Spirituality

When we hear the expression “from the heart” we understand it to mean that the speech or action is both emotional and sincere; it is powerfully felt, so much so that the action it inspires cannot be resisted. When we open our hearts, we invite others in so that they may know us more deeply. When we are sad, our hearts are broken; when happy, they fill with joy.

St. Vincent often expressed his own love, sympathies, and joy by speaking of his heart, once saying to his beloved friend St. Louise that “my heart is no longer my heart, but yours, in that of Our Lord, Whom I desire to be the object of our one love.” [CCD I:172]

Our hearts are moved by each other, moved by pain, moved by joy, and moved by love most of all; the love of family, of friends, of romance – and the greatest of all loves, agape, the love of God. “That is because,” Bl. Frédéric once explained, “the human heart easily allows itself to be captured by love and there is always much love there where there is much faith.” [Letter 145, to Velay, 1837]

Just as our hearts seek one another and seek God, He also seeks us. His love comes first, unbidden and gratuitous; he is, as St. Catherine of Siena said “crazy in love” with us. [Dialog 153] This is the love that truly fills our hearts. It is the love that Frédéric said “which gives itself without diminishing, which shares itself without division, which multiplies itself, which is present in many places at once.” [Letter 107, to Curnier, 1835]

When we visit the neighbor, seeking to learn what Frédéric called “the secret of his lonely heart” [Baunard, 279], we can really only do so by “serving them from the heart” as St. Louise taught. [SWLM, a.85]

Our first Rule, in 1835, explained that Members share a friendship that “will make of all our hearts one heart.” Our vocation calls us to share that friendship not just with each other, but with the neighbors we serve; to share our hearts, and the love of God within them. As was said at the Society’s National Assembly of 1911, “were we to search carefully, we would find in this world, more hungry hearts than hungry stomachs… Humanity is made up of hearts, and hearts need sympathy more than material aid.”

This is the great lesson of our patron, and the reason Frédéric said in the first annual report that ought to model not only his works, but “the manner in which he understood his works. Charity does not consist so much in the distributing of bread as in the manner it is distributed.” Vincent’s life, he said, “is a life to be carried on, a heart in which one’s own heart is enkindled.” [Letter 175, to Lallier, 1838]

In this, may we each have, as Vincent wished for Louise, “a young heart and a love in its first bloom for Him Who loves us unceasingly and as tenderly as if He were just beginning to love us.” [CCD I:408]

Contemplate

Do I let the neighbor in to my open heart?

Recommended Reading

Praying with Vincent de Paul

“Well,” we sometimes admonish ourselves when an idea we’re discussing doesn’t seem quite right, “that’s not very Vincentian.” The phrase is a simple reminder of who we are, and how we act. It needs no further explanation. After all, our Rule finds it sufficient to say that “Visits to the Poor are made in a Vincentian Spirit.” [Rule, Part III, St. 8] The very word Vincentian carries with it a depth of meaning that conveys so much more to Members than it does to anybody outside the Society.

It isn’t that the Rule never explains what it is to be Vincentian. Throughout it, we read things such as “Vincentians feel called to pray together,” “Vincentians strive to seek out and find those in need,” “Vincentians serve the poor cheerfully,” “Vincentians endeavor to establish relationships based on trust and friendship,” “Vincentians never forget the many blessings they receive from those they visit,” and, of course, “Vincentians serve in hope.”

It turns out that our little word, Vincentian, is a very big thing. So big that if we were to make a list of all the characteristics and actions of Vincentians from our Rule and Manual, and treat as a list of instructions, it would be overwhelming.

In a similar way, if we were to make a list of all the times Jesus says things like “go and do likewise”, “as I have done for you, you should also do,” “do this and you will live,” “love your enemies,” or “whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me,” we would have an even longer list!

The good news is that these lists are not in conflict; Vincentian spirituality is Catholic spirituality. To be Catholic, and to be Vincentian, is not to carry these lists only in our books, but in our hearts, and in our actions. We know that to be Vincentian is always to err on the side of compassion, even though those words are not in the Rule.

Challenged by the Pharisees to pick out the greatest of the commandments, Jesus responded with an entirely new commandment, in two parts: “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind… You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” He was not dismissing the Ten Commandments, but was instead answering the “why” of those commandments.

Few Vincentians have the Rule memorized, and although we try to live it fully, most of us will fall short from time to time. That doesn’t make us any less Vincentian, as long as we remember the “why”. Our “ideal is to help relieve suffering for love alone,” and that is just Vincentian enough.

Contemplate

In serving, is my foremost motive always love of God and neighbor?

Recommended Reading

The Spirituality of the Home Visit

“There is no act of charity,” St. Vincent once wrote, “that is not accompanied by justice…” [CCD II:68] We so often see the words “charity” and “justice” used together that we perhaps don’t often think enough about what these words mean, and what they mean for us to do in practice.

We know that charity, the greatest of the theological virtues, is love, and that our acts of charity are in turn the means by which we express and live this virtue: loving God and neighbor. [CCC, 1822]  But justice seems like a harder word, doesn’t it?

Our human justice, the legal system, seems focused mainly on punishment, and when we think of God’s justice we may think mainly of the Final Judgment. Yet it should be clear that St. Vincent is not asking us to pass judgment on anybody, much less to punish them. Nor is Frédéric, when he calls upon us to “to make charity accomplish what justice alone cannot do.” [Letter 136, to Lallier, 1836]

Taken in context, Vincent’s letter was to a missioner regarding a large donation that had been sent to him to support the religious, reminding hm to “use none of it for any other purpose under any pretext of charity whatsoever.” [CCD II:68] In other words, taking what belongs to somebody else, even to help the poor, cannot be an act of charity because it is unjust.

In a similar way, Frédéric was calling to “to make equality as operative as is possible among men; to make voluntary community replace imposition and brute force; to make charity accomplish what justice alone cannot do.” [Letter 136, to Lallier, 1836] It’s the Christian duty, in other words, for those who have much to give it away of their own accord. It is not our duty to try to force them. And if what each of us can spare is not enough, then we dig deeper, beyond what we think we can spare.

We sometimes say of convicted criminals that “they got what they deserved!” That is justice, but all persons deserve certain things. After all, God did not place us on the earth, living in community, so that some of us might starve. As John the Baptist preached, for the man who has two coats, one belongs to him, and the other belongs to the man with no coat. Having “two coats” was a sign of wealth 2000 years ago, but each of us can ask ourselves today “what is my second coat? To whom does it belong?”

As Pope Saint Gregory the Great explained, when we give “necessaries of any kind to the indigent, we do not bestow our own, but render them what is theirs; we rather pay a debt of justice…” [P.R., Bk III] Giving our time and ourselves is charity. Treating the poor with dignity is justice. Assisting them with money donated for that purpose is justice. That is why “Conference members should never adopt the attitude that the money is theirs, or that the recipients have to prove that they deserve it.” [Manual, 23]

Contemplate

What is my “second coat”? To whom does it belong?

Recommended Reading

Serving in Hope, Module IV – Our Vincentian Mission

Writing to his friend Auguste Materne, a 17-year-old Frédéric Ozanam tried to sum up his good points and his bad points. The bad side he reduced to “four predominant faults: pride, impatience, weakness, and an extreme meticulousness” which he went on to explain in more detail, then closed with an odd self-assessment: “Add to these faults that of despising the neighbor a little too easily and you have my bad side.” [Letter 12, to Materne, 1830] Less than three years before founding the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, whose members are dedicated to loving and serving our neighbors, this man, this role model of holiness, admitted to “despising the neighbor a little too easily”?

The younger Frédéric recognized his own pride and impatience, which sometimes led him to intolerance. He concluded that he thought he “could become either a very wicked or a very virtuous man.” Ozanam’s frankness may be a reminder that each of us has a saint within us, struggling to be set free from our human weaknesses, whatever they may be, and in order to achieve the holiness we seek, we all need help. As our Rule puts it, “Vincentians are aware of their own brokenness and need for God’s grace.” [Rule, Part I, 2.2]

Frédéric, whose beatification attests to the holiness he ultimately attained, found the grace to go beyond his own brokenness in the very place that we may find it, too – in the Society he founded for this very purpose. Indeed, only nine years after delineating his own weaknesses, he would write to Father Lacordaire, saying “I greatly fear to lose in useless efforts time I could more modestly and surely employ for my salvation and the service of the neighbor.” [Letter 211, to Lacordaire, 1839] His impatience had reversed itself, and he now urgently sought to serve the neighbor.

Each of us, Frédéric wrote, “carries within his heart a seed of sanctity”. [Letter 137, to Janmot, 1837] It is in the poor that we see God, and are able to serve Him and thus grow closer to Him; to nurture that seed. This is both the lesson of Frédéric’s life, and the example he leaves for us; an example of holiness attained, but more importantly, an example of growth in holiness.

Beyond even that, Frédéric shows us how to grow in holiness together, asking his fellow Vincentians to “not allow yourselves to be stopped by those who will say to you, ‘He is in Heaven.’ Pray always for him who loves you dearly, for him who has greatly sinned. If I am assured of these prayers, I quit this earth with less fear.” [Baunard, 386] In return, Léonce Curnier would say after his lifelong friend’s death that “I never think of Frédéric without an inclination to invoke his assistance… I seem to see him in Heaven between St. Vincent de Paul and St. Francis de Sales, whose faithful disciple he was.” [Ibid, 406]

May we continue to serve Christ, and to pray for each other’s salvation. Pray for us Blessed Frédéric!

Contemplate

Do I always pray for my fellow Vincentians, living and dead, and ask also for their prayers?

Recommended Reading

15 Days of Prayer with Blessed Frédéric Ozanam

The bold, five-year mission of the starship Enterprise was “to seek out new life and new civilizations” on “strange new worlds.” Vincentians, though constrained to our same old world, and not limited to a mere five years, are similarly called “to seek out and find those in need and the forgotten” in our mission of charity. [Rule, Part I, 1.5]

Our hands are full, it may seem, just answering the calls for help that arrive unannounced; our treasuries may strain to meet the needs presented to us. So why would we go around trying to find more? After all, don’t our neighbors find us, just as we receive donations, through God’s providence? Of course! But recall that trust in Providence is not a mandate to be merely passive. As Blessed Frédéric once wrote, “Providence does not need us for the execution of its merciful designs, but we, we need it and it promises us its assistance only on the condition of our efforts.” [Letter 135, to Bailly, 1836]

What greater or more important effort could we offer but to seek out those in need – especially the forgotten? After all, as both Moses and Jesus remind us, the land will never lack for needy persons and the poor will always be with us. The most needy may be forgotten by their neighbors and by society, but they are not forgotten by God, their Creator. It is exactly that message, that hope, that we are called to share on our home visits.

It is our respect for the dignity of every person that should motivate us to seek them, to find them, and to share God’s love in the form of bread, in the form of help, and most importantly in the form of our presence and love. We can never let the fear of a depleted treasury stop us from seeking out those most in need, because we know that “giving love, talents and time is more important than giving money.” [Rule, Part I, 3.14]

God does provide. He provides generously and lovingly. It is the will of God that our neighbors in need call us, and the will of God that enables us to help them. But as St. Louise reminds us, we must “never take the attitude of merely getting the task done.” [SWLM, A.85] We are not the Society of Bill Payments, we are the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, following the example of our Patron, as he in turn imitated Christ.

We are called to see the face of Christ. He is out there; not on a strange new world, but perhaps on a park bench, perhaps in a darkened apartment, perhaps in a hospital or prison. The world may have forgotten Him, but we hear His cry, and seek Him, unafraid.

Contemplate

Where can I go to find Christ, and how can I serve Him best?

Recommended Reading

Faces of Holiness

“The little Society of St. Vincent de Paul is alive and growing,” wrote Bl. Frédéric, “the extraordinary needs of this winter have reinvigorated the activity of our almsgiving.” [Letter 224, to Lallier, 1840] This was, he said, the way in which they strove to keep the fire of Christian brotherhood burning. But for this seven-year-old Society, “almsgiving” had already expanded to include the kind of works we now describe as “systemic change”.

Frédéric went on to explain that a “great many of our members have volunteered to help young ex-prisoners, and the excellent La Perrière is engaged in establishing preventive assistance.” [Ibid] Not content only to serve the needs of those already hungry and in poverty, the Conference at Lyon was working to help ex-prisoners make their way back into society and setting up other programs to help people avoid poverty in the first place. This only makes sense – as the old saying goes, we fight poverty, not the poor. So why would Vincentians not try to head it off at the pass?

Such approaches do not contradict our mission of person-to-person service, of seeing and serving Christ in the poor whom we visit. On the contrary, it is our home visits that give us the insights necessary to determine what sort of programs are most needed in our own communities. That is why the Rule explains that the “Society should work not only with individuals in need but also with families and communities.” [Rule, Part I, 7.9] Special Works and Systemic Change are, and have always been, the natural outgrowth of the home visit, and the regular practice of the Society. [Manual, p. 5]

Social scientists may do their studies, and offer insights in their publications, but it is as true today as it was in Frédéric’s time that “knowledge of social well-being and of reform is to be learned, not from books, nor from the public platform, but in climbing the stairs to the poor man’s garret, sitting by his bed side, feeling the same cold that pierces him, sharing the secret of his lonely heart and troubled mind.” [Baunard, 279] We are called not to simply drop the groceries at the top of those stairs and walk away, but to gain from our neighbors the knowledge Frédéric described, and put it to use beyond the home visit.

“There is no act of charity that is not accompanied by justice,” St. Vincent wrote, “or that permits us to do more than we reasonably can.” [CCD II:68] Charity and justice go together in our church’s teaching, our Patron’s spirituality, and our founder’s example.

Justice places its demands on each of us and all of us, not just the Society of St. Vincent de Paul. And while justice and charity are inextricably bound together, Vincentians remain especially committed to solve those problems that we understand uniquely through the eyes of our neighbors, always “[making] charity accomplish what justice alone cannot do.” [Letter 136, to Lallier, 1836]

Contemplate

My Conference serves many individual needs. Can I add them up to a wider problem we can address?

Recommended Reading

Seeds of Hope

In advising a young priest who was departing to become the Superior of the Agde Seminary, Vincent offered guidance that was both deeply spiritual and profoundly practical – advice that remains pertinent to those in servant leadership in the Society today. [CCD XI:310-316]

He urges the new leader to focus on imitation of Christ, discernment of God’s will, and especially on the virtue of humility. Indeed, it is Christ’s humility that Vincent holds forth as an example to imitate. Christ, as leader of His disciples did not “lord it over them”, despite, in fact, being the Lord! He taught us that he had come not to be served, but to serve.

Vincent contrasts this very basic tenet with those who that you have to “make it clear you are Superior.” Instead, he emphasizes that the superior should live just like the others, and always seek God’s will in prayer and meditation, rather than rely on his own personal judgment. Observers should not be able to tell by watching how we live, which is the leader.

Again and again, he comes back to humility, and to imitation of Christ’s humility: The superior does not take personal satisfaction in the works or successes of the company, instead always attributing them to God. He does not offer his words of advice or make decisions without recourse to prayer and meditation to God. He asks God to tell him the needs of the others and to guide him in serving them.

No matter how dedicated we may feel that we are in our prayer lives, Vincent’s words here remind us how much more room there is for prayer and meditation – and how very practical this advice is. For those times when, even subconsciously, we think “this problem is not important enough to bring to God,” Vincent reminds us, echoing the Sermon on the Mount, that God counts even the hairs on our head. Not to bring our “little things” to Him more regularly is, in a sense, to deny the great humility of God’s incarnation in Christ; it is to elevate our own judgment in place of God’s.

As servant leaders, we should marvel each day that Providence led us to this place and to this role and pray that we are giving back to heaven all that we have been given. Perhaps this, from St. Vincent, should be one of our daily prayers:

“Lord, what have I done to have such a ministry? What works of mine correspond to the responsibility being placed on my shoulders? Ah, my God, I’ll spoil everything if You yourself don’t guide all my words and works!”

Contemplate

How often do I pray for God’s guidance in all of my decisions and all of my works?

Recommended Reading

Praying with Vincent de Paul