In four moments, Fr. Emmanuel Hirschauer proposes a discovery of Fr. Marie-Eugene’s teaching about the human person in its corporeality by commenting on the joyful, luminous, sorrowful and glorious mysteries of Jesus’ life.

 

Sorrowful Mysteries

“I have been put to death on the cross with Christ; still I am living; no longer I, but Christ is living in me; and that life which I now am living in the flesh I am living by faith, the faith of the Son of God, who in love for me, gave himself up for me” 

(Ga 2,19-20).

 

It is not always possible to smile and sometimes our eyes are full of tears. Suffering is never acceptable as such : « We aspire to happiness, we are made for it » (Fr. Marie-Eugène, lecture, 19 July 1932, GG p. 295) How can we live the trial that bruises us ? To look at Jesus on the cross and let him look at us offers a path… :

No suffering, no human need let him indifferent. He had to relieve, to heal (Fr. Marie-Eugène, sermon, 24 January 1965 ; GG, p. 295).
Our whole being objects to the announced suffering. Our poor human nature and our faith need to be sustained. Let us say to Our Lord : Show me the distant light at the end of the tunnel so that we might walk towards this luminous point shining in the dark. (Fr. Marie-Eugene, sermon, 24 February 1963)

 

Fr. Marie-Eugene imagines the way Maria looked at the dead body of her son Jesus taken down from the Cross and laid in her arms :

Maternally, you look at his wounds, his face, you discover his majesty and you kiss him. Allow us to kiss him after you : his forehead, his feet and his hands, the wound of his heart. (Fr. Marie-Eugene, Way of the Cross : Jesus’ body is given to his mother, and Fr. Marie-Eugene, « The Night of Calvary », in More Mother than Queen, p. 121)

At all stages of his life, Fr. Marie-Eugene went through the brazier of suffering :

I suffered a lot in my life. This is necessary for the fecundity. (to Marie Pila, 1967, GG, p. 147)
Jesus made it clear to me that it would be through suffering that I’d fulfill the role He wanted me to play. (Letter to his sister Berthe, 18 Feb. 1922, as he left to enter Carmel) (GG, p. 73)

During the illness that eventually took him away he experienced his weakness more than ever :

I’ve got over this illness weakened, but my weakness is relying on God’s mercy, on the strength of Our Lord’s cross.(Fr. Marie-Eugene, GG, p. 260)

At each stage, his trust and his living faith grow so that he can say :

How could it be possible for me not to be happy with all that, in spite of my sufferings ? This joy surprises everyone, but this joy is normal.

Yesterday, during the medical examinations [they lasted for three hours], I prayed all the time on the [examining] table. I was asked if I didn’t suffer too much on that table… Of course I suffered, in my spinal column, in my whole body… But it didn’t matter, I was with the Holy Trinity, time didn’t seem long to me. (Fr. Marie-Eugene, GG, p. 262)

If you talk about me, you must say that I was a poor and simple man, and that I suffered … (Fr. Marie-Eugene, GG, p. 263)