FEAST OF St MARIE EUGENIE

Jn 15:9-12

“I was coming back from the holy table when I heard a voice which said to me: one day you will lose you mother, you will leave all that you love to serve this Church which you do not know.”

Today we celebrate the feast of Saint Marie Eugénie Milleret de Brou, founder of the Religious of the Assumption. Marie Eugenie is a great Saint who found the strength of her life in the love of God. It is very interesting to read what she wrote about her experience of first communion: During my first communion, I felt very deeply a quiet separation from everything to which I was still bound, to enter alone into the immensity of him who I possessed for the first time. Lost in my God, my soul forgot everything else without regret. I felt anything except God whose immensity seemed to absorb all my strength. This is a filling of somebody who has fallen in love.

This experience of the first communion was for Marie Eugenie a moment which marked her deeply. She said: That was the first call to my vocation; and which vocation was that? A vocation to transform society through education. Marie Eugénie thought and understood that our faith in Jesus impels us to love the world and all its people. She believed that all action should flow from a life of love and prayer.

As we celebrate her feast today we are again called to remain, to abide in this same love of Jesus Christ. How do we abide or remain in love? To abide in the love of Christ is translated in the love of of our brothers and sisters; in the love one another as Jesus loved us. Again a lesson to us from Marie Eugenie, For her, the Blessed Sacrament was the link to that love. Writing to Lacordaire after the death of her mother she said: But God in his goodness had left me a link to love. When in the Church I see the sacred host in the hands of the priest I pray in spite of myself to become as spotless as itself and to be drawn upwards. I have no other mother than the Church for which I had so little love and the only links that are meaningful to me are those I have made in her bosom.

Celebrating this feast, we are reminded of God's love to us and of our duty to pass on this love, following the example of Marie Eugenie who realized how important it was to pass on to the young generations, an intellectual, moral and spiritual training that would make them into adults capable of taking charge of their life and of making their contribution to the Church and society. May the example of St Marie Eugenie invite strengthen men and women today willing to witness Christian values among the youth.