A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. A discussion arose among the disciples as to which of them was the greatest. Jesus, who knew their thoughts, took a little child and placed it beside him. After which, he said to his disciples, whoever welcomes this little child on my account welcomes me. And whoever welcomes me welcomes him who sent me.
For the least, one among you is the greatest. It was John who said, master, we saw a man using your name to expel demons, and we tried to stop him because he is not one of our company. And Jesus said to John in reply, do not stop him. For any man who is not against you is on your side, and this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen.
Well, over the weekend, I was brought into contact with a book that once I started I couldn't lay down. It's called Per Jacques, and the author of it is Michel Carrouj. In in a word, it's the it's this it's the account of a young Carmelite priest who was the master, the principal of a school near Fontainebleau, who was because he befriended some Jewish boys, was sent to a concentration camp by the Nazis in 1944, to a concentration camp in Mauthausen, near Linz, not far from Vienna. The book is about evenly divided between his life before he was sent to the concentration camp and what happened to him there. Now I only I'm not I'm not interested in here in displaying the horrors of that camp.
It's absolutely unbelievable, but it's not that isn't new. See, that is there's nothing new about this. Man's inhumanity to man has been commonplace down the centuries. First, with this young Carmelite, he started out by being a secular priest, a teacher, and then decided he wanted to join Carmel, which at that time was there were only about 50 in the whole of France. Remember, the religious had a hard time getting back.
Now, one of the things that he had in mind as a young was was that everything he did was to be done for God, the opus dei idea. And here's a quotation I found. It is from it's called the book title is the experience of the presence of God. And I quote, listen to the voice of one who was a cook in the Carmelite convent in Rue De Vogierar under Louis the fourteenth. His name was brother Lawrence of the resurrection.
Now I quote him. This is brother Lawrence speaking. He says that, remember, he was in the kitchen. He was the cook. So he says the time of action is no different in the kitchen from that of prayer in the chapel.
I possess God just as tranquilly in the confusion of my kitchen where sometimes several people ask me for different things at the same time and want them on the minute, as if I were on my knees before the blessed sacrament. My faith itself sometimes becomes so enlightened that I believe it, faith, has disappeared. It seems to me that the veil of obscure obscurity has been lifted, that the endless light of the other life begins to appear, even in my kitchen. That quotation had great significance for the young Ter Jacques. Ter Jacques of the of the of the his family name was Bunnell, b u n e l.
We might remember him at this mass. Now, here on January January something or other of 1944, here's this young Carmelite in a new school near Fontainebleau with about 25 ordinary French boys there trying to teach them French. I don't know how you teach French to Frenchmen, but I guess you do the same thing trying to teach English to Americans. I don't know. Anyway, there he was going through the routine, humdrum routine of trying to teach French to a bunch of French kids.
And all of a sudden, you know, there's a knock on the classroom door, and there's the gestapo. And they yank him right out of the classroom, order the school to form in the out in the quadrangle, have a roll call, and meanwhile the three Jewish boys have been secreted. They don't get a hold of him, but they get a hold of the priest. And they yank him off, and in stages, he winds up at Mount House, concentration camp of about 20,000 men, all men, apparently, near Gille I mean near Linz, near Vienna. Now, he's in that camp for about a year.
Now, can you imagine the contrast between the life in that camp and trying to teach French to a bunch of French kids in a new school near Fontainebleau? And yet his whole attitude towards his functioning as a priest, as a Carmelite friar, didn't change one iota. All he did was to do what seemed to need doing. In Fontainebleau, it was teaching those little kids who were about as interested as the cobblestones out in the courtyard. In the camp, he did what he could for any that he found that he could do anything for.
And of course, he was no better off than any of them. Matter of fact, in many ways, was worse off. But he simply laid down his life for his fellow prisoners. He was criticized by some of his fellow Catholics, there were many of them there, of all nationalities, because he seemed to be so friendly with the communist. Well, he had been friendly with communists back in in Paris because you can't escape being friendly with communists for sometimes they're on the right side.
See? And sometimes they join us because we're on the right side. Think of that in terms of today's gospel. Those who are not against you are for you. It's a delicate principle, but there it is.
And anyway, he he just gave himself to do the job that he could do with what he had. He had very little of anything to do anything with. They managed to have a mass on Christmas. And if you would read what the the the because that was actually anyone who had been caught at that mass would have been executed like that. I don't know why precisely, but they he's the the author says they would have been Because a great great majority of these prisoners were all were Catholics from all parts of the world, from Spain, Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, you name it.
There's only a fraction of Jews. So if you could read there what that mass meant to with the with the with what the elements of the mass that they had to use, the makeshift things they had to use, and to think how commonplace mass is to us, you know. How we get all excited about vestments and stuff like that, you know. But anyway, the point I want to make is that he died two days after the camp was freed by US troops. So the liberation didn't mean much to him.
But he died just as he had lived. He refused to be liberated. He wanted to stay with his own people. He could have been liberated before, but he chose to stay there. Now the only point I want to make, I I I don't want to get mixed up with this all this camp horror.
I want to make this point that this good fryer who was a cook down in the hubbub of a community kitchen, And when he says how a lot of people were asking for different things and one of them right away. You can see the picture there. Here this old monk's running around with his habit, you know, and the fires are steaming and one wants an omelet well done and another wants just a little bit liquidy, you know. And another one wants a soft boiled egg, and there he's trying to give them to everybody. And yet he says, it was as tranquil as if he were before the blessed sacrament.
But you see, wasn't before the blessed sacrament. He didn't run away and leave his kitchen to go up to the blessed sacrament because he knew God was as much in his in the kitchen as he was in the in the chapel. And this this perejac, you see, here's the point I want to make and don't want you to miss it. He didn't change one iota bit from being a teacher teaching French to a bunch of uninterested students because they were average. He didn't change one bit from flopping from there back to Mauthausen.
Everything was changed, but he wasn't radically changed. Because the same idea of spirituality that he had in that new school of of Om, he took right into the camp. The one thing that everybody admired about him was his tranquility. That was the same tranquility he had in the school because he was always with his lord and savior wherever he was. That's the point I wanna make.
And that is so please, you can take that with you today and live it. This isn't this isn't lofty spirituality, whatever that may mean. This is down to earth spirituality because, you know, folks, that's where we are. We're on this earth. And Saint Paul says, pray always.
And I say to you again, pray always. What did he mean? The good cook can't be cooking eggs for his companions in the kitchen to be up in the chapel praying. So we come back to this idea of the work of the Lord. But what is the work of the Lord?
It's the work that comes to your hand today. And in this and the light of this, it can't be insignificant. This is the point, you see. If you're working with the Lord and for the Lord, what you're doing for him is really immaterial. That's pretty much of his choosing.
What what counts is how you do it, in whose presence you do it. What realization do you have that wherever you are and whatever you're doing, you are in the presence of God, just as real as if you were in the chapel and perhaps just as frankly and joyfully. The name of the father and of the son and the holy spirit. Amen.