He asked for nothing for himself

Talk about radical. Talk about prophetic and holy. I don't know if, in my lifetime, I have encountered a person quite as clear as Peter Maurin. So clear that he is somewhat hidden.

Even now, he's known mostly through Dorothy Day. Not directly.

This is the 70th anniversary of his death and NCR has an article.

https://www.ncronline.org/news/environment/peter-maurins-farm-rooted-vision-gains-ground-among-catholic-workers

"He asked nothing for himself, so he got nothing," Dorothy Day wrote in Loaves and Fishes of Peter Maurin.

Day once said that Maurin's dedication to voluntary poverty was so extreme that perhaps the only possession he really valued was his mind. (He eventually surrendered that as well, experiencing an apparent stroke that made him lose his ability to think clearly several years before his death.) When Maurin died May 15, 1949, he was buried in a donated grave, wearing a donated suit.

Like Jean Vanier, he found his way as a lay man.

Enfolded in weakness and hope

“When you die, you fall asleep. And you wake up, and there’s a very gentle peace. You feel well. And then you discover the face of God coming through that ‘wellness’. "
- Speaking to the Tablet in 2017

“But let us not put our sights too high. We do not have to be saviours of the world! We are simply human beings, enfolded in weakness and in hope, called together to change our world one heart at a time.”
- Becoming Human

More Quotes from Jean Vanier are HERE.

Jean Vanier died early this morning, just outside of Paris. RIP.

There is no going back

No, no, there is no going back.
Less and less you are
that possibility you were.
More and more you have become
those lives and deaths
that have belonged to you.
You have become a sort of grave
containing much that was
and is no more in time, beloved
then, now, and always.
And so you have become a sort of tree
standing over a grave.
Now more than ever you can be
generous toward each day
that comes, young, to disappear
forever, and yet remain
unaging in the mind.
Every day you have less reason
not to give yourself away.

~ Wendell Berry ~