Vocation of Vincentian Brothers
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18 August 1984
To Brothers on Retreat

My dear Confreres,

May the grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ be with us forever!

Two days ago Brother Camille Harmond wrote to me, asking if I would join you during your annual retreat. Regretfully I am unable to do so, as I will be spending almost the entire month of September with our Confreres of the Province of Poland. So I write these few lines to greet you, to pray God's blessing on your retreat and to ask your prayers for the needs of the Congregation and for mine.

Let me say how happy I am that you are making your retreat together. I congratulate you on supporting this initiative which has been taken by yourselves. I am sure that the experience of praying together and of sharing your spiritual insights with each other will deepen in you the love and appreciation of the vocation which God has given you.

A grace that I hope God will give to each of you is to see with clarity of vision that the vocation which you have as a brother is a special one. Too often we look only to what our eyes can see and our hands accomplish, and we judge the value of our lives by our external achievements. The truth is otherwise. What gives value to our lives is the quality of our personal relationship with Jesus Christ. That relationship arises from the vocation He has given to each one of us. The Church of Jesus Christ has authoritatively told us through our Constitutions that to some men Jesus Christ has given the grace of being brothers in the Congregation of the Mission, and who are thus called to preach the Gospel to the poor through their prayer and the work which they daily do.

One of the graces that I received from God in the past two years was to meet a brother in one of our Provinces in the United States who is blind, but who asks daily to be led out into the grounds of the house so that he can, by his sense of touch, trim the grass under some of the trees. When I arrived at the house where this brother lives, the priest Confreres pointed him out to me as a blind brother whom they looked upon as a very saintly confrere. Talking with this brother for a little while later in the evening, I found myself agreeing fully with what the priests had said to me about him earlier. I mention this fact to illustrate the truth which we all know; namely, that it is not the position that we occupy in the Congregation that matters most in God's eyes, but the quality of our personal relationship with His Son, Jesus Christ.

Today I read the following few lines in a letter of St. Vincent to Brother Marin Baucher on 27 July 1659. I make St. Vincent's sentiments my own as I greet you individually in my heart: "Continue, my dear Brother, to give to God all the affection of your heart, the application of your spirit and the works of your hands, and hope for great blessings from His divine goodness. Ask Him for mercy for me who am in His love, my dear brother, your very affectionate Father and servant." (Coste VIII, Fr. ed., p. 56).

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