If Father de Foucauld chose the name ‘Little Brothers of Jesus’ for his future disciples, it was not just because he was fond of it as a term, but because it seemed to him so aptly to express the ideal that had formed itself in his mind and heart. Since that ideal is our vocation, I want here to help you to realize the full meaning of our name and, at the same time, to see what it binds us to.

Brothers to Jesus is literally what we are to be with our entire lives. We are not giving ourselves only to an ideal, however great, we are not giving ourselves only to the pursuit of a perfection, however real: we are giving ourselves to a Person, a living person who is a God, and a God who is our brother in the most absolute sense of the word, because He is also a man. Of all the reasons for the life we have chosen, Jesus Christ is the sum and substance. Our deepest aim is to live real and total friendship with Him, in the midst of the world. It is for the sake of Him – Him, our ‘first-born’ – that we work and struggle like ordinary men; it is in order to meet the call of His love for us that we are so often on our knees, at His feet, trying to learn to love Him – to love Him as our God, to love Him as our Friend, to love Him as our Brother, as Father de Foucauld knew how to do so well.

From first to last, our effort of faith will be in the direction of a most personal meeting, certain as we are that we cannot lose our way if we adhere to our Lord with our whole being, if we place our lives and our very selves in His hands – in the hands of Him who is the Way itself, Truth itself, Life itself.  Everything in us must therefore tend to simplify itself into a union with Him in those places where we shall find Him alive, namely in our faith, in the Eucharist, in the Gospel, and in our fellow men. For it is indeed there that Jesus resides. And if we wish to make the gift of ourselves to our fellow men, it is, again, on account of Him; if we mean to share with our fellow men – and especially those who are the poorest, the most oppressed, the most unjustly dealt with – all we can of their toil and their concerns and their weariness, it is because they are loved by Jesus, because of what He has said of them in His Gospel, because we know, because we can see that He – He Himself, the Son of Man, perfect Man, and the Man of Sorrows – is there before us, present in them, present everywhere in their midst. In short, it is Jesus we shall thus be seeking, loving, working with, suffering with.

In a world as unsettled as is ours today, a world in the midst of whose confusion man has to think of a city of the future which shall be fraternal, just and favourable to the human person, nothing is easy, everything is complicated. The number of problems which are posed simultaneously, and on a scale now enlarged to the dimensions of the universe, is so great, and it brings into play such a tangled mass of values of all descriptions on all the different levels of social and economic life, that the human mind, with its natural limitations and its inherent weaknesses, is as  if overawed. Faced with the immensity of the effort entailed and the complexity of the techniques required, people’s minds are apt to become absorbed to a point where they will lose sight entirely of the one thing which lends meaning to the world, the existence of Jesus, their Christ. Even for the most sincere Christian, involved in the gigantic task by love – for surely it is one of the obligations of Christian love to work for the cessation of injustice in the heart and the establishment of conditions for all which shall be not only human but Christian; even for the most sincere Christian, I say – yes, even for the apostle – there is a great temptation in thinking that one does not have the time to look towards Jesus and love Him as He should be loved: for Himself.

Our rôle, Little Brothers, our particular task is right here: to act as the ‘regard’ of men of today upon Jesus, to be in the presence of Jesus as the ‘standing delegates’ of the forgetful crowd, carrying to Him on their behalf their adoration, their needs, their complaints and their faults. A Little Brother must be close to Jesus, wherever he is. There is therefore but one direction to which he may turn – and turn continually and untiringly – in feeling his way towards love, and that is to Jesus Himself, because the source of his life is Jesus.

For some little time now, it seems to me, there has been a certain misuse, or over use, of methods and schools of spirituality practiced among Catholics. Something we can re-learn from Father de Foucauld is how to go straight to Jesus and live for Him, simply and naturally, once we have seen Him as He really is in the Gospel. Father de Foucauld leads us back to essentials and teaches us to simplify our lives. His is no ‘new spirituality,’ at least in the proper sense of that term; and certainly he never had any pretensions to that description. It is merely a return to the Gospel – but the Gospel as it is in its entirety.