I don't want chocolate...

... I NEED a little piece of Bread. 

As a little valentines gift I want to share with you two texts that have become especially important to me within the past year. They were both written by Fr. Thierry de Roucy, the founder of Heart's Home. 

Although they speak so powerfully for themselves, I would like to share a little insight into why they have become important to me, and why today I don't want chocolate or flowers or a piece of paper with a little handwritten note. 

I don't want little symbols of love, but rather the unleavened bread that is Love Himself.

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In Vienna? But what is Heart's Home doing in Vienna? 

--even if they don't say it so bluntly, most of them, consumed with physical images of poverty bloated bellies and bones covered with thin skin and ragged clothes, are thinking it. 

I was too. And then I arrived here...

and discovered that I was exactly the reason Heart's Home was called to Vienna.

I--with a poverty bloated belly and ragged clothes covering my frail bones. It doesn't look like it on the outside, but I myself am one of the poor, everyday experiencing more and more my poverty...

which is also the heart of my presence here. Not to stand on the edge, on the outside, and minister or organize or problem-solve, but to be invited inside, to embrace, to follow, and to, in spite of excruciating pain, be united.

I didn't know how big my hunger was. 

I didn't know what it was to beg. 

I didn't know what it was to desire. 

Until, looking into the eyes of my friend, my community sister or brother, or a complete stranger...

I came to know my hunger...for peace, joy, understanding, mercy, love. 

I had to beg, every instant once more, for the love of the one standing before me. 

I had to accept not being understood or accepted. 

What is it that unites? 

It is an insecurity--not the insecurity of not having a job, of not having enough to eat, or not having the possibility to go to school. 

It is the insecurity that could easily lead to madness. It is the insecurity of our deepest humanity. It is the insecurity that continually screams out, "Please, love me". The insecurity of having to await a response, that may or may not be given. 

And in this insecurity, I, along with those with whom I have found myself united in this very human poverty, have the opportunity to truly experience for the first time the dignity of the human person--the reality of our humanity--life as being upheld by one hope alone, the hope and promise of an eternal response--"Yes, I love you"

the hope found in the never-ceasing and ever-consoling presence of Love Itself

a love that satiates insatiable hunger

a love that requires dependence and gives eternal Presence

a love that requires insecurity in order to give peace

the echoing cry for love 

finds its reply within a Presence 

that doesn't satiate on demand, but expands in order to fill even more, and to expand and fill again. 

The Eucharist. 

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The Bread and the Poor

 “D’un Point-Cœur à l’autre” #20
September 1997

When Jesus had just washed their feet, the Apostles, still moved, believe that, for this evening at least, it is the end of the amazing gestures of their Master. They feel relieved. What else could He still invent? ... As any other adult, Peter and his companions prefer what is foreseen to what is unforeseen, what is reasonable to what is foolish. Now it is time to eat what has been prepared for the paschal feast. Let us eat!

However, God doesn’t grow weary of amazing the Apostles. Just when they believe that they have reached an unclimbable top, then they realize that God is using each completion to undertake a new beginning. This is the lesson of the washing of the feet: although this gesture has in itself all its own cohesion and riches, as the sacrament of mercy, we can also notice that it’s only a springboard towards a bigger gift.

So it is the same when considering the commitment in Heart’s Home―as in any Christian’s commitment―we believe that it’s a definitive answer to a call of the Lord and that it can easily give satisfaction to Him, and it’s the starting point of an amazing adventure guided by the always-more of grace. Heart’s Home is not an end, neither a disgression, it’s a beginning, it’s the emergence of a love story without precedent.

An unexpected hunger

We gladly imagine that most of the apostles, when Christ chose them, were men whose wishes were easily fulfilled. They were working, sometimes very hard. They were eating. They were taking care of their families. Some of them were fervently participating to the prayers in the Synagogue, others had hardly any religion. They were simple men who were satisfied by life, with its happiness and sadness.

And God gave birth to a fear in them: Through the voice of John the Baptist, at the occasion of an event... Or maybe through a question. Indeed, it is always like this. The first word that the Lord speaks to man is a word which embarrasses him, which awakens his appetite, which makes him go out of his torpor. It is the end of a life where questions are kept silent as soon as they appear. The labor starts, which aims at the expansion of the heart. One has to go deeper, to listen to, to follow. Nothing will satisfy the human being more than a step forward, than the acceptance of a hunger which grows in so far as it is satiated.

When Jesus appears, this appetite, already opened in the heart of those He calls, will not leave off growing. Their worry grows, which some days takes the face of anguish:

“The peace of the Lord consists in the fact that any security is removed (from the Apostles). [...] They are given up to the incommensurable where any guarantee is suppressed. [...] We always would like to possess a peace similar to the one of the world, a peace which protects against aggressions, which allows us to rest behind its walls. But the Lord’s peace is the opposite of this world’s peace: it deprives us of all security.”

“The Lord didn’t come to reduce God to the human measure, but to expand man to God’s measure” Adrienne von Speyr, John: The Farewell Discourses, Hardcover, Ignatius Pr.

However, any turning back has become impossible, any backwards walk. The previous life of the apostles would seem tasteless and coming back to it would leave them disappointed. From now on their hearts are crying for a substantial presence which will never abandon them. Their intelligence claims a speech which will give sense to reality, to event. They need to listen, they need to open themselves, they need to let themselves be looked at. And without their new Rabbi, life seems all of a sudden impossible. He is the only One who can fulfill the immense wishes they just came to discover in themselves. We can understand, in this light, the cry of Peter in the synagogue of Capernaum while it was becoming empty, “Where would we go?” We understand also how the journey of Jesus to Jerusalem could disgust the disciples.

“It’s three years that we have been with Him; what will we do without Him? What will we become?”

Thus, if the way with Jesus is like a long rise of desire, the outlook of the Cross, for Peter and his companions, can only generate despair. It would be a dramatic end, not only of an adventure, but also of a promise; it would be starvation more terrible than that of the body... without thinking about the Eucharist, all that would be the case. But this new hunger, this strange hunger of heart revealed by Christ to the Apostles, was not without answer. The Lord does not call in order to disappoint. He pushes to increase and to fill, and to increase again.

The interior way made by the Missionaries is well similar to the one made by the apostles and at last to that of all disciples of the Lord. To commit oneself to Heart’s Home means to decide to follow God. And to follow God means that we discover day after day our own poverty. He who is hungry and thirsty, it is me... He who is in jail, it is me... He who is naked, it is me... “Give me something to drink!...” We do not feed well our neighbor except if we have ourselves known hunger. We cannot well console the one who is suffering, except if we have ourselves accepted tenderness from another.

In this context, the Eucharist gains each day more and more value. The way taken by the Missionaries is not first of all a way of duty, it’s a way to discover themselves. This is the discovery―not desolate at all―that we cannot do anything without God and that God gives everything from Himself to the one who, everyday, sits at His table. In spite of premonitions, in spite of recommendations, such a dependence is a surprise. We were still thinking that we had enough reserve, with all the affection received from our childhood, with our certificates, with our multiple experiences. But the Eucharist suddenly appears like the essential food, like the Presence without which everything is only absence, like the Light without which other things are only darkness... Because from now on, it is as if our life would have been displaced. Now it takes place at the level of the heart, and the heart does not accept any other food than love.

To awake the hunger of others

Many men are hiding their hunger. Many are playing with their hunger. In the same way, some others betray it, those whom we discover one day, dead by suicide or anorexia. In the countries where there’s an abundance of money, hunger―every kind of hunger―has become a shame, as if gold had this consequence of annihilating it. However, this is to misunderstand what hunger is. It’s not at all a dishonor. It’s a dynamism. It’s an opening to what can be given to itself. It’s a spring stretched towards communion.

So, it is a good thing to be hungry. Jesus knows it well and He is the one who, on the way to Galilee, was walking proclaiming, “Happy are those who are hungry and thirsty...”. Nowadays the Lord’s disciples are too often seen as organizers, religious executives, judges, masters; they are rather those who believe in man’s hunger because God made them first experience their own hunger, as for the prodigal Son―their hunger for return, their hunger for mercy, their hunger for the Father. They are those who have experienced this hunger, this emptiness, this need in such a deep way and sometimes through a burning pain that they are even able, like the strannik of old Russia, to leave everything and to go and proclaim, “You are hungry, my friends... Do you know how big, how huge your hunger is? Let them follow me those whose hearts are crying famine! Beyond any hope, they will be fulfilled: but let their hunger still grow up!”

If in our western countries, to recognize that we are hungry looks like a leper’s acknowledgment, it’s not the same in most of the countries where the Heart’s Homes are settled. There, hunger is exposed. Hunger is crying too much to be hidden. It’s enough rather to orientate it. It’s more necessary to help it to get over another step. Then it stops lowering the one who suffers from it, and it raises him and helps him to recover his human dignity, as Son of God.

In Heart’s Home, our encounters all wish to lead to the Eucharist. If the Missionaries are the banquet―we will see it―they are especially those who lead to a meal more definitive, where the poor―those of the pathways and the squares―are invited. It is the meal of a love which is given without limits to all those who are excluded on earth. It is the meal which generates peace in the hearts of all those who are sometimes worried until madness.

Everything passes by. Our parents. Our relatives. We are pilgrims. As Missionaries, we are also aware that we are only passing. And even if our friendship lasts beyond the objective signs we give of it, one day we have to leave... This day, our presence disappears―even if it could have awakened hope―this day our smile disappears―even if it stays visible in some photos―this day our speeches stay silent, even if one or the other of them are still carved in the memory of those who have heard them.

There is an emptiness which would be infinitely painful, even murderous, if the Eucharist itself would not stay, as the Bread given to the poor, as the Presence offered to those who do not have friends, as the speech told to those who live in a troubled silence. Just as the mission of the parents consists essentially in transmitting to their children the friendship which has supported and attended their existence, the Missionaries are called to bring all the persons they meet in the presence of an enduring Love which will nourish their life. The Missionaries possess a treasure. Surprisingly humble. Terribly discreet. It is the treasure they come to offer to their friends: a bread which gives eternal life, an intimate presence as none other, faithful until the end, a love without limits.