In many long hours of prayer in the caves, I realized anew that the saving knowledge of Jesus Christ supersedes all else, allowing us to experience a freedom that is not limited by the borders of a world that is itself in chains. At the same time, I recognized that many of the burning theological issues in the church today are neither burning nor theological and that in an age characterized (in some quarters) by confusion, third-rate theatrics, and infidelity, it is not more rhetoric that Jesus demands but personal renewal, fidelity to the gospel, and creative conduct. As Emile Cardinal Leger said in his farewell to Montreal, “The time for talking is over.”
This is the fundamental premise around which the 230 disciples who compose the Little Brothers of Jesus have organized their lives. The Little Brothers learn to disentangle essentials from nonessentials and to realize that this particular way of life is simply an exterior consequence of an immense, passionate, and uncompromising love for the person of Jesus. To live among the poorest and most abandoned of peoples as a manual laborer without clerical garb, to pass days and weeks in the desert in the gratuitous praise of God, to communicate through friendship values that cannot be communicated through preaching, [emphasis mine] satisfies not a desire for novelty but a compulsion of love. Same may call it foolish. I call it true wisdom from the God of Love.
“The Importance of Being Foolish” – Brennan Manning
