Carlo Carretto is a monk, one of the Little Brothers of Jesus. He has divided his time between the order's house in the Sahara and Spello (near Assisi) in the Umbrian Hills, where he has lived as a hermit.In the book illustrated here he wrote some years ago, "When I think about the state of the world, of the Church which is its conscience, and of myself who am a very small antenna of both world and Church, I feel that we are entering the eye of a cyclone."
What troubles him most, however, is not the cyclone but the fear that has Christians in its grip. What we are experiencing in our time is "the history of Israel all over again," he contends, "the adventure of being exiles and pilgrims on earth....
"We Christians ought henceforth, I think, to consider ourselves as being in a foreign land, as deportees in a modern Babylon, reduced to tiny minorities but witnessing to the Invisible, no longer as bosses but as guests among the nations, offering a message which has the power to save, offering a hope which is in fact the only hope.
"It may be that the Church will have hard times, as Israel had in the time of the Babylonian Captivity." But, he writes, "this doesn't worry me much, since Christ himself has set us free from fear; hence I am no longer in Israel's position, to be terrorized by the Assyrian sword....
"I am full of hope," he concludes. "And it is genuine hope, not hope founded on human optimism.... It is not based on my own strength, nor on the organized resources of the Church, but on the living God alone, on his love for the human race, on his actions throughout history, on his saving will."
Summing up his feelings, Carretto writes, "I could put it very briefly: I have discovered how to be much poorer than I thought I was before. {And] The more you find your poverty, the more it stimulates you to pray." He then lifts up to us all what the Little Brothers of Jesus call the Prayer of Abandonment:
Father,
I abandon myself into your hands;
do with me what you will.
Whatever you may do, I thank you;
I am ready for all, I accept all.
Let only your will be done in me,
and in all your creatures;
I wish no more than this.
Into your hands I commend my soul;
I offer it to you
with all the love of my heart,
for I love you, Lord,
and so need to give myself,
to surrender myself into your hands
without reserve
and with boundless confidence,
for you are my Father.
The sign of Corretto's hope lies both in the signature that follows and the place, season, and calendar year when writing:
CARLO CARRETTO,
Spello, Easter, 1975
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