T HE SPIRITUAL CHARISM OF

N AZARETH
• Gisbert Greshake •

“In Nazareth, God’s Son sanctifies

the ordinary, insofar as he recognizes it
as a gift offered to him by the Father,
whom he must follow in obedience.”

To anticipate right from the outset: we ought not speak of “the”

spirituality of Nazareth, but rather of a variety of spiritual orientations
that revolve around the keyword “Nazareth.” Moreover, “Nazareth”
does not simply represent the “hidden life” of Jesus, since, at least as
Luke presents it, one finds elements of public life during this period
(“the twelve-year-old in the temple,” Lk 2:41ff), just as Jesus’ “public
life,” conversely, contains elements of hiddenness (time spent in the
desert, the withdrawal into solitude [Mk 1:35; Jn 5:15], works
performed in secret [Jn 7:4], remaining hidden [Jn 7:10; 8:59; 11:54]).
Though there are clearly differing points of emphasis, it nevertheless
remains true that if one were to isolate the single perspective of
“hiddenness,” one would diminish the full significance of “Nazareth”
for spirituality.
If we turn our attention to three particular spiritual currents,
we see a broad spectrum of spiritualities opening up under the heading
“Nazareth,” which have an immediate bearing on our own age. It is
these three currents that we intend to develop more fully in the
following pages.

Communio 31 (Spring 2004). © 2004 by Communio: International Catholic Review

 The Spiritual Charism of Nazareth 17

1. “Nazareth” as radical presence:

Charles de Foucauld

Taking his bearings from Jesus’ life in Nazareth is the spiritual

nourishment that sustains Charles de Foucauld from the time of his
conversion onwards. But this ideal is not at all for him a single, fixed
idea with a definitively established content; instead, the word
“Nazareth” opens up a process, which leads to ever new discoveries and
transformations. By the end, these too have acquired features wholly
new from what characterized them at their beginning. Let us explore
them in some detail.
Reflecting on the first years after his conversion, Foucauld
writes on 14 August 1901 to his friend Henry de Castries:

Everyone knows that the first effect of love is imitation; from

this it followed that I had to enter into whatever order would
enable me to imitate Jesus in the closest possible way. I did
not feel moreover that I was called to imitate his public life
in preaching; thus, I wanted to imitate the hidden life of the
humble and poor manual laborer of Nazareth. It seemed to
me that I would not encounter this life anywhere better than
with the Trappists. . . . I spent six and a half years there. At
that point I longed for a deeper and greater humility, in
order to be able to come even closer to Jesus; I . . . received
permission from the general of the order to go alone to
Nazareth, and to earn a living there by my own work as an
unknown laborer. And there I remained, enjoying the
poverty and humility for which God had given me such a
burning thirst, in order that I might imitate him.1

As we see in this passage, at the beginning of the “Nazareth” process,

what stands in the foreground is the imitation of Jesus in poverty,
humility, and laborious work.

It is my calling to imitate the hidden life of Jesus, . . . to

make myself the lowest of men through humility, to be a
worm and no man, to experience the contempt of the
people and the shame of men: the more I descended, the
more I would be with Jesus . . . . To live in the greatest
poverty; Jesus lived more poorly than the poorest of work-

1
Charles de Foucauld, Oeuvres Spirituelles: Anthologie (Paris, 1958), 664.
18 Gisbert Greshake

ers; for . . . he worked less than they did so that he could

have more time to devote to prayer and Holy Scripture.2

When one considers the fact that Foucauld came from a noble family
and up to this point had spent his life in riotous living, then Nazareth
here appears as a total contrast to his previous life. This life is “hidden”
insofar as it means total humility. “Be careful to hide everything that
could raise you up in the eyes of others,” he remarks. “Seek out the
work that is most humiliating. . . . If you look like a fool to other
people, so much the better.”3
In this initial phase of the Nazareth ideal, an additional
essential element comes to the fore, namely, prayer that continues as
uninterruptedly as possible, i.e., continual contemplation. For Brother
Charles, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph lived in Nazareth in unity with God,
“in order to lead in common, in a small, lonely house, a life of
adoration, of continuous prayer, . . . of uninterrupted contemplation,
a life of silence.” For this reason, he resolves “to leave the house as
seldom as possible, solely for things that are absolutely necessary, . . .
to deal with the outer world as little as possible.”4
Brother Charles describes the Nazareth way of life, thus
understood, in the following way in his annual retreat in 1987: “To
consider my life in Nazareth as a definitive way of life, as a ‘resting
place for all times.’”5 Nevertheless, at the very same time he explains
his readiness “to throw myself impetuously and without looking back
wherever and to whomever God’s will calls me.” Indeed, he appar-
ently already senses that God has other plans for him. For, on the very
same day, we find yet another entry in the journal: “It is also your

2
Charles de Foucauld, Immer den letzten Platz (Munich, 1975), 65. Cf. also, from
the same book, 55: “God appears as man and makes himself the lowest of men
. . . . You have descended to the lowest of the humble places . . . in order here
[in Nazareth] to share the life of the poor laborers, who earn their living through
laborious work. Your life was like theirs, in poverty and laborious work.”
3
Ibid., 220f.
4
Ibid., 233. Cf. also Charles de Foucauld, Seul avec Dieu (Paris, 1975), 325: In
prayer, Jesus says to him: “Cultivate as few relationships as possible. Go out as
little as possible. Mary, Joseph, and I also lived in this way.”
5
Ibid., 257 [translation modified by Greshake].
 The Spiritual Charism of Nazareth 19

calling to proclaim the Gospel from the rooftops, not only through
words but also through your life.”6
After a little more time of seeking and discernment, he decides
to follow Jesus also as the redeemer, as the good shepherd, as the one
who came “in order to save what was lost,” and thus makes himself
available to serve the Gospel as a missionary. He left Nazareth and was
consecrated a priest.
In leaving Nazareth, he does not surrender his former ideal;
instead, he now “enacts” it.7 The important thing now is to go “to the
most desperate and lost sheep,” in order “to benefit them through our
presence, through our prayer and above all through the presence of
the Holy Sacrament.”8 For this reason, he settles down in the Sahara
(Beni-Abbès) “in order to lead a life of solitude, isolation, and silence
there in corporeal work and holy poverty, a life that, as far as possible,
is in accord with the hidden life of the beloved Jesus in Nazareth.”9
The “Nazareth” ideal thus remains determinative, but is
nevertheless actualized in a new way: on the one hand, through a
monastic way of life (for which he longs for brothers to join him, a
longing that was never satisfied during his lifetime), and, on the other
hand, through a clear missionary orientation: He wanted to bring Jesus
and his Gospel to others, and, indeed, to do so precisely in and
through the “Nazareth” way of life, which means concretely: not
through “words” but through a modest life of prayer on their behalf
and in their place, through unconditional openness and radical
presence among the people that lived around him.

6
Ibid., 268.
7
This fitting expression appears throughout the book by J. Amstutz,
Missionarische Präsenz: Charles de Foucauld in der Sahara, NZM-Schriftenreihe, vol.
35 (Immensee, 1997).
8
An outline of the rule of 1897, in Foucauld, Oeuvres Spirituelles, 405. Regarding
the Eucharist, he was convinced at every stage of his life that “merely through
the presence of the most holy sacrament is the surrounding area sanctified in
silence” (Charles de Foucauld / Abbé Huvelin, Briefwechsel [Salzburg, 1961], 131).
9
A letter to Abbé Caron, 8 April 1905. Cf. also the passage from a letter to his
sister, 17 January 1902: “I plan to continue to live the hidden life of Jesus in
Nazareth in the Sahara, not in order to preach, but in order to practice the
poverty and humble work of Jesus in solitude. Moreover, I would like to try to
benefit souls, not through words, but through prayer and the saying of Mass,
through penance and acts of charity.”
20 Gisbert Greshake

But in this way the original “Nazareth” ideal acquires a new

gestalt: to be sure, his life is still filled with long periods of prayer, in
which, kneeling before the most holy sacrament, he plunges himself
into Jesus’ self-offering “for the many.” But it is precisely this “for the
many” that drives him himself to radical existence for others. “I see
myself, in astonishment, pass over from a contemplative life to a life of
caring for souls. And, indeed, not because this is what I want to do, but
because the people need it.”10 At this point, what “Nazareth” means
to him is to be at once closed and open, withdrawn from others and at
the same time ready to offer hospitality, to live with Jesus handed over
to a life of contemplation and at the same time to break out toward
others in mission.11 In Beni-Abbès he becomes the brother of all who
come to him: the inhabitants of the oasis as well as the caravan
travellers who honor him as Marabut, the soldiers and the officers of
the garrison. “I desire that all the inhabitants—Christians, Muslims,
Jews, and pagans—consider me their brother, the brother of all
men.”12 What provided a model for his own establishment were the
so-called “Zaouias,” the Islamic centers of hospitality, which offered
travelers accommodation and shelter, whether they are pilgrims or
beggars, no matter who it is who happens to stand at the door. Thus,
the “newly discovered” characteristics of Nazareth come to include
hospitality, a variety of relationships, and a missionary presence.
It would be difficult to find a passage that describes this new
“enactment” of Nazareth better than the following:

I am so overwhelmed with external occupations that I

scarcely have a moment any more for reading, and also very
little for meditation. The poor soldiers come to me con-
stantly. Slaves fill the poor little house that was built for their
sake, travelers come straightaway for “fraternity,” the poor
are here in droves. . . . Every day there are guests for dinner,
a bed, and breakfast; the house has not yet been empty, up
to eleven people sleep here in a single night, not counting

10
From a letter to his cousin, 7 January 1902.
11
Cf. Foucauld, Seul avec Dieu, 80: “In the house of Nazareth with Mary and
Joseph, I cling to Jesus like a little brother to his elder brother, to Jesus who is
present day and night in the holy Host. . . . To behave toward my neighbor, as
is fitting in this place [Nazareth!], in this community, as I see Jesus himself behave
. . . .”
12
From a letter to his cousin, 7 January 1902.
 The Spiritual Charism of Nazareth 21

an elderly invalid who is always here; I have between 60 and

100 visitors a day. . . . A meeting with 20 slaves, taking in 30
or 40 travelers, distributing medicine to 10 or 15 people,
alms for more than 75 beggars. . . . I sometimes see up to 60
children in a single day. “Fraternity” . . . lasts from 5 to 9 in
the morning and then a beehive from 4 to 8 in the evening.
. . . In order to have a good idea of my life here, you would
have to imagine poor, sick, and homeless people knocking
on my door at least ten times an hour—usually more often
rather than less. . . .13

At the same time, he fought for the rights of the poor and the vulnera-
ble and took their side as opposed to the French colonial power, as
opposed to the officers who were his former companions. He fought
passionately against the injustice of the colonial system, especially
against the slavery that was tolerated by the French colonial power, and
wrote various petitions on this score to the parliament in Paris. To cite
a passage he often repeated, he did not want to be a “mute hound” (Is
56:10).
To sum up: To live Nazareth now means to be wholly there for
the people of the area by means of a modest monastic existence.
But this is not yet the last expression of Nazareth. To the
apostolic prefect of the Sahara who was his authority, Msgr. Guérin, he
writes: “You ask whether I am ready and willing to leave Beni-Abbès
for the sake of spreading the Gospel: yes, I am ready for this, I am
ready to go to the ends of the earth and to live until the Judgment
Day.”14
Various trips, on which he walks thousands of kilometers by
foot, following behind his camel, roaming through the Sahara, lead
him farther into the south. On these trips, he also encounters the
Tuareg, who had not yet been reached in any way by the Gospel, and
who were therefore for him the poorest of the poor. In relation to
them, he is struck by the insight: “I can do nothing better for the
sanctity of souls than to bring the seed of the divine Word to as many
as possible—not through preaching but through my actions.”15

13
Letters to Msgr. Guérin, 4 February 1902 and 30 September 1902.
14
Letter of 27 February 1903.
15
Letter to Msgr. Guérin from 30 June 1903.
22 Gisbert Greshake

At the invitation of an earlier comrade in arms, Laperinne, he

founded a hermitage in Tamanrasset, which was then a tiny oasis
remnant in the middle of the Sahara. More than a few nomads led him
to surrounding oases and watering grounds, where he—as he observes
at every turn in his journal—“benefits others” (especially through
medicine and gifts of alms).
With the Tuareg, the Nazareth ideal to which Foucauld
steadfastly adheres even in Tamanrasset, acquires once again a new
gestalt (even though Brother Charles not infrequently has a “bad
conscience” about this move and at first looks on it as merely an
“exception”). At first, as in Beni-Abbès, he forgoes “preparing the
nest” for the brothers to come; monastic ideas (a cloister, etc.) fall ever
more by the wayside.16 Thus, the relationship between contemplation
and missionary action receives a new determination. To be sure, the
contemplative foundation remains, just like the longing for solitude
and prayer. He continues to spend many hours before the most holy
sacrament, in order to penetrate ever more deeply into Jesus’ disposi-
tion, to “sanctify” himself for the people of his surrounding area, to
give himself to them, indeed, to carry them before God by represent-
ing them to him. But now, it takes the following form: “To pray at
night, and to work during the day . . . and thus to do as much spiritual
and material good to my neighbor as my meager means allow, . . . just
as Jesus did in Nazareth.”17
Indeed, it is possible, as he himself experiences, to live
“Nazareth” in the countless trips that he takes in the Sahara. It is a
matter of “walking through the world unknown, as Jesus did in
Nazareth, like a person wandering in the night, . . . poor, diligent,
modest, gentle, and beneficent, as he was.”18 In a certain sense, he
translates “the rules of becoming present,” i.e., the way he lived
Nazareth in Beni-Abbès, “for the situation of the caravan.”19 In a word:
Nazareth is something a person can “live anywhere.” A person ought
to live it in whatever way and in whatever place “it is most useful for

16
Cf. Charles de Foucauld, Carnets de Tamanrasset (1905-1916) (Paris: 1986), 45:
“Provisionally (!), no habit, no cloister, . . . no lodging that would lie at a
distance from any inhabited place, but rather in the vicinity of a town, . . . in
everything, to be like Jesus of Nazareth.”
17
Journal entry from 17 May 1904, in Foucauld, Oeuvres Spirituelles, 362.
18
Ibid.
19
Thus: Amstutz, Missionarische Präsenz, 57, 120 with more precise examples.
 The Spiritual Charism of Nazareth 23

one’s neighbor.”20 And this happens now in a radical “presence”

among the Tuareg and for them. He sees ever more clearly that it
would not be possible to bring Jesus and his Gospel in a direct way to
the Muslim Tuareg, and that it requires instead a preparation period,
in which he acquires the trust of the people and their friendship.

Direct evangelization is not possible at this moment; the only

possible way to live is the life of Nazareth, in poverty and its
humiliations, in worship, in manual or intellectual work. . .
. And all of this with the goal of gaining people’s trust, to
earn their love and in a gentle and friendly manner, through
brief conversations, to correct their false ideas about natural
morality.21

Thus, he is entirely present, as much for the Tuareg as for the

members of the military, and for the scientists and technicians of the
expanding colonial empire. Of the more than 6,000 letters that have
been preserved, nearly 500 were addressed to members of the French
military, in which he “mixes himself up” in the colony’s political
affairs. He proposes plans for an administrative reform in the Sahara
region, and protests against arbitrary confiscations and obstructed or
unjust administration of rights. With respect to the Tuareg, he
becomes more and more what today could be called an aid worker.
He is the advisor of the Amenokal, the most important tribal chief of
the Tuareg, in political and economic affairs. He attempts through
argument and appeal to raise up the deficient morality of the Tuareg
(and also of the French soldiers). He takes an interest in the new
technologies that serve to develop the Sahara (railways, roads, the
telegraph, meteorological stations) and defends them; he gives advice
regarding the economy and the care and control of medicine; he
teaches the Tuareg women knitting and crocheting. Above all, he
teaches them the language and gathers together the Tuareg literary
tradition (which by itself amounts to more than 5,000 poetic verses!),
and he works to the point of exhaustion on a never yet surpassed four-
volume French-Tamaschek dictionary, comprising more than 2000
pages, which was first published after his death.

20
Journal entry, July 22, 1905, cited in Charles de Foucauld, Correspondance Sa-
hariennes (Paris, 1998), 369.
21
Letter from 1 October 1906 to Abbé Caron.
24 Gisbert Greshake

Towards the end of his life, all of these tasks step into the
foreground in such a way that in his self-description as a “missionary
monk,”22 we ought to underline the word “missionary” —indeed,
even in the word “missionary,” the “service” element holds pride of
place. “My apostolate must be an apostolate of good deeds,” he writes
repeatedly. In a word: “Nazareth remains; it can be lived everywhere;
ChdF has discovered it anew in Tamanrasset.”23
“Nazareth” is thus for Foucauld an extremely flexible spiritual
keyword. The concept that ties together the various expressions of
Nazareth is “présence,” presence, a word that Foucauld uses frequently:
Humble and lowly presence before God and humble and poor
presence among men, just as Jesus himself lived it in Nazareth.

2. “Nazareth” as the guiding image for a poor Church:

the “Church of the Poor” group from Vatican II

A revival of the Nazareth spirituality occurred around 1960 in

Paul Gauthier, as well as in those he initiated and the groups approved
and supported by Georges Hakim, the Malachite archbishop of
Nazareth, called the “Companions of Jesus the Carpenter”
(“Compagnons de Jésus Charpentier”), which played a considerable
role at the Second Vatican Council. This revival of Nazareth had an
accent different from Foucauld’s.
Fr. Gauthier, originally a professor at the seminary in Dijon,
was like many other French Christians sorely grieved that the Church
had lost the working class and thus allowed the greater part of the
French population (and indeed of Europe’s population) to become
secularized. The worker priest movement in the middle of the last
century, which would later be banned by Pius XII, was already a
reaction to this disturbing state of affairs. In this context, Gauthier
heard the reproachful call of Jesus: “I am the poor Jesus, with whom
and for whom you do not live,” and his response lay in the resolution
“to live and to work among the poor and those who work.”24 He

22
Cf. the letter to his brother-in-law R. de Blic, dated 25 March 1908: “I
remain a monk—a monk in a missionary land—a missionary monk, but not a
missionary.”
23
Amstutz, Missionarische Präsenz, 137.
24
P. Gauthier, Diese meine Hände . . . Tagebuch aus Nazareth (Graz, 1965), 25.
 The Spiritual Charism of Nazareth 25

resolved to do so “in community with Jesus, the carpenter, in order to

proclaim the Gospel to the poor and to the working world.”25 He felt
his resolution was confirmed by the various pronouncements by the
popes, who had “repeated over and over again for a century: ‘Go to
the worker. . . . Go to the poor worker’ ( Divini Redemptoris, Pius XI).
‘In your following of the divine master, come to the aid of the poor
and the working man . . .’ (Menti Nostrae, Pius XII).”26
Invited by Msgr. Hakim and accompanied spiritually by the
well-known theologian Jean Mouroux, he went to Nazareth with the
consent of his own bishop, in order to live his calling as a worker
among workers. Although in doing so he not infrequently made
explicit appeal to Charles de Foucauld, his spiritual vision of Nazareth
is nevertheless something different, and Gauthier himself was aware of
this: “In Nazareth, he [Foucauld] thought that he ought to do only so
much work as was necessary for him to live, in order that he might be
free for prayer.”27 In comparison to Foucauld, the contemplative
element does not stand so much in the foreground for Gauthier
(although it is not absent); instead, the emphasis lies on the solidarity
with the poor and with those who work, as a precondition (!) for missionary
service. For one can bring the Gospel only as a “poor man to the poor,”
and only thus can the Church take root.28 For Gauthier, the keyword
“Nazareth” represents precisely this:

25
Ibid., 8.
26
Ibid., 190.
27
Ibid., 75. Ultimately, the final “stage” of the Nazareth spirituality that
Foucauld embodied has a similarity with Gauthier’s perspective, even if the
contemplative element plays a greater role, and the work—both the missionary
service as well as the establishment of the Church—plays a smaller role for
Foucauld than for Gauthier.
28
Cf. ibid., 49. Otherwise, one would “turn down the wrong path”: “We live
at the margins of the life of the poor people. We live in big houses, and they
have no roof over their heads. We understand almost nothing of their language,”
44. And therefore, “If the Church is afraid of allowing her priests to work for
wages, is this not a sign of the anomalous character of the position of one who
works for a wage? The apostle has to live and suffer with the people to whom
he is sent. In order to make visible the inhumanity of a system in which human
beings buy and sell other human beings, isn’t it necessary to have priests among
the masses of human beings who are bought and sold?” (40f).
26 Gisbert Greshake

Before Jesus spoke the word, “Come to me all who are

weary and overburdened. . . .,” he first wanted to live and
work in Nazareth with the lowly people, for unpleasant
employers. . . . Before Christ called those to himself whom
their burden had pressed to the earth, he wanted to share the
humiliating, hard, and laborious fate of human existence.29

To live as a poor man among the poor, to slave away with

the workers, to share their lot, which high society re-
fuses—all of this is what Jesus did.30

In this sense, “Nazareth” still represents a spiritual challenge to us

today. For it is “precisely our contemporary world that urgently needs
apostles, priests, religious, and laypeople, who preach renunciation of
the goods of this world and the sovereign freedom of poverty through
their life and words in humility and simplicity.”31
This spiritual vision of “Nazareth” had its influence on the
Second Vatican Council.32 Msgr. Hakim took Fr. Guathier with him as
a peritus, and in the very first days the archbishop cooperated together
with Bishop Charles-Marie Himmer from Tournai in the preparation
of an essay by Gauthier, which was entitled “Jesus, the Church, and
the poor.” On the basis of this “prospectus,” over 50 bishops and
nearly 30 peritii gathered together in the Belgian College, in order to
meet regularly thereafter (sometimes weekly!) under the name of the
“Church of the poor.” This group was presided over by Cardinals
Lercaro (Bologna) and Gerlier (Lyon) as well as by the Malachite
Patriarch Maximos IV. The bishops Hakim and Himmer remained
driving forces of this group, and Gauthier was its secretary.
The group was able to connect with a statement from Pope
John XXIII, who described the Church at the opening of the council
in a “Message to the world” as “the Church of all people, and in

29
Ibid., 35.
30
Ibid., 60. Moreover, Gauthier points out that Jesus not only was the
“carpenter’s son,” who had worked with his father, but according to Mk 6:3 he
is “the carpenter,” the “town carpenter,” who as such carries out his mission. Cf.
also ibid., 74, 75.
31
Ibid., 68.
32
Cf. on this point Geschichte des Zweiten Vatikanischen Konzils, ed. G. Alberigo
and Kl. Wittstatt, vol. 2 (Mainz–Louvain, 2000), 237-241; vol. 3 (Mainz–Louvain,
2002), 194f.
 The Spiritual Charism of Nazareth 27

particular, the Church of the poor.”33 Cardinal Lercaro took up this

expression in a speech he made to the council in December 1962, in
which he said, “This ought not to be simply one theme among many
at the Council, but must become the central question. The theme of
the Council is the Church, insofar as she is above all the ‘Church of
the poor.’”34
Entirely in line with Gauthier’s initiative, the “Church of the
poor” group translated into action the analysis of our situation as a
“schism,” i.e., a schism

between the incarnation of Jesus Christ in his visible Church

and the other mysterious incarnation of the poor Jesus in the
poor . . . . If sanctity and poverty are synonymous expres-
sions in the Old Testament, if Jesus, the Holy One, appeared
as poor among men, then the holy Church on earth can only
be the poor Church, and conversely only the poor Church
can be the holy Church. The danger—the schism and the
heresy—consists here, as it always does, in the fact that that
which is a unity becomes separated: the mystical body, in
which the poor have a privileged place through Christ’s will,
is on earth no other Church but the Catholic and apostolic
Church. . . .35

And thus the “Church of the poor” group did not concern
itself merely with Jesus’ presence among the poor, with the
evangelization of the poor and the workers and with the development
of poor nations, but also and above all with the return to the “poor
face” of the Church and to the Church’s practice of poverty. And
precisely these themes were represented in the “Nazareth” perspec-
tive, especially for Msgr. Hakim and Fr. Gauthier.
To be sure, despite all these efforts, this theme remained at the
margins of the council. Still, one reads in Lumen Gentium 8: “Just as

33
Cf., Y. Congar, Für eine dienende und arme Kirche (Mainz, 1965), 121.
34
Cited in P. Gauthier, Consolez mon peuple (Paris, 1965), 201.
35
Gauthier, Hände, 202f. A little later, Gauthier adds, “This does not imply that
the rich are forgotten. . . . Nevertheless, the Church must become herself poor
if she wishes to preach the Gospel to the rich, and she must challenge the rich
to share their goods according to the example of Zachaeus. But ‘fear nothing on
this account, the rich will always have priests to help relieve them of their
burdens,’ as Fr. Chevrier tastefully put it” (ibid., 204).
28 Gisbert Greshake

Christ carried out the work of redemption in poverty and obedience,

so too is the Church called to follow the same path.” But Gustavo
Gutiérrez was right to observe that, nevertheless, it “was not the theme
of Vatican II. Perhaps it was still too early.”36 It was only Latin
American liberation theology that took up some of these ideas once
again, while Gauthier, because of disappointment with the path the
Church followed after the council and as a result of conflicts with
ecclesial officials, sought a new path of his own.
Nevertheless, “Nazareth” remained a “thorn in the side” of the
Church from Vatican II on. To what extent is she truly the “Church of
the poor,” and the poor, defenseless and lowly Church in the midst of
society’s power struggles?

3. “Nazareth” as the significance of the ordinary:

a challenge for our age

For the third expression of Nazareth, we must first look once

again at what Scripture offers: Nazareth is a wholly insignificant speck
at the corner of the world, which receives no mention anywhere else.
“Can anything good come from Nazareth?” (Jn 1:46). Moreover, this
insignificant little town lay in the province of Galilee, which was
completely underdeveloped in relation to the surrounding hellenistic
republics of the Decapoleis in the East and the Mediterranean capitals
in the West. In this altogether inconsequential place and in this
absolutely marginal region, Jesus grew up—in obedience to his parents
(Lk 2:51), but not only in relation to them, but through and with them
also in relation to the mores and customs, the duties and common
practices of his environment. Completely embedded in this tiny
world, in which everyone knew everyone else (cf. Jn 6:42; Mt 13:55f),
there is nothing said about Jesus for the space of thirty years other than
that he immersed himself in this life indistinguishably from the others,
as a presence among the small and lowly. Apparently, apart from the
twelve-year-old’s pilgrimage to Jerusalem (about which we will have
more to say), there is nothing serious to report, contrary to all of the

36
G. Gutiérrez, Die großen Veränderungen in den Gesellschaften und Kirchen der neuen
Christenheit nach dem II. Vatikanum, in Kirche im Wandel, ed. G. Alberigo, et al.
(Düsseldorf, 1982), 42.
 The Spiritual Charism of Nazareth 29

attempts of later apocryphal Christian texts to wrest something

“remarkable” from this time spent in Nazareth.
Today, we would call such a way of life ordinary. An ordinary life
is:
—a life that adapts itself to common practices and customs;
—a life in the daily, monthly, and yearly “round,” i.e., in the
inescapable routine37 without any special events or new perspectives;
—a life that, in its obviousness, often passes into a boring,
meaningless, and empty monotony.
It is precisely this that forms the innermost mystery of Nazareth:
God’s Son lived a human ordinary life for thirty years. To put it with
emphasis, God’s incarnate Son had “nothing better to do” for thirty
years than to lead a life of the most banal ordinariness. Can we not say
in the light of the hymn in the Letter to the Philippians that this is an
intensification of the radical kenosis undergone by the “One who was
like God” (Phil 2:6ff)? There seems to be yet something absolutely
“special” about the Most High emptying himself to the point of the
humiliation of the cross, as the hymn expresses it. Just as in the popular
fairytale, the king’s son becomes a beggar in order to love a poor
maiden on the same level. In recounting this venture, the fairytale
seeks to provoke surprise and wonderment. But God’s “becoming
ordinary” in Nazareth eliminates even the radiance of the spectacular
from the event of the kenosis: God becomes man, and this occurs at
first in the empty ebb and flow of thirty long years, during which
(considered on the surface) “nothing” happens. But in reality, what
happens, as the scriptures tell us, is a growing, that is, an increase not
only in age and strength of life, but also in wisdom and a ripening in
God’s grace and love (cf. Lk 2:39; 2:51).
The “ordinariness” of Nazareth, however it might look in its
details, is thus not a dark prison, not an absurd emptiness, not a
meaningless, mechanical, marching-in-step. Instead, whenever this gift
that God offers is accepted and embraced, it becomes a time of

37
R. Voillaume had referred years ago to this perspective on Nazareth as the
ordinary life in his book, which stands in the spiritual tradition stemming from
Foucauld, called Botschaft vom Wege (Freiburg i.Br., 1962), 229: “Isn’t the normal
course of our life a routine? People often give this word a deprecatory sense. . .
. The same word has a different color in English; it means the daily duty that
returns every day in the same form. . . . The life of Nazareth was a long routine,
of modest duties, which always remained the same.”
30 Gisbert Greshake

absolute significance, a genuine growing in love. The apparent closed-

off inescapability of the ordinary, in which nothing happens, thus has
a “window,” which opens into another, higher reality.
These “windows” become explicit especially in those
moments that belong essentially to the complex reality of the ordinary,
namely, in moments of feasting and celebration. It is for this reason that
the pericope of the twelve-year-old Jesus’ pilgrimage to Jerusalem is
just as indispensably a part of the reality of the ordinariness of Nazareth
as the (indirectly mentioned) regular celebration of the Sabbath (“In
Nazareth, . . . he went, as was the custom (!), to the synagogue on the
Sabbath,” Lk 4:16).
It is precisely the feast that interrupts the ebb and flow of time;
it “breaks the ordinary open and brings it into the light of an uncondi-
tional meaning, which is visibly proclaimed through the feast day’s
symbols.”38 Thus, both things belong to human life: the ordinary in its
ordinariness and the celebration, through which the ordinary receives
its meaning. Seen from the perspective of the celebration, the ordinary
is transformed into a time that points to eternity, into a space in which
one fulfills the Father’s will as Jesus did, and into an opportunity, in
which we “prepare the material of the heavenly kingdom” (GS 38:
materiam regni caelestis parantes).
This message of the ordinary as sacred time, sacred space, and
sacred matter for perfection ought to be—at least in Western
countries—the most urgent form of a “Nazareth spirituality.” For,
already in the past few generations, the ordinary has increasingly
become an experience of meaninglessness.
Martin Heidegger already captured this situation about seventy
years ago in the notion of “the mode of being of average-everyday-
ness,” as a falling away of Dasein “from himself to itself.”39 This means
that, for him, the ordinary is a deficient mode of human being, insofar
as it is a situation of inescapable and enslaving givenness, which
produces narrowness, routine, emptiness, boredom, indeed, a feeling
of absurdity, disgust, and surfeit; these in turn generate a longing for
escape and revolt. Stuck in the mill of compelling forces that cannot be
questioned (the “obligation” of daily work, the “they” of customs and
fashions, the “anonymity” and “mechanicity” of relationships and

38
B. Casper, “Alltagserfahrung und Frömmigkeit,” in Christlicher Glaube in
moderner Gesellschaft, vol. 25 (Freiburg, i.Br., 1985), 62.
39
Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 6th ed. (Tübingen, 1949), 178.
 The Spiritual Charism of Nazareth 31

authorities), which depersonalize human existence, turning it into

putty to be molded, man, caught up in the ordinary, must become the
subject of his own history, he must take his own life in his hands. As
Heidegger thus called man to “be wholly himself” in the resolute
“being-towards-death” and against the “in-authenticity” of Dasein, the
meaninglessness of the ordinary, toward which the past generation was
heading, only deepened.
Today, ordinariness is something we experience for the most
part simply as negative (basically as an opportunity to make money and
practice self-improvement). But at the same time, we cannot escape
the sense that the meaning of life lies somehow precisely outside the
ordinary, i.e., in extra-ordinary experiences, in the experience of the
most extreme possible series of “events.” It is not for nothing that
Gerhard Schulze’s standard work analyzing contemporary society bears
the suggestive title, “The experience-society.”40
Consequently, the criterion of a full and meaningful life is a
fullness of subjective experiences—in all things, and also in every area.
Thomas Pröpper recently pointed to the following witty and extremely
revealing example:41 previously, advertisements for soap pointed to its
“effective cleaning power,” then, to its “fragrant scent,” and now the
advertisement says that this or that bar of soap “caresses your skin.” In
other words: Even something so banal as the process of cleaning is
today presented in the horizon of a subjective experience. But
something similar happens with everything else: whether it concerns
a car wash, meditation lessons, a disco, or Beethoven’s Ninth.
Everything is translated into a particular experience, which can be had or
enacted, and which fascinates and allows a person to “feel” something.
In short, even the most ordinary and banal has to be turned into a
special event. One could also say that we are trying to make everyday
life a constant celebration.
This attitude, which is so widespread today, has already
provoked objections from (non-Catholic) philosophers. Thus, Odo
Marquard writes that we must “defend the ordinary against celebra-
tion.” “Because even celebration . . . would thus cease to be a
celebration, if it were to take the place of the ordinary and thus
eliminate the ordinary. . . . The feast day instead of the everyday: this

40
Gerhard Schulze, Erlebnisgesellschaft (Frankfurt, 1992).
41
Cf. T. Pröpper, Evangelium und freie Vernunft (Freiburg i.Br., 2001), 36.
32 Gisbert Greshake

is problematic and will inevitably turn out ill.”42 Why? Because

wherever one strives after celebration as a total “moratorium on the
ordinary,” there arises the inclination to “break away” from concrete
life altogether, and this can bear horrific masks.
In connection with Manès Sperber, Marquard suggests that
even war, as the total upheaval of everyday relationships, can be seen
as one of these horrifying consequences:

Though people fear war, they also have a certain desire for
it, at least unconsciously, in order to escape their everyday
lives—their stressful and burdensome everyday lives. Any
warning against war remains too ineffectual insofar as it fails
to recognize and warn against this source of the war-wish:
War is not only something that horrifies people, it is also in
a horrifying way something people want: as an escape from
the everyday, as a moratorium on the everyday.43

Other forms of such a “totalitarian moratorium” are the radical

aestheticization of the world which seeks to make of it a “total work
of art,” and which thereby “deprives the present reality, such as it is,
of any value”; the escape into an “alternative way of life,” which “as a
completely different and novel way of life negates the present one, it
intends to take the place of the reality before us and eliminate both its
ordinariness and its celebrations through a great exodus from them;
[and thus] it too tends to acquire, in spite of itself, materialistic traits.”44
Concerning all these and other forms, which negate the
ordinary and seek to make life a constant celebration, we can only say
with Marquard: “Nothing sustainable in a human way can come out of
all this, for we can trust that whoever wants to make earth into
heaven—and this is indeed the intention of the absolute celebra-
tion—will end up making it hell.”45
From the perspective of the disastrous consequences that
follow from the attempt to flee the ordinary as a “meaningless picture

42
O. Marquard, “Moratorium des Alltags: Eine kleine Philosophie des Festes,”
in Zukunft braucht Herkunft. Philosophische Essays (Stuttgart, 2003), 194–204, here:
196.
43
Ibid., 197.
44
Ibid., 199f.
45
Ibid., 201.
 The Spiritual Charism of Nazareth 33

of things,” the significance of the spirituality of Nazareth stands out in

stark contrast: in Nazareth, God’s Son sanctifies the ordinary, insofar as
he recognizes it as a gift offered to him by the Father, whom he must
follow in obedience. By accepting this ordinariness, he assumes the
finitude that compels human beings to recognize that earth is not yet
heaven, that time is not yet eternity, and that their own freedom is not
yet capable of fashioning that which is given according to their own
desires and inclinations, but that—as feast days reveal (the Sabbath, the
pilgrimage to Jerusalem)—our hope is ordered to something meaning-
ful. Faith invites us to discover the traces of the infinite in the ordinari-
ness that often appears as an unbearable burden. Two things follow
from this. First, it is necessary “to overcome the evident closedness of
the seemingly endless world of the ordinary and to understand
everything that is given as an unconditional gift, i.e., as creation,” so
that even the simplest things and everyday relationships “can become
an occasion for trust in the giver of all gifts.”46 Secondly, however, it is
important to recognize God’s call and his task in the givenness of the
ordinary. Precisely because the everyday world is the world we share
in common, in which I am bound to and am intertwined with others
in a way that is in a certain sense predetermined, we must take
responsibility for one another, practice solidarity, walk with one
another along the path toward the improvement of our everyday
relationships, and keep our eyes open for the “great hope” that is
promised us. It is ultimately not the feast as the “moratorium on the
ordinary” that opens the perspective of community. For the fact that
one can never celebrate a feast alone points to the fact that we must also
affirm the ordinary in common.
Thus, Nazareth spirituality presents a vast spiritual spectrum:
—to be wholly present (for God and for others) wherever one
is placed;
—to live in a modest way (both personally and as Church);
—to discover in one’s own ordinary circumstances the
pregnant moments of eternal significance hidden within, the presence
of God and his Christ.
Wherever this occurs, one can say about these ordinary
circumstances: “We have seen his glory [even here], the glory of the
only Son of the Father, full of grace and truth” (Jn 1:14).—Translated
by D. C. Schindler.

46
Casper, “Alltagserfahrung und Frömmigkeit,” 64f.
34 Gisbert Greshake

GISBERT GRESHAKE is professor of dogmatic theology at the University of

Freiburg, and visiting professor at the Gregorian University in Rome.