I love Father Peyriguere’s letter writing style.  The subtly of his straightforward letters deserves slow deliberate thought.  Matter of factually, he says things few are able to say and few are able to understand, and even less are able to live.

Yes, as you say, be full of gratitude.  Gratitude because you came out of the night, and also because you were plunged into it, abandoned to it, crushed by it.  Gratitude for everything in your life, since everything comes to you from God, and you know that God is your Father and Friend.  He wants only what is for our good.  He leads us along His own paths as far as He wants us to go.  And how good it is to let Him choose the paths along which He leads our steps toward Him

While praising and loving the “mysteries of God’s designs,”…you must not strain to see these designs.  There is only one thing worth-while: to surrender yourself and your fortune to His will with the blind and total trust of a little child in his father’s arms.  The child does not know where is father is taking him, and doesn’t even think of asking..

Yes, your duty of the moment is to be calm, peaceful, totally relaxed, and to question neither God nor yourself about what will happen next–and I mean by this not what will happen the day after tomorrow or tomorrow, but even today.

Welcome with great serenity the progressive return of light to your soul.  Do not rush at it greedily and impatiently.  Accept it as it comes, and in the measure which it is given to you.

Rest, rest, rest!  This is your duty for the time being.  Remember that in the life of the soul there is neither action nor inaction.  These words are meaningless.  There is simply acceptance of the will of the Father, and this is supreme activity.  Everything that does not come from Him, but that we have tried to wrest from Him by our desires and preferences, is agitation and,  therefore, useless.  

And so, for what has happened and what will happen, God be praised.

You want to hear about our work?  Yes, I accepted the help of a follower of Father de Foucauld, a sister who i now settled in Khenifra.  Do you know what I told her before she came?  Not to insist on having mass every day.  Father de Foucauld asks his followers to be ready to die of hunger.  And I, harsher still, imposed upon her a more terrible hunger than any other, a hunger for the Eucharist.  She is sure of mass and, therefore, of Communion only every two weeks.  She agreed.  To make up for this and to help her to hold fast, every time I go to Khenifra I tell her to repeat over and over again to the Eucharistic Christ in her chapel, “Just the same, if It were not here, you would not be there.”  And it’s true.  Without her, a little corner of the world would be empty of Christ.  Because of her it is full of Christ.

Disciple of Charles de Foucauld

The work is hard, I know, and the harder it is, the more stimulating it is.  You have understood that it will be fruitful in so far as it will not be your own but Christ’s and that means the Church’s.  And this will come about through obedience, the obedience of the spirit: seeing Christ in those who give us orders…this makes obedience natural since it means saying “yes” to Christ.

Avoid all tenseness in your relations with the Lord.  Let your action be contemplation.  This is possible if you see Christ in your work and in the people you meet, if you welcome Christ and help Him to grow.

May I confess that it is when my dispensary is in full swing that I can best contemplate?  “I was sick and you cared for me,” so in suffering flesh of these sick ones I have the overwhelming honor and joy of touching the flesh of Christ.  I call that an experience of “the real presence”.

And you, too, can welcome the Christ Child in these little ones entrusted to you.  Go to the Lord with great simplicity, lucidity, and self-control—no exaltation.  Which does not mean that if, at certain moments, Our Lord wants to “ravish” us, we haven’t the right to feel how wonderful this is.  –Father Albert Peyriguere ‘Voice From the Desert’

Father’s word possess subtle nuances, a saturation of applied wisdom, experience proving spiritually fruitful.  There is a presence within.  I marked in bold the words I took deepest to heart–no exaltation.  Internally, emotionally, a man of extremes, I trend to exaltation in worship and deed.  It is advice staunchly provided by another.  This morning I am bound for mass at Jennings, a wonderful place of Catholic faith being applied to caring and tendering for men and women in a similar manner as Father Peyriguere brought to the world, and his spiritual directee provided for children.

Hold on, plans have changed, Jennings mass begrudgingly put off to another morning.  I just received a telephone call from the Hospice, my presence is requested for a vigil, a sobering call to sit bedside with a man of ninety-one years experiencing final moments due to congestive heart failure.  Within lucidity, simplicity, and self-control, I feel blessed.  Matters are starting to go into full swing with the Hospice.

Jennings Chapel’s tabernacle, taken with my phone.

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Yes, be more simple with God. We are never simple enough, never childlike enough with Him. When you are before Him, think of Him only, not at all of what comes to you from Him or through Him. Think of Him only, not of the insight He gives you about Himself, not of the feelings that through Him you have for Him—think of Him alone. I was going to say, be so busy looking for Him and loving Him that you do not even notice that you are looking at Him and loving Him, that you do not know in what way you are looking at Him and loving Him.  –Father Albert Peyriguere ‘Voice from the Desert’

Disciple of Charles de Foucauld

You know that, though your spiritual center of gravity has been displaced, in your new circumstances you have the same solid foundation.  There is a way of fusing contemplation and action so that all becomes contemplation, an awareness of the presence of God, strengthened by a ceaseless prayer of oblation.  To be at the Lord’s disposal, to surrender to Him, ready to do whatever He wants, to give oneself over and over again, and to be accepted by Him often for unrewarding work with people, this is no small thing and it throws one still more completely into Our Lord’s arms.

What an incentive this is to reduce our ego in order to let Christ grow and work in us.  People have, as it were, an antenna to pick up the waves of Christ in us.  But to be picked up, the waves must be there.  Yes, I will pray a great deal for the new apostolate to which you are called by the Church, that is, by Christ. 

…at last you have found Christ.  It is in the darkness, in the darkness of our whole selves—the night of St John of the Cross—that He wants to be sought and found.  But often we do not look for Him there, because it is ourselves that we are seeking in Him.

“Where were you, O Christ, while I was desperately struggling to hold on to you?”  “I was near you, my child.  If I had not helped you, you would have lost me, I would no longer be yours…”  This is a dialogue between Jesus and St Catherine of Siena.  She had lived through a temptation in which she felt that no trace of Christ remained in her.

–Random words from two letters of Father Albert Peyriguere in his book ‘Voice From the Desert’

I was thinking about the lack of reading, writing and time I am being allowed to dedicate to the contemplative life.  It has been seriously reduced.  I decipher it as the will of God.  I went to Father Peyriguere’s letters in regards to the fact he went off to the desert to follow Charles de Foucauld, desiring to live the life of a desert hermit, only to experience the life of a missionary caregiver to the local Berbers.  Daily, he was inundated with the poor, sick, and needy demanding his time and attention.  He found no time for the life of a desert hermit.  The way he wanted to approach God–good, moral, and righteous–was not what God asked from him.  I laughed during today’s Gospel reading.  Father Roger’s foreign tongue accenting perfectly the question posed by the Sons of Thunder, the blessed apostle brothers James and John, two of my favorites, the saint of my mother’s country Spain and the contemplative mystic.   Hearing their words to Our Lord, the way Father Roger read it, I laughed, thinking they did not really say that did they?  Here is the demand: “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.”  It still makes me laugh.  Ohh, how we must make God laugh, and frustrate Him.  My reflections, during mass, moved to my encounter with Father Reymann, one of his parishioners, and his bulldog in Wellington, Ohio.  It dawned on me what an enlightening moment God presented.  The elder priest, the oldest in the Cleveland diocese, came at me in such a friendly, welcoming comical manner he disarmed me, allowing me to be a small little man of no consequence.  He just kept talking.  I did not have to be anything.  I did not have to act like a Church scholar, a writer, a contemplative, a man discerning a religious vocation, the possibilities existing through the Hospice, nothing.  I did not have to be anything special at all.  The reality struck me as we talked, and I found myself playing a little with the situation.  He showed me the small hidden chapel he created behind the main sanctuary.  I asked him if he celebrated daily mass here.  He said yes.  I then asked awkwardly, due to the fact there was very limited seating, if the public was invited.  He looked at me as if I was mentally deranged, remarking: ‘You ask some really odd questions.  Of course the public is invited.  What do you think I lock the doors, celebrate mass by myself, not allowing anyone else to join me?’  I could only laugh which in reflection was just about the first moment his bulldog took a running start before throwing himself into my back with both of his front paws.  Throughout the splendid fellowship, I made a vow to remain simple, not to convey in the slightest regard a position of being knowledgeable about faith, hope, or charity.  The reason I brought up the Shrine was the fact he asked me what parish I belonged to.  The overall message I am presenting is the living of a hidden life of smallness, the true being of who I am in the eyes of God, is not a clever option amongst many options chosen by a man of brilliance.  I do not become small through my magnificence.  I do not educate my way into spiritual poverty.  It is a ‘becoming’ through purification, illumination, and on into unification.  Mass and adoration has become the centering point of my efforts, the time of transformation.  Must run off to work, my time is limited.  It will be even more limited once the Hospice calls.  I eagerly wait upon the challenge.

Father Albert Peyriguere is an inspiring letter writer of spiritual direction. Let us read one of his letters.

September 17, 1949

Another great loss in your life, another death. Our answer to God must always be the same as Job: “The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord”.

You are probably home again after taking care of your motherless little nephews. The school year will soon start, and you will be engaged in humble duties which require obedience only and no initiative; you will be nothing, just an insignificant little wheel. Oh! My dear child, it is so good to be nothing in men’s eyes, for then we are deeply imbedded in the truth, and we can harbor no illusions about ourselves. The attentions we receive can no longer give us swollen heads. Whether we are in an important or in a humble position, we are still nothing before God—it is easier to realize this when we are at the bottom,

And it is when we know ourselves to be “nothing” before God that we touch His heart. So many apostolic works are lasting and fruitful more because of the humble work of those at the bottom of the ladder than because of the outpourings of brains and activity from the top.

God first placed you at the top, but now wants to bury you in the foundations. Try to love being “nothing,” and don’t even ask if you can be more.

How mysterious are God’s plans that allows so many trials to overwhelm those who are dear to you. Yet they are still to be adored. God knows where your relatives are going along these rough roads, and also where you are going. And so, close your eyes, put your hand in His, and go on, sorrowfully but always with trust and love.

Disciple of Charles de Foucauld