Sunday, August 31 : Saint Charles de Foucauld

The Incarnation sprang from the goodness of God. The humility contained in this mystery is amazing, marvellous, astonishing. It shines with a dazzling brilliance. God, the Essence, the Infinite, Perfection, Creator, All-Powerful, the Great Sovereign Lord of All, becomes a man and takes on himself the body and soul of a man. He appears on earth as a man, and the humblest of men. What is man’s respect worth? Was it meant that God should seek to possess it? As he looks down upon the world from the height of his divinity all seem equal in his eyes, the great, the small, all like ants and worms to him. He disdained all false grandeur, which is in reality so very small, and had no wish to assume it himself. And as he came on earth to ransom us and teach us, he taught us from the very first, and all through his life, to despise human greatness and detach ourselves entirely from man’s esteem. He was born, lived and died in deepest abjection, in the lowest humiliation, for he took once for all the lowest place so completely that no one has ever humbled himself lower than he did. It was to teach us that he put himself last so constantly, and to shew us that men and their respect are worth nothing; He teaches us that since our conversation is not of this world we should make no matter of the forms of this world, but live only for that heavenly Kingdom which the God-man saw for ever here below by the Beatific Vision, and which we should see always with the eyes of Faith, walking in this world as though we were not of this world, without concern of outside things and busy with one thing only, with contemplating and loving our Heavenly Father and doing his Will.
Roman Catholic Ordinary Calendar – rosary,team