Converted at the age of 28, Charles, in willing acceptance of the Abbe Huvelin"s "direction" ( so "gentle and firm", so open to the Spirit), spends three full - and to him long - years in search of his personal vocation. As he later says, a vocation is "not chosen but found, and "once found to be embraced wholeheartedly". And his vocation-search is in line with his faith-discovery: total. He wants, and needs to give his "all" for the "All" that he has received: "As soon I knew that God existed, I knew that I could only live for Him" (we can recognize, again, his affinity with the "all and nothing" of John of the Cross).

Who is this God that Charles comes to know and wishes to live for? It is not the all-powerful Creator and just Judge (the popular image of God at the time), but the God who is Presence, the God who is Love: the God whom Charles encountered in his conversion experience, whom he later names as Jesus-Caritas", and whose mercies he sings in his "retreat of Nazareth" of 1897. Charles is far from denying the total Transcendence (he had found a pointer to this among the Muslims), but this transcendent God meets him and embraces him in the heart of human experience. "By his incarnation, the Son of God has... united himself with each and every human person" (Gaudium et Spes). It"s these words of the Council that are spelt out in Pope John Paul"s first, programmatic, encyclical, and are continued in all the others: Jesus" redemption, God the Father"s mercy, the Spirit"s uplifting and healing power are present at the root of all human experience, be it personal history, family life, work, social relations and institutions. We only need faith (of which we have so little) - faith like that of Mary - to become aware of this "presence"and to correspond to it in our actions.

Where is God present? In Nazareth... This is Charles" great discovery. Visiting the Holy Land (at Huvelin"s suggestion), Charles is attracted irresistibly by Jesus" life in Nazareth, but he will only discover little by little all its meaning for himself and his followers. He chooses to enter a Trappist monastery precisely because it is, for him, a "Nazareth": a place of poverty and manual work in "imitation" of Jesus, a place of "sacrifice" for Jesus. As we know, Charles left the monastery. While clearly expressing what he felt God"s will to be for himself at this critical moment, he entrusted the decision totally - as was his way - into the hands of the Abbot General and his Council.

Was Charles" seven-year stay with the Trappists a case of mistaken vocation? No it was not a mistake; but it was incomplete, though only the experience itself made Charles and his community aware of this. For Charles learnt much as a Trappist: self-discipline, community life, the ways of prayer... But he failed to find the "abjection" of Jesus: hadn"t Jesus chosen "the last place" (as he had heard the Abbe Huvelin say)?

Charles had seen something of this "last place" when asked to visit a sick man, a poor Armenian, who lived with his family in the hills near the monastery of Akbes. It was this that drew him to go and live in Nazareth itself and to be a "workman". For wasn"t Jesus "God the worker of Nazareth"? In fact, Charles lived and worked as a handyman for the local convent of Poor Clares, and while doing odd jobs for the community (his manual skills, as it turned out, were limited!), he spent the greater part of his time in prayer before the Blessed Sacrament, in meditation on the Gospels, and in writing copy-book after copy-book of gospel-based reflections (the majority of his writings are from this three-year period). It was like a long retreat (his contact with the village people was limited), in which he explored the meaning of Nazareth: the meaning for Jesus, for himself, and for the future "fraternity" of Nazarene "brothers" and"sisters".

From the first Charles, surprisingly, envisaged founding communities. Surprisingly, for he felt called to the "hiddenness" of Jesus" Nazareth life; and he had absolutely no means of realizing his desires. But it was only after an internal struggle that he accepted an invitation from the Mother Abbess of the Poor Clares at Jerusalem, to ask for priestly ordination, once assured that it was compatible with the "humility" of Jesus.

Ordination, at the age of 42, is for Charles a turning point. Before, he had put all his energies into his personal relationship with Jesus. Now he thinks in terms of being Jesus for others: as his ordination notes affirm, he now wishes to "join Jesus in his immolation for the salvation of all", and in particular to "offer the divine feast to the poor". At the same time, Nazareth becomes "wherever is most useful to my neighbor... for those most in need... for the most abandoned". So at Beni-Abbes, where he celebrates the first Mass on the 30th of October (the anniversary of his conversion exactly 15 years before), just a few months after his ordination as priest on the 7th of June (on the Sunday within the then octave of Corpus Christi), we find, soon after his arrival, the well known texts on his desire to be "a universal brother": a brother to others, not in a purely humanistic or secular sense, but "as Jesus our Brother" and "seeing Jesus in each person"! Soon, in fact, he was seeing up to a hundred people a day, people in every sort of need.

At the same time, there is a deepening in his relationship with Jesus: while continuing to "look at Jesus and love him", he feels called to enter more deeply into Jesus" prayer to His Father. Human brotherhood and God"s Fatherhood find, for Charles, their centre in Jesus.

Living at Tamanrasset, Charles goes further in both directions, towards God and towards people. Sharing more closely in the life and hardships of the Touareg people, learning both to give and, for him more difficult, to receive, entering into the culture and aspirations, offering and receiving advice, Charles is able to see the "other" as an "equal" and a "friend", and is seen by those "others" as "one of us". And it is as "one of them" that Charles "offers his life for them, an offering completed and accepted in that freely-willed martyrdom that he has long desired: "Know you"ll die... a martyr, and hope it will be today".

Two symbols mark his death: his body and his monstrance were "accidentally" thrown together on the sand, the Host still present and untouched: and it was a First Friday in Advent. Charles" recognition of the Lord"s love and his own answering love were full of Advent expectation...