Human beings are creatures of desire, and therefore of ceaseless searching. Because we need. From the cry of the newborn, needing air to breathe, and the wail expressing the most basic need—to eat—up to the final gasps for air of those leaving this life, and the gestures of those who can no longer communicate otherwise. We search. Later come the search for balance, the “whys,” the need to know, to understand… until we integrate what uniquely fulfills us as adults, men and women… and also what life imposes upon us in other ways.
But is this enough?
When God created us, He did so in His own image. “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them…” (Gen. 1:27). And this image is engraved within us—whether we acknowledge it or not—in what we call our heart. It is here that we must arrive, to that image which, once discovered—more or less definitively—brings true human happiness and which ought to be the desire and pursuit of an entire lifetime.
To desire, to seek, to embark upon a journey to reach it is the ordinary task of discovering this true image of ourselves, at the unique personal center that is the heart.
Yet, “this truth of each person… is hidden beneath much undergrowth…” (Pope Francis, Encyclical Dilexit Nos, 6). Each of us can pause to identify what constitutes our undergrowth, what threatens us, or what the modern world drags us toward. A world that lives amid wars and natural disasters, yet one for which we do not lose hope…
The feast of St. Augustine approaches. Most of the Religious of the Assumption were accustomed to referring to “our Father” St. Augustine. We knew and heard read weekly the Rule of St. Augustine. We could recite from memory some of the phrases that mark his spiritual journey.
Similarly, we know that St. Mary Euphrasia of Jesus adopted from the beginning, as the foundation of the first Statutes (1854) of the congregation she founded, the Rule of St. Augustine: “First of all, let us love God, let us love our neighbor…” (Opening excerpt of the Rule).
Therefore, reflecting together on Augustine and Mary Euphrasia—two restless hearts, two stories of conversion and surrender—can aid us in our own journey toward God, “…who loved us first” (cf. 1 John 4:10).
Contemplating their paths can also help us deepen our understanding of the spirituality of the Assumption today.
How did this adventure begin for each of them?
Indeed, the restlessness of the heart is the common starting point of these two journeys.
From the very beginning of his Confessions, Augustine declares: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you” (Confessions, Book I, Chapter 1). Yet he recounts a turbulent adolescence and a tumultuous, disordered youth. He was restrained by inner obstacles, by concupiscence from which he resolved to free himself at nineteen: “And now I was nearly thirty and still could not leave the mire” (ibid., Book VI, Chapter 11), not to mention the diversion in his search for truth caused by Manichaean fallacies…
Nevertheless, all of this was, in its own way, marked by the search for love, beauty, and truth—even for worldly success! He describes his doubts, his struggles, his deepest and most superficial desires. For at the core, “I was hungry for a food that was nothing other than You, my God” (ibid., Book III, Chapter 1). God continually showed him signs of His presence: his mother’s prayer; the path of friendships that revealed another possibility; the encounter with Ambrose of Milan… These glimpses already point to the importance of friendship and spiritual accompaniment.
Today, we are well aware of the family backgrounds and situations from which many of the children and young people we educate come, and we understand what this entails.
Mary Euphrasia, after a happy childhood, experienced an adolescence marked by: her father’s financial ruin; her parents’ separation; the death of her mother; and being entrusted to families that swung her from one extreme to another in religious practice (see Origins, Vol. I). What might all this mean for the shaping of a personality?
She then lived a youth characterized by searching, questioning the meaning of life, and—at last—encountering the living Word during Lent of 1836. All of this external, and above all internal, journey she recounts in a letter written to Father Lacordaire, O.P., in 1841, where she describes the situation that preceded her definitive steps toward God: her education “in an unbelieving family,” albeit with the positive influence of her mother; her superficial religious formation; later doubts and questions “that interested no one”… And at the same time, that God who, in the sacraments—and especially in the Eucharist—made His presence uniquely felt. All of this, beginning with the experience of her First Communion, the first grace she also considers the origin of her return to God, her conversion.
The process of conversion was, for both, a path of light and truth, and the experience of emptiness acted as a push toward the essential.
Augustine: His journey goes from the outside to the inside: “Late have I loved you, Beauty ever ancient and ever new! You were within me, but I was outside myself, and out there I sought You” (L. X, Ch. 27). After traveling tortuous and laborious paths, he moves from dispersion to inwardness, with the Holy Scriptures as his guide and the Psalms as a system of lights guiding the soul toward God. The definitive encounter is with Christ, the true Mediator, in whom he “founds a solid hope” (L. X, Ch. 53).
His conversion was not solitary. Augustine always felt accompanied by friends, the seed of the Augustinian “community,” inspired by the Trinity and the community initiated by Jesus: “…and they came to Him… to be with Him, and to send them out to preach…” (Mk 3:14). Communion and mission go hand in hand.
Furthermore, there were decisive companions in his spiritual journey. The encounter with Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, was the spark that ignited his conversion: “Without my knowing it, You guided me to him so that, through him, I might reach You” (L. V, Ch. 13). Also, the prayers and tears of his mother, Monica, were essential: “…after Augustine’s conversion, she no longer needed to continue living” (L. IX, Ch. 10). The silent intercession of others is a powerful help before God.
M. Eugenia: Her conversion was early and definitive. There were no doubts or reversals, though there were trials in fulfilling the vocation that would gradually take shape over time. “My conversion dates from Notre Dame” (Origines, Vol. I, Ch. II, p. 48). The words of Fr. Lacordaire in his final Lenten Conferences were decisive: “…it seemed to her that each of his words was directed straight at her and answered all her questions… the light shone, calm, serene, radiant” (p. 48). Her immediate response was to give herself to God and to serve a Church she did not yet know, fully accepting the truth she discovered in Jesus and the Gospel. She was 18 years old.
The heart that seeks becomes a heart that loves and serves.
Then comes the concrete realization of this vocation: the encounter with Father Combalot the following year; her difficult “yes” to a mission that involved founding a new congregation; the no less turbulent challenges of the first small community with the Founder; the painful separation… Yet, “Two years after Father Combalot’s departure, Mother M. Eugenia wrote to Father d’Alzon on February 2, 1843: ‘I believe that for some time now, our sisters have begun to love Father Combalot again… We value our spirit and our devotion to Jesus Christ more than anything we see elsewhere, and we are grateful to Father Combalot for his influence on this’” (Textes Fondateurs, p. 82).
We have also mentioned Father d’Alzon and “the first sisters.” We have cited “our spirit,” the spirituality of the Assumption; “our devotion to Jesus Christ”… Here we again find echoes of Augustine’s spiritual journey. Beyond the difficulties and doubts on the path to God, we find people who support, guide, and sustain her—spiritual friendship (her first sisters); a companion (Emmanuel d’Alzon) who ultimately also becomes a companion and, above all, a friend, about whom it would be too lengthy to elaborate here.
In both cases, we appreciate an embodied spirituality: from inwardness to commitment, to service.
In Augustine, a passionate love: love for truth, for community, for the Word in Sacred Scripture, the unfathomable mystery of the Trinity… All of this directs him to live for God and for his brothers, without shirking social commitments until the end of his life.
He also did not refuse the task, accepting the burden of being Bishop of Hippo despite his desire to devote himself to his community, to study… and he lived out fully the responsibilities he had accepted: “For you I am bishop; with you I am Christian” (Sermon 340,1). Doesn’t this sound somewhat like synodality: the shepherd who walks with his sheep…? (This phrase was echoed by Pope Leo XIV in his greeting following his election on May 8, 1925.)
María Eugenia is also passionate about God and Christ. God’s love is her only support. “God alone,” the motto she adopts, is not merely the one circulating in the 19th-century French Church, but something she lives with passion. Her life has a single orientation: the worship of God as the first.
The spirituality of the Assumption is one of the single gaze. This single gaze defines her simultaneously as contemplative and missionary. “My gaze… is entirely on Jesus Christ and the extension of His Kingdom” (cf. Origines I, Part 2, Ch. 11, p. 488).
In M. Eugenia, this is summarized in a service aimed at transforming society through the Gospel lived concretely. And for this, she proposes education as the means.
She finds in the mystery of the Incarnation of Jesus Christ the ultimate expression of the love that made us children in the Son, from which she draws her capacity to love: “The world is not big enough for my love” (Notes Vol. no. 154). Furthermore, she is convinced that Jesus Christ, in His mystery of the Incarnation, “is the beginning and the end of Christian teaching: ‘to make Jesus Christ known, liberator and king of the world’” (Textes Fondateurs, p. 116). And she explains in that decisive letter to Father Lacordaire: “I find it difficult to call the earth a place of exile; I see it as a place of glory for God,… and we are here to work toward the arrival of our Father’s kingdom in us and in others” (ibid., p. 117).
This open gaze on the world, her conviction that we all have a mission in it, and that we can be agents of transformation in society, in community life, and in prayer, sustain her apostolic energy and commitment.
But always in and with the Church. Her spirituality is enriched by the spirit of the Church, which she loyally loves, even while recognizing its limits, especially in its members…
Everything involves her in the “social kingdom of Christ” in society and in each person. This rootedness in Him leads her to authentic freedom of spirit. She gives herself generously, with what she calls “joyful detachment,” a lived experience she has left as a legacy and which in some way expresses the mystery of the Assumption of Mary.
The spirituality of the Assumption draws from hearts that have sought deeply. Therefore, some of our tasks today could be:
Recover the value of inner searching in a world full of distractions.
Live interiority as a source of transformative action, not as a kind of refuge.
Delve into the path of Augustine and Mary Eugenia, adopting them as guides in our own journey of mature, free, and committed faith.
Rethink personal accompaniment, both for ourselves and for those who need or request it.
Augustine and Mary Eugenia invite us to make our lives a pilgrimage of the heart toward God. A journey. But not alone. Walking within the Church is what we call today synodality. Here we have a call that necessarily engages us.
We can invite one another to keep seeking, keep walking, keep trusting: “hope does not disappoint” (Rom. 5:5)… as Pope Francis reminds us at the beginning of his Bull calling for the Jubilee of the year 2025.