions of the paschal mystery.

Drawing Strength for the Trials Ahead

Facing Fear

In September 1943, Père Jacques gave a series of talks to the Carmelite nuns of Pontoise, which have since been published as Listen to the Silence.¹⁶ In this work, Christ in his Passion is an important and pervasive presence, occurring repeatedly throughout the talks, even though they cover a variety of topics. Père Jacques points to the sensitivity of Christ – he uses terms such as “Christ’s perfect sensitivity” (LS, p. 70), his “extreme sensitivity” (cf. LS, p. 70) and “especially tender soul” (LS, p. 70) – which, he feels, would have made the Passion all the more crushing.

Père Jacques especially emphasises fear, as in this reflection on Gethsemane:

You can be sure that Christ was in no way impervious to the stupendous suffering set out before him. In fact, he recoiled at the prospect. His human nature shuddered in fear. (LS, p. 28)

And before that, during Christ’s ministry:

Since he knows the Sacred Scriptures through his human intelligence, he can foresee his impending Passion. In palpable, haunting imagery, he discerns the drama of Calvary in all its details. (LS, p. 54)

And again:

The Holy Shroud enables us to discover the full extent of Christ’s suffering. Yet, he saw all this ordeal, even the crucifixion itself, in advance. (LS, p. 54)

We note a common factor in these passages: the words “prospect”, “foresee” and “in advance”. Everything that Père Jacques expresses here about the Passion is not technically about Christ suffering during the Passion itself, but rather the burden of living with the knowledge of his future Passion.

We can have a good idea of why Père Jacques has taken this perspective. At the time, he was expecting imminent arrest and probable torture for his Resistance work (cf. FM, p. 91). He would be arrested four months later, although he was never tortured, as we have seen; but he would have expected it. He was living with this prospect every day. So we can see how closely he was identifying with Christ when he says that Calvary was “an ever-present vision that accompanied [Christ] every day of his life” (LS, p. 54).

Strategies for Strength

In the midst of Père Jacques’s horrible waiting experience, we can see him trying to discern where Christ drew his strength so as to endure the Passion – surely so that Père Jacques himself would know where to draw strength in the trials that lay ahead. And if we look more closely, we see that there are always two things going on, in Père Jacques’s depiction of the Passion: alongside what is weakening and frightening, he highlights something strengthening and consoling. He writes, for example: “The serene silence of Jesus […] flows from the secret deep within him. Moreover, he likewise enjoys times of deep joy, but they are constantly accompanied by the dreadful image of Calvary…” And he specifies: “These feelings are always present together. Even at the peak of his Passion, the beatific vision [lasts] in the depths of his soul” (LS, p. 55; my italics).

So, here we have two things with which to try and redress the balance: the horrors of Calvary are counteracted, in Père Jacques’s view of the Passion, by holding onto the beatific vision. And the other thing he highlights here is silence. On this, he simply refers to the Carmelite Rule (cf. LS, p. 57); as he was speaking to Carmelite nuns, he didn’t need to elaborate. But they would have known of how the Rule (# 21) quotes from Isaiah 30:15: “In silence and hope will be your strength.” This kind of silence is not just an absence of noise or talking, but a silencing of all one’s emotions and passions – the fears and even joys – so as to unite one’s whole being in silence. We all know that a house divided against itself is weakened. An inner silence, on the other hand, doesn’t scatter one’s forces but unifies a person and thus gives strength and ability to endure. Père Jacques, then, is picking up on some strengthening elements: to contemplate God in his glory; to keep one’s self unified and strengthened by an inner silence; and to this we could add: the knowledge of doing the will of the Father (cf. LS, pp. 28-9, 70).

To “Baptize” Suffering

Père Jacques also speaks explicitly of learning from Christ how to endure suffering. He says: “we can ‘baptize’ it” (LS, p. 71). What does this mean? First, he says, quite realistically, that most people try to avoid suffering. But that doesn’t work – because life brings suffering that we can’t always avoid. So we need a strategy, and this is what he calls the baptizing of suffering. He says that “Christ has taught us to overtake suffering at its source” (LS, p. 72) and that we can “seize and transform it” (LS, p. 72). “Christ is on the cross […],” he says, “meet him and embrace him, where he is” (LS, p. 73). Furthermore, he explains that Christ has transformed suffering so that it is “a force, a lever, to raise the world. It is redemption!” he exclaims (LS, p. 74).

Here, we find two essential aspects of the Carmelite life. One is relational: “embrace him [on the cross],” he says. This is not primarily union with Christ’s mission as such, but union with Christ himself (which includes his mission). The other aspect concerns the potential of sacrifice: that we can unite our suffering with that of Christ, so that it becomes redemptive. Such suffering is never wasted. Christ achieved more through his Passion than through his other works combined, and he can continue this in us as we complete the Passion in our own self (cf. Col 1:24). This is a teaching of great encouragement for all who are ill and suffering. Mother Teresa of Calcutta founded the lay movement “The Sick and Suffering Co-workers of the Missionaries of Charity”, so that people who were ill or in pain could offer up their sufferings for the missions. We can feel useless, that we have nothing left to give… What a sense of purpose it can give us, to realise that our greatest weakness and suffering can be effective and redemptive! It is, in fact, a sharing in the apostolate of the Carmelite nuns, who cannot help in an active way, but who help powerfully in a hidden, mystical way.

These were the encouraging ideas that Père Jacques was holding before his eyes. It may well explain why, when he was arrested, he went with strength and purpose towards his own Calvary, inwardly embracing the crucified Christ.

This is how much Jesus Loves us

There is a small work called Jesus: Contemplation of the Paschal Mystery, containing a selection of Holy Week and Easter homilies given by Fr Marie-Eugène in the early 1960s.¹⁷ It would be wonderful material to ponder during Lent; and it contains many insights for the theme of this contribution. Especially relevant, perhaps, are the three times that Jesus falls on the way of the cross, because these are the times of greatest weakness. This depiction is very different from that of Père Jacques. Rather than being reflective, it is addressed to Christ as a prayer. And rather than looking ahead to the future Passion, it is bursting with the immediacy of the present moment.

The First Fall

Here, we see straightaway the paradox of strength and weakness, the two opposites in the one person, as Jesus is addressed as: “God-man, poor man” (CMP, p. 42). Then, Fr Marie-Eugène continues: “let me look at you”. This is a contemplation that tries to penetrate into the depths of the soul of Christ. Interestingly, like Père Jacques, he points to the sensitivity of Christ as making the Passion especially crushing. He says: “You are sensitive, O Jesus, sensitive to the love of God and to the love of people, sensitive also to hatred. That crushes you” (CMP, p. 42). Also like Père Jacques, though in a different way, he evokes the beatific vision: “Yes, you have the vision [of God] that is face to face, but you have everything else as well, and for now you only see the everything else, that is, the hatred” (CMP, p. 42). This perspective, I feel, may well give us a greater sense of the Passion itself than the perspective of Père Jacques who was looking to find strength for the trial ahead; whereas Fr Marie-Eugène is offering us a close-up of the scene, showing just how much Jesus suffered for us.

The Second Fall

Fr Marie-Eugène continues to emphasise the paradox: “You, the strong God, you whose body and soul are penetrated with divinity, you are on the ground, […] you are weakening” (CMP, p. 48). At the same time, he keeps strength and weakness steadily in balance, as it were: “O Jesus, […] we adore your strength, we adore your weakness” (CMP, p. 49; cf. 1Cor 1:24-25). And to this he adds: “Has the Spirit of God left you? No, that is the proof of his presence […]; the impressions of weakness, and powerlessness, become the proof of his presence” (CMP, p. 49). This interesting passage recalls straightaway 2 Corinthians 12:10 – “when I am weak, then I am strong” – in which we saw that weakness and strength are the same thing: that is, when human weakness invites in divine strength. We notice, too, that Fr Marie-Eugène prefers to specify “impressions” of weakness, not actual weakness. And he urges us to make our own falls a springboard to a confidence in God that will lead us to call upon the Holy Spirit (cf. CMP, p. 49). This is no coincidence: the Holy Spirit is always power and strength, and the perfect Person of the Trinity to turn to in our weakness.

The Third Fall

We now encounter the full force of the redemptive battle which reaches a crescendo just before the crucifixion. It is, Fr Marie-Eugène says, as if hell has awoken. And Jesus collapses, crushed (cf. CMP, p. 51). Here, he describes Jesus as having become sin – carrying the weight of the sin of the world (cf. CMP, pp. 51-2; 91, n. 11).

Fr Marie-Eugène wishes to look right inside the soul of Jesus, as it were (cf. CMP, p. 37). A term used in this work is a gaze that penetrates, like that of Mary penetrating into the interior, the soul of Christ (cf. CMP, pp. 43-4). Fr Marie-Eugène’s own penetrating gaze makes me think of Hebrews 4:12 – the description of the word of God as being like a two-edged sword that can pierce into the space between the soul and the spirit, the joints and the marrow. It is as though Fr Marie-Eugène splits open, explodes open, the divine and the human. The reality, of course, is different: the human and divine are always joined together in Christ, all the time. But the impression we are given is that the divine is pared away, so that the pulsing reality of human weakness is laid bare: through the powerful words, we feel every trembling sinew, every juddering heartbeat – so that Fr Marie-Eugène is saying to each of us: This is how much Jesus suffered for you! This is how much he loves you!

Sharing the Glory of the Wounded Christ

Finally, with the Resurrection, the language changes: and it is as though the human and the divine are put together again, as one indivisible whole – as Jesus is portrayed as “divine mystery, impenetrable, incomprehensible” (CMP, p. 77; my italics). And the direction changes, too: instead of our gaze going towards Jesus – penetrating into the soul of Christ – we now stand back and receive, as we are told that “divinity radiates out of him” (cf. CMP, p. 77).

But does this notion of impenetrability mean that Jesus is further away from us now? Of course not. When the veil was torn in two in the Temple, at the moment of his death, he became closer to us than ever before. He shares his life with us, he gives us himself in the Eucharist, he gives us the Holy Spirit. And this radiating of mercy and grace towards us is all part of that sharing of himself. We are all called to become more like Christ, and indeed to open ourselves to him in prayer so that he may transform us into himself. But we need to keep in mind that Christ is one step ahead of us: he has already made himself more like us – and even and especially in our woundedness, through his carrying our sins. Fr Marie-Eugène gives us a powerful insight:

[J]ust as the wounds of the risen Christ are glorious by reason of the floods of life that flow from them, so the wounds of sin can become so by the cleansing floods of mercy that they draw down. (IADC, p. 480)

In this magnificent passage, Fr Marie-Eugène is saying to us that there is a divine line of contact – a line of mercy and of divine life – from the wounds of Christ to our wounds.

Ultimately, both Carmelites give us a beautiful impetus to unite ourselves lovingly with the heart of God. Père Jacques says to go and embrace Christ on the cross. Fr Marie-Eugène might say to clasp the hands of Christ, to meet him at the place of his wounds. And in that continual to and fro of life: Christ takes to himself our weakness, and gives us in return his strength.

1. See P. Pierre d”Ornellas, “Le Père Marie-Eugène de l’Enfant-Jésus et Sainte Thérèse de l’Enfant-Jésus” (Assemblées Fédérales – Lisieux, 16-22 juin 1989, off-print), pp. 8-9. ↩︎
2. Ph = Père Philippe de la Trinité, OCD, Le Père Jacques: Martyr de la Charité (Paris: Desclée De Brouwer – “Les Études Carmélitaines”, 1947). ↩︎
3. IWSG = Fr Marie-Eugène of the Child Jesus, OCD, I Want to See God: A Practical Synthesis of Carmelite Spirituality – vol. 1. Trans. Sister M Verda Clare, CSC (Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria Press – Christian Classics, [n.d.: facsimile of the 1953 English-language edition]). ↩︎
4. IADC = Fr Marie-Eugène of the Child Jesus, OCD, I Am a Daughter of the Church: A Practical Synthesis of Carmelite Spirituality – vol. 2. Trans. Sister M Verda Clare, CSC (Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria Press – Christian Classics, [n.d.: facsimile of the 1955 English-language edition]); the reference to Teresa is from The Interior Castle VII:4:4, in The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila, vol. 2. Trans. Kieran Kavanaugh, OCD & Otilio Rodriguez, OCD (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1980), p. 445. ↩︎
5. See also, in this connection, his work Under the Torrent of His Love: Thérèse of Lisieux, A Spiritual Genius. Trans. Sister Mary Thomas Noble, OP (Staten Island, NY: Alba House, 1995), especially Chapter 2, “As a Child Before God”, pp. 35-59. ↩︎
6. LC = St. Thérèse of Lisieux: Her Last Conversations. Trans. John Clarke, OCD (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1977). ↩︎
7. The Book of Her Foundations 5:16, in The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila, vol. 3. Trans. Kieran Kavanaugh, OCD & Otilio Rodriguez, OCD (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1985), p. 123. ↩︎
8. LT 230, in Saint Thérèse of Lisieux: General Correspondence, vol. II. Trans. John Clarke, OCD (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1988), p. 1101; cf. IWSG, p. 386. ↩︎
9. LT 197, in ibid., p. 999; cf. IWSG, p. 385. ↩︎
10. RR = Raymonde Règue, Father Marie-Eugène of the Child Jesus: Spiritual Master for Our Times (Darlington Carmel, n.d.). ↩︎
11. Other related terms in the Gospels include: “he loved them to the end” (Jn 13:1) and “It is finished” (Jn 19:30; cf. v. 28). ↩︎
12. FM = Francis J Murphy, Père Jacques: Resplendent in Victory (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1998). ↩︎
13. In Joseph M Malham, By Fire into Light: Four Catholic Martyrs of the Nazi Camps (Leuven: Peeters, 2002), p. 125; cf. Ph, p. 390. ↩︎
14. Cf. Malham, p. 124. ↩︎
15. The Poetry of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. Trans. Donald Kinney, OCD (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1996), p. 219. ↩︎
16. Listen to the Silence: A Retreat with Père Jacques. Trans. & ed. Francis J Murphy (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2005) – referred to henceforth as “LS”. ↩︎
17. Père Marie-Eugène de l’Enfant-Jésus, Jésus: Contemplation du Mystère Pascal (Toulouse: Éditions du Carmel, 1986) – referred to henceforth as “CMP”. There is also available an English-language edition: Father Marie-Eugene of the Child Jesus, OCD, Jesus: Contemplation of the Paschal Mystery (Darlington Carmel, n.d.). ↩︎