From the time of his conversion in October 1886 Charles de Foucauld was driven by a powerful sense of vocation ‹ a sense that he had been called by God for some unique purpose and mission. In retrospect he was able to discern in his past life the hand of Providence drawing him, through so |||| many unlikely twists and turns, toward his true end. And yet the struggle to find his calling was marked by years of trial and error. His only certainty was that he was called to imitate, as nearly as possible, the life of Jesus of Nazareth. This conviction led him initially to a Trappist monastery in fits Syria, where he remained for seven years (1890-97). Ultimately, compelled by the same spirit that had driven him to the Trappists, the desire for perfect poverty and obscurity, he departed the monastery and set out for the Holy Land. There, in Nazareth, the very town where Jesus had spent the better pan of his life, he found work as a servant to a convent of Poor Clares.

Foucauld left few autobiographical writings. Among these, however, are the following notes, written during a retreat in 1897, which give a partial account of the path to Nazareth.

0 God, we should all hymn the praises of your mercies ‹ we, who were all created for everlasting glory and redeemed by the blood of Jesus, by your blood, my Lord Jesus, beside me now in the tabernacle. But if we all have cause to do so, then how much the more have I? From my childhood I have been surrounded by so many graces: the son of a saintly mother, who learned from her to know you, to love you, and, as soon as I could speak at all, to pray to you....

And the true piety of my upbringing!... I see myself going to church with my father (and how long ago that is!), and with my grandfather. I see grandmother and my cousins going to Mass every day. And my first Holy Communion, after a long and careful preparation, surrounded by the blessings and encouragement of a family wholly Christian, in the presence of those I loved best in all the world, so that on a single day there came together everything necessary to let me taste pure joy....

And then, when alas, despite so many blessings, I began to drift away from you, how gently you used my grand¬ father^ voice to call me back to you. With what mercy you restrained me from falling into the ultimate excesses by keeping tenderness toward him alive in my heart. But alas, in spite of everything, I withdrew even further from you, my Lord and my Life, an*d my life began to be a death, or rather, had already become a death in your eyes.

Yet in that state of death, you preserved me still, keeping the memories of past times alive in my soul, together with esteem for what was good, and an attachment, dormant yet still alive like the glow of fire under the ashes, to certain beautiful and devout souls, and respect for the Catholic faith and the religious life. All my faith had vanished, but respect and esteem were still there, untouched. And you gave me other graces too, 0 God: you kept alive in me the taste for study, for serious reading and good things, and with it a disgust for vice and shame. I did evil, but I never approved of it or loved it.

You made me experience a melancholic emptiness, a sadness that I never felt at other times. It would come back to me every evening when I was alone in my rooms; it kept me silent and depressed during our so-called celebrations: I would organize them, but when the time came, I went through them in silence, disgust, and infinite boredom. You gave me the ill-defined unrest that marks an unquiet conscience which, though it may be wholly asleep, is not completely dead. I never felt that sadness, that distress, that restlessness apart from those times. It was undoubtedly a gift from you, 0 God. How far off I was in my doubting! How good you are!...

And while you were thus protecting me, time passed, until the moment came when you judged it right to bring me back into the fold. In spite of me, you dissolved all the evil relationships that would have kept me away from you. You | even unloosed all those good ties that would have prevented me from returning to the bosom of my family, where you willed that I should find salvation, but which would have | prevented me from one day living for you alone. At the same time, you gave me a life of serious studies, an obscure life in solitude and poverty. In heart and mind I was still far from you, yet I had begun to live in a less vicious atmosphere; it was neither true light nor goodness ‹ that was lacking ‹ but it was not so deep a morass nor so odious a wickedness. Little by little the place was swept clean; the flood still covered the earth, but the waters were continually falling, and it had stopped raining. You had broken down the barriers, softened my soul, prepared the ground by burning off the thorns and bushes....

And having cleansed the filth from my soul and entrusted it to your angels, you, 0 God, planned to reenter it yourself for even after having received so many graces, it still did not acknowledge you.... Then you breathed into it a taste for virtue, the virtue of the pagans: you let me search through the works of the pagan philosophers, and I found nothing there but emptiness and disgust. Next you let me glance at a few pages of a Christian book, and you made me conscious of its warmth and beauty. You made me realize that I might find there, if not truth (for I did not believe that men can know truth), at least the elements of virtue, and you inspired me to look for instruction in a virtue completely pagan in Christian books. Thus you brought to me an awareness of the mysteries of religion....

By the beginning of October 1886, after six months of family life, I admired virtue and longed for it, but I still did not know you. By what devices, 0 God of goodness, you made yourself known to me! What devices did you not use? What exterior means, both gentle and strong? What an astonishing series of circumstances, in which everything combined to drive me toward you: unexpected solitude, my emotions, the sickness of those dear to me, ardent feelings, a return to Paris as the result of a surprising event. And what interior graces: the need for solitude, recollection, and pious reading; 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." All these things were your work, 0 God ‹ the work of you alone.

A noble soul supported you ‹ by its silence, its gentleness, its goodness and perfection. It let itself be seen; it was good and it spread its seductive perfume around itself, but it never intruded itself. It was you, 0 Jesus, my Savior, who did all things, both within and without. You attracted me to virtue through a soul in which virtue seemed so beautiful to me that it snatched away my heart irrecoverably. Through that same soul, you also attracted me to truth. Then you gave me four blessings. First, you inspired me with the thought that as this soul was so intelligent, the religion it believed so firmly could not be the folly I had thought it. Second, you inspired me with another idea: since this religion is not folly, may it not be that there is to be found in it that truth which is to be found in no other upon earth, nor yet in any system of philosophy?

Your third blessing was to say to me: Study this religion, then ‹ 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. And the fourth was the unparalleled blessing of directing me for my instruction in religion to Father Huvelin. I believe, 0 God, that by leading me to go into his confessional on one of the last days of that October... you were giving me the best of all good things. If there is joy in heaven at the repentance of a sinner, then how great joy there must have been when I entered his confessional! What a blessed day that was, a day of blessing. And since that day my whole life has been a chain of blessings.

You put me under the wing of a saint, and I have stayed there. You used his hands to bear me up, and the result has been grace upon grace. 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. When I think of it, I cannot stop myself from crying: and I do not want to stop the tears running down for, 0 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?...

How good you are, my God, to have broken everything around me, to have annihilated in such a way everything that would have prevented me living for you alone, giving me an ever deeper feeling of the futility and falseness of the life of the world, and of the vast distance there is between the perfect life, the life of the Gospel, and the life men lead in the world. You gave me a tender and increasing love for you, 0 Lord Jesus, and a taste for prayer, trust in your word, a profound awareness of the duty of almsgiving, a longing to imitate you. You gave me too those words in a sermon of Father Huvelin's which are now so indelibly engraved on my soul: "May you so truly have taken the lowest place that no one will ever be able to take it from you," and a thirst to give you the greatest sacrifice I am capable of making for you, by leaving forever the family which had been also my joy, to live and die far away from it. You gave me my search for a life like yours, in which I might share completely in your abjection, your poverty, your humble work, your obscurity ‹ the search made so clear to me in a last retreat at Clamart.

On January 15, 1890, I was enabled to make this sacrifice, and I received from your hand that grace, La Trappe: daily Communion; all I learned in seven years spent in the religious life.... After three and a half years spent in waiting, the most reverend General told me, on January 23, 1897, that it was the will of God that I should follow that in SB me which was driving me out of the Trappist order into B a life of poverty, humble labor, and profound obscurity ‹ the life whose vision had been with me so long. There followed my departure for the Holy Land, my pilgrimage and arrival at Nazareth. The first Wednesday I spent there you let me, 0 God, through the intercession of St. Joseph, to enter the convent of St. Clare as a servant. 0 the peace, happiness, consolation, blessings, and wonderful happiness I knew there!...

I can only fall far short of such mercies, 0 God: I can only beseech the Blessed Virgin and all devout souls to give thanks for me, for I am overwhelmed by blessings. 0 beloved Bridegroom, what have you not done for me? What do you want from me? What do you expect from me, that you have so overwhelmed me? 0 God, give yourself thanks through me, create remembrance, gratitude, fidelity, and love in me; I am overcome, I fail, 0 God; create my thoughts, words, and deeds, so that they may all give you thanks and glorify you in me. Amen. Amen. Amen. ‹SA 10-18

In this second text, a letter written on August 14, 1901, Foucauld again describes his spiritual journey, this time on the eve of his return to the Sahara.

As soon as I believed there was a God, I understood that I could not do anything other than live for him. My religious vocation dates from the same moment as my faith. How great God is! There is such a difference between God and everything that is not him! In its beginnings my faith had a good many obstacles to conquer. I had doubted so much that I didn't believe every¬ thing in a day. First it was the miracles in the Gospel that I considered unbelievable. Then it was that I wanted to mix in passages of the Koran with my prayers. But God's grace and my confessor's advice cleared away the fog.

I wanted to be a religious and to live for God alone. I wanted to do the most perfect thing whatever it might be. My confessor made me wait three years. As for myself, though I longed to "breathe out my life before God in sheer losing of myself," as Bossuet says, I did not know what order to choose. The Gospel showed me that "the first commandment is to love God with all your heart," and that everything had to be enfolded in love. Everyone knows that love's first effect is imitation. Therefore I was to enter the order where I would find the most exact imitation of JESUS. I didn't feel I was made to imitate his public life of preaching: thus I ought to imitate his hidden life as a poor and humble workman at Nazareth. It seemed to me that no one offered me this life better than the Trappists.

I loved very fondly what family the Lord had left me. I wanted to make a sacrifice, to be like him who made so many, and I left home - it's been nearly twelve years ago now -for a Trappist monastery in Armenia. I spent six and a half years there. Then, desiring a deeper dispossession and a greater lowliness so that I might be still more like Jesus, I went to Rome and received permission from the superior general of the order to go to Nazareth and live there without anyone knowing who I was, as a workman living by my daily labor. I stayed there four years, withdrawn from the world in a blessed solitude and inward prayerfulness, tasting the joys of that poverty and lowliness God had made me desire so ardently in order that I might imitate him. Exactly a year ago I took the road back for France on my confessor's advice in order to receive holy orders. I was just ordained a priest, and I'm applying now to go to the Sahara where I would continue "the hidden life of Jesus at Nazareth." I don't mean to preach but to live in the solitude, the poverty, and the humble labor of Jesus, while trying to do good to souls not with my words but with prayer, the offering of the Holy Sacrifice, penance, and the practice of charity. -CG 37-38