spirituality

Charles de Foucauld continued:

He won their respect by his sympathy with their language and way of life, but was assassinated in 1916.

The Little Brothers and Little Sisters, who follow the rule he composed, copy his ideal of prayerful presence and commitment to a local community.De Foucauld held that prayer is the starting point of true encounter. His example was followed by the Trappists of Our Lady at Tibhirine in Algeria. They created a prayer group with Muslim friends, called Ribat es Salam, ‘The Bond of Peace’. Prayer, they hold, is the only real bond between humans and the only lasting guarantee of peace and they think that until dialogue reaches this point it remains fragile. Fr Christian de Chergé, the Prior of Tibhirine monastery, wrote:

It is always somewhat painful to see a man of prayer and interior life stop short in his dialogue with the other, stumbling on the enunciations of faith and the opacity of their incompatibilities, without succeeding in seeking the other above in the heights or down below where is he engaged by the uprightness of his submission to the work of the Spirit, in him and in the crucible of Islam. The first time a Sufi community of the neighbourhood asked to meet us - it was Christmas 1979 - its spokesman had been careful to be precise that it was for sharing prayer they wanted to meet us. “We do not want”, he said, “ to engage in a theological dialogue with you, for it has often raised barriers which are man-made. Now we feel called by God to unity. So we have to let God invent something new between us. This can be done only through prayer”. You will say “this is an exceptional case”. Perhaps, but this experience exists, and it is not an isolated case.

This dialogue through prayer was destroyed by the ruthless murder of the seven Trappist monks, but the initiative was not buried with them.

For more on Charles de Foucauld: www.charlesdefoucauld.org/.