Charles adopted JESUS CARITAS as his motto in April, 1900, when planning to found the congregation of the Hermits of the Sacred Heart and to become himself the first hermit on the Mount of the Beatitudes. Later he will change this to the Little Brothers of the Sacred Heart, and dedicate the first fraternity of Beni-Abbes under this title. Further, all his letters and personal notes will carry this motto, JESUS CARITAS, with the heart in the center. Today, with our different sensibility in the matter of all that concerns 'devotions', we need to ask ourselves what exactly Charles meant when speaking of the Heart of Jesus. We need to look at his words and, perhaps more importantly, at his actions.

Firstly, then, Charles' motto needs to be taken as a whole: the sign of the Heart is in the centre of the words Jesus' and 'Caritas'. Clearly it's the sign of the Person, Jesus, and of the basic attitude of that person, Love or loving. Charles makes few references to the 'devotion' as such; his whole concern is with the historical and living person of Jesus, the historical Jesus of Nazareth now living with him, Charles, and with each person he meets. Charles, we know, is fascinated by the person Jesus, as his words and actions so clearly indicate. He is a ~Jesus-man' all through, totally and passionately absorbed. What particularly strikes him is that Jesus' is 'of Nazareth', a poor person of poor parents in a poor village, a person born in poverty and later choosing to associate with the poor, a person who shares our human experience as 'one of the poor' and who shows a preference for those who are, in various ways, deprived and burdened. And as He, Jesus, was on earth, so He is in the here-and now: Charles is ever conscious of this oneness between the Jesus of history and the same Jesus present with us in our history. And Charles is equally aware that this human Jesus, one of us, sharing all our life and experience, is 'God-with-us'. Our Brother is the unique Son of the Father whose Spirit we are given. Charles never ceases to explore the human personality of Jesus: the way Jesus assumes all the ordinariness of human life, Jesus' choice of the 'last place' and his concern for the 'most abandoned', Jesus as giving and also as ready to receive, Jesus' response to each individual and to the multitudes, Jesus'self-offering for the salvation of'all'.

Secondly, Charles is increasingly drawn to enter into the attitudes of ,~. Having experienced Jesus' love and mercy for himself (expressed so vividly in the long meditation on 'my past life - Gods mercy' in Retreat at Nazareth, 1897), and being inspired to 'empty himself in the absolute love of God, returning love for Love, Charles is moved to imitate and reflect Jesus' own attitude towards others. His long moments of Gospel meditation and long hours of presence to Jesus' Presence while in Nazareth are both acts of love, having their end in themselves, and being a kind of 'absorbing' of the being and way of acting of Jesus. At Beni-Abbes we see the fruit of this process: Charles, with difficulty and some repugnance, is able to give himself to each individual person with their individual needs. Drawn towards Jesus and his Love, Charles wishes 'to act like Jesus'. In Tamanrasset, this effort to share in Jesus' interest and concern for each and every person becomes, increasingly, simple and natural. The sign on the 'gandourah', the red-cloth Heart stitched roughly onto the white-cloth garment, becomes, more and more, a reality: a reflection of the personalized love of Jesus for each person encountered.

Thirdly, in Tamanrasset particularly, we can notice an emphasis on the quality of God's loving. Charles always sees the Father in Jesus (John 14,9). Constantly reflecting on the human acts of Jesus, with their physical gestures and emotional charge, he sees expressed the 'character' of the Word who is one with the Father. Seeing this, Charles acts out, in his own context, something of the total respect of God for what each person is and does, something of the deep tenderness of God for our human frailty and erring, something of the universality of God's love and concern, that love which touches each of us in our unique particularity and yet embraces all without exception, and which is equally present in the most ordinary of events and experiences and in the most profound. When we look at Charles' attitudes and actions, especially those of his days in Tamanrasset and on the Assekrem, we can, I think, be aware of these divine qualities expressed in an authentically human way, qualities that derive from his union with the Heart of his Beloved Brother and Lord. Of course, there are limitations and, probably, imperfections, but the reflection is unmistakable, and his friends, both Christian and Muslim, did not fail to notice it and to remark on it.

As we know Charles met his death on the 1st of December. That year, it was a Friday, the 'First Friday' of Advent, that special time of waiting for the Lord's coming. And some three weeks after his death, his body was found half-buried in sand, and next to it, also in the sand, was the monstrance in which the Host was still present and intact. Both had been violently cast aside, and 'by chance' both were found together. There are here, perhaps, two small signs which, discreetly, indicate the inner reality of Charles' closeness to the Heart of his Beloved, signs, both of Charles' personal devotion and, more importantly, of that Loving Presence which was at the origin of that devotion and which brought it to completion.