Meditations of a Hermit
By Charles de Foucauld || Translated by Charlotte Balfour “My vocation,” declared Charles de Foucauld, “is to lead a hidden, solitary life.” In his desert hermitage, he accomplished that vocation with heartfelt simplicity and singular devotion to Christ crucified. At the same time, thanks to his heroic efforts to convert the Tuareg people to the Christian faith, he accepted the responsibility of writing, teaching, and preaching in order to faithfully follow the will of God. Of his writings, as René Bazin notes in his Preface, the vast majority were neither intended for the world’s reading nor devised to establish their author as a “public figure.” Rather, their sole aim was “to measure out the small amount of truth that the ‘Poor of the Sahara’ were capable of absorbing, just so much light as their blind souls could take in without being startled; for eyes, unaccustomed to light, will close their lids if too much brightness is shown to them all at once.” As soon as I believed in God,