The Nazareth Meditations (1897–1900)
Discovering the Hidden Life of Jesus
After leaving the Trappists, Foucauld went to Nazareth, where he lived in great simplicity near the Poor Clares. Choosing a humble and hidden existence, he worked as a servant and devoted long hours to prayer, meditation, and contemplation of the life of Jesus.
During these years, he reflected deeply on what he called the “hidden life” of Jesus: the long years Christ spent at Nazareth before beginning His public ministry. For Foucauld, these years were not simply a preparation for what would come later. They revealed something essential about the mystery of the Incarnation itself — God choosing an ordinary, humble, and largely unseen human life.
Nazareth gradually became for Foucauld much more than a geographical place. It became a way of following Jesus: through humility, simplicity, prayer, ordinary work, and a life lived without seeking recognition or visible achievement.
From this contemplation emerged his desire to imitate the life of Jesus as closely as possible. Rather than placing public preaching at the center of his vocation, he increasingly understood Christian witness as a life lived among others — sharing their ordinary existence and allowing the Gospel to be revealed through presence, goodness, and love.
The writings of this period became foundational to Foucauld’s spirituality. His understanding of Nazareth would remain with him throughout his life and eventually inspire others to seek God in the simplicity of everyday life and in a humble presence among those around them.
The 1897 Nazareth Retreat Notes
Seeking the Last Place
During his time in Nazareth, Foucauld made a private retreat in which he wrote a series of personal resolutions concerning the life he desired to lead. Written before he had any community or followers, these notes form a deeply personal rule of life centered on prayer, humility, self-denial, and the imitation of Jesus.
The retreat reveals the demanding spiritual path Foucauld set for himself. He continually examined his life in the light of Jesus and sought to become increasingly humble, hidden, and detached from recognition. His resolutions express an intense desire not simply to admire the life of Christ at Nazareth, but to reproduce its humility in the concrete circumstances of his own life.
At the heart of these reflections is the idea of the “last place”. Foucauld came to see Jesus at Nazareth as having freely chosen a life that was humble, unnoticed, and without social importance. To follow Him therefore meant not merely accepting obscurity when it came, but willingly seeking a place of humility and service.
This desire for the “last place” became one of the characteristic themes of Foucauld’s spirituality. It expressed his conviction that closeness to Jesus was found not through status or recognition, but through humility, simplicity, and becoming small in the eyes of the world.
The spirituality expressed in these retreat notes would continue to shape Foucauld’s choices long after he left Nazareth and would later become an important source of inspiration for communities seeking to live according to his vision of the hidden life of Jesus.
Reflections on Nazareth as a Model for Religious Life
A New Way of Living Nazareth
For Foucauld, Nazareth gradually became more than a personal spiritual ideal. He began to imagine it as a model for a form of religious life rooted in the ordinary existence of the people among whom a community would live.
Rather than emphasizing traditional missionary preaching or separation from the world, he envisioned small fraternities living close to those who were poor and often overlooked. He hoped especially for a presence among Muslim communities in North Africa, where members could share the daily life of their neighbors and build relationships through friendship, respect, and goodness.
Manual work, simplicity, and poverty were essential to this vision. Just as Jesus had lived an ordinary life at Nazareth, Foucauld imagined men and women supporting themselves through their own work, avoiding wealth and prestige, and remaining close to the conditions of those around them.
In this vision, the fruitfulness of religious life was not measured primarily by visible achievements, but by the quality of one’s presence: living humbly among others, forming genuine relationships, and allowing the love of God to become visible through everyday life.
This understanding of Nazareth would become an important part of Foucauld’s spiritual legacy. After his death, communities inspired by his writings – including the Little Brothers of Jesus and the Little Sisters of Jesus – sought to embody this intuition through small fraternities, ordinary work, simplicity of life, and a close presence among the people with whom they lived.
The Motto: “Jesus of Nazareth”
Nazareth at the Heart of His Vocation
Throughout his spiritual journey, Foucauld returned again and again to Jesus of Nazareth as the central reference point for his vocation. More than a place or a period in the life of Christ, Nazareth came to represent for him a particular way of following Jesus: hidden, humble, ordinary, and entirely given to God.
His attention to Nazareth reveals one of the deepest intuitions of his spirituality. Before the years of public preaching, miracles, and the events of the Passion, Jesus had spent most of His earthly life in the simplicity of an ordinary home and an ordinary community.
For Foucauld, these hidden years carried a profound message: the presence of God does not depend upon visibility, recognition, or extraordinary achievement. God can be encountered and revealed in work, silence, relationships, prayer, simplicity, and the unnoticed circumstances of everyday life.
This understanding of Nazareth became a thread connecting many aspects of his writings and vocation – his Gospel meditations, his desire for poverty and manual work, his plans for fraternity, and eventually his choice to live close to the people of the Sahara.
Jesus of Nazareth thus became more than an object of contemplation for Brother Charles. Nazareth expressed the life he desired to live: close to Jesus, hidden in God, and present among others through the simplicity of everyday love.