The Vow of Personality: An Expression of Love

of the Highest Divine Union

Fr. Louis Demba Ndione, SSS

The Vow of Personality: An Expression of Love of the Highest Divine Union

I am very glad to share the spirituality of Saint Peter Julian Eymard and about the forgotten, or rather the unknown mystic of the Eucharist. My reflection will be centered on the “gift of personality” of Father Eymard in view of the transforming or divine union. We cannot understand the gift of personality if we do not recall to mind its background, context and spirit. Early in the XVII century, there were formulations of the gift of self in line with the French School of spirituality. It is quite interesting to notice the gift of self in the understanding of Father Eymard and reveals something new and far greater than the simple theories of schools; it is a life of communion in which the human person gets into an overabundance of divine lights, or transforming union where its soul reaches the beatific vision in the terminology of Saint Thomas Aquinas. This idea was the fruit of his vocational journey in the major seminary of Grenoble and the period spent in Lyons. Besides the theories of the French School of spirituality, Father Eymard read in 1850, the book of his great friend Blanc de Saint-Bonnet on ‘SUFFERING’ where the Philosopher strongly defends that holiness is nothing other than the gift of the human personality. Along with his readings and meditation, Father Eymard shaped little by little his spirituality around this central idea. In fact, this enterprise later became the summit and turning point of his life and spirituality. It is made manifest during the period of his great Retreat in Rome 1865 in which the depth and breadth of the gift of life had been understood. An act of love leads a person even to fusion with God. The gift of personality indicates the profoundness of the spirituality of Saint Peter Julian Eymard, which is deeply rooted in the Eucharist as a burning fire of love that transforms human personality, heart and soul. On March 21st 1865, the feast of Saint Benedict, Father Eymard made his Vow of Personality in response to the love of Christ. From this vow Father Eymard comes to the crowning of his spiritual Eucharistic life linked with the text of Gal. 2,20 “ it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me”.

He wrote in a dialogue form the union of Christ in the soul: “Through communion you will live for me because I will be living in you. I will fill your soul with my desires, and my life will consume and annihilate in you all that is your very own. So much so that it will be I, instead of you, who will live and desire everything in you…you will be the body of my heart, your soul, the active faculties of my soul, your heart, the receptacle, the movement of my heart. I will be the person of your personality and your personality, the life of mine in you: Vivo ego, jam non ego, vivit vero in me christus” (Fr. Eymard, Retreat Notes, March 21 st, 1865)

By means of understanding the gift of personality one should have in mind that the entire person is changed in Jesus Christ which consists of living for Christ and being everything for him. “per ipsum, cum ipso et in ipso” (Through Him, with Him and in Him). This is where we can find the level of understanding of the mystical life of Father Eymard as purification in line with the terminology of Saint John of the Cross in Dark Night of the Soul and paralleled with Saint Teresa of Avila in her numerous meditations on this divine union. In the experience of Saint Teresa of Avila she argues that God resorts to removing the scale that covers the eyes of the soul, through the way towards the most extraordinary truth, the soul discovers and understands something of the grace that God deigns to honor it. Saint Peter Julian Eymard enumerates in this sense three different kinds of union that summarizes all the states of spiritual life:
✔ Union to the truth of Jesus Christ
✔ Union of love or Unitive way which includes three degrees of perfection (Union of obedience, Union of sentiment, Union of the spirit where the soul can see it being realized in it)
✔ Union of society which comes closest to the hypostatic union and understood as the transforming union.

In this regard, Father Eymard sounds like Saint Teresa in affirming that when the Lord desired to grant a soul the grace of this divine marriage, he makes her enter into his own home. But what is required for a reality to be mystical? What is natural in the sense of normal in the supernatural order? Saint Peter Julian Eymard by the gift of personality lived a mystical experience of purification and interiority. He effected all this spiritual work with the help of Grace and of the Supernatural forces accompanying grace, in a state of soul called mystical. Even though the ascetical factor seems to be predominant in his life, this does not exclude the mystical dimension of spirituality. Monseigneur Trochu wrote about him that the Great Retreat of Rome was a precious point of departure and an extra step forward to holiness that he was fixed in the unitive way, bordering on the sublime heights to which a special grace elevates the supremely generous soul resolved not to refuse God anything. This mystical factor remains an unknown area in Father Eymard’s life and spirituality. As Saint John of the Cross expresses the transforming union that consists in “possession of a marvelous fullness of God”2 Father Eymard in his own considers it the state in which Christ fills the soul with his desires and his life. The mystical dimension of Father Eymard’s spirituality is related to the mysteries of Christ’s incarnation, real presence in the Eucharist and the divine transforming grace. The realm of divine union consists in an interior thirst for God, state of elevation and communion in the divine being. For the Blessed Sacrament Religious, it is none other than a Eucharistic transformation of one’s entire personality into a life of devotedness, mortification and thanksgiving. To live this state of grace Father Eymard recommended his religious to experience and value the grace of the moment in the very interior cenacle of the soul. It is in fact an interior search of the divine, through the reaches of the Eucharist, as the fount of the Eymardian spirituality. The time has come to rediscover this mystical dimension of the SSS spirituality in and through the interior life and an effusion of our being in the Eucharistic Lord. It is also important to keep in mind the two main features of our congregation: contemplation and action. When the Lord invites us saying that he wants not what is ours but ourselves we can joyously repeat with father Eymard in simple words quoting Saint Paul: “it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2: 20).