John Baptist de La Salle was a man who listened attentively to the movement of the Spirit in his life. He responded freely and creatively in ministry and in the founding of the Brothers of the Christian Schools. This essay presents provocative remembrance of certain aspects of the life of De La Salle, a remembrance that energizes and challenges. The complete writings of De La Salle are a monumental corpus of prose, including more text than the Hebrew and Christian scriptures combined. The writings in this essay offer a concise representation that are consistent with the wider body of text. They contextualized the life of De La Salle within the time period he lived and illuminate important aspects of his free response to the Spirit moving in his life.

John Baptist de La Salle was born in Rheims in 1651, about one hundred years after the Council of Trent. De La Salle was a member of a leading bourgeois family and a canon of the Cathedral of Rheims. As a well educated priest, a doctor of theology, he moved about freely in the Counter-Reformation church of seventeenth century France. The reform movement now known as the French school of spirituality was the theological and sociological context of his entire professional journey, and its influence on De La Salle is easily identified in his writings. When we accept this context, the language of De La Salle becomes even more meaningful, and the transformative power of his life and work becomes even more incredible.

In the spring of 1679 about one year after his ordination, John Baptist de La Salle met Adrien Nyel at the house of the sisters of the Holy Child Jesus. Over the following several years, De La Salle became progressively more involved in establishing free schools for boys in Rheims. After helping Nyel establish his schools in Rheims, in December 1679, De La Salle narrowed the distance between himself and the school teachers by renting a house for them, bringing himself to the threshold of a world to which he was more or less a stranger. Within a year, he invited the teachers into his own home for meals, a move not applauded by his own family and culture. Then in 1681 he made the momentous decision to invite the teachers to live in his own home, experiencing thereby the social miseries of his native city;. In June 1682, De La Salle, with the teachers, chose to move to a modest building on the Rue Neuve, separating himself from the comfortable world in which he had grown up, and placing himself on the periphery of the world of the poor. In August 1683, the Founder resigned his canonry and, following a severe famine during the winter, his patrimony was essentially divested by the spring of 1684.

Little by little, De La Salle progressively, almost unknowingly, responded to the movement of the Spirit at the margin between his own bourgeois culture and the culture of the poor. The response was a struggle linked to specific historic events, but it was always affected by the decisive conversion of De La Salle standing at the boundary between two cultures, looking outside himself to the poor and abandoned, and seeing the face of God.

In the Memoir of the Beginnings, De La Salle reflects back incredulously on this period in his life, seeing the movement of the Spirit working gently and imperceptibly. Indeed, De La Salle did not realize that his willingness to advise the eager Nyel would eventually lead him to a lifeÕs work that was completely unforeseen and unthinkable :

The first contact with the teachers introduced De La Salle to a world and a culture of which he had known little. It was through the concrete contact with teachers that the real needs of the teachers themselves, as well as of the poor and abandoned children, became apparent to De La Salle.

The most impressive feature of the thought of De La Salle in this Memoir is his unswerving response to the direction of God's will, that is, his free and willing pursuit of the movement of the Spirit. Between 1679 and 1684, the needs of the teachers and the abandoned children crystallized into a call that was perceived as a call from God. De La Salle's search for the Spirit at the margin of society was characterized by attention to the daily, existential events of living. Hence, the unforeseen consequences of the entire movement were divided into decisive, hidden moments of revelation. De La Salle was led to a religious reading of the successive commitments he had made, and his reading was accompanied by a decisive commitment that would imply certain breaks. These, in turn, brought criticism from his family and friends, suspicion from ecclesiastical authorities, and forced him to examine the exclusive nature of priestly ministry in the church.

As Edwin Bannon powerfully states in De La Salle: A Founder as Pilgrim: "He made himself poor with the poor, for the sake of the poor. he had reached a point in his journey of faith when the road ahead was the only one that lay open to him. What that road would lead to was still uncertain and unclear -- except for the certainty and the clarity of his faith gave him that Providence was guiding him along it, step by step." Through his choice to be with the poor, De La Salle became the crystallizing seed for a new ministry in the Church.

The new community that De La Salle gathered around himself experienced growth and success in the following years. The community became publicly identifiable by adapting a distinct habit, probably in the winter of 1684-85. This distinctive habit of the teachers, different from secular persons and from the clergy, made their existence visible to their pupils, the parishioners, and the general public of Rheims. The habit symbolized the teachersÕ communal identity during a time of growth and expansion. In 1686, the principal Brothers of the community assembled for the first time to discuss and reflect on the shared experience of community and ministry, and to discern where the Spirit was directing them. In February 1688, the first Brothers were sent to Paris to work in the parish school of Saint Sulpice. By 1690, the Brothers had expanded into three different dioceses (Rheims, Laon, and Paris) and had experienced considerable success in the running of schools. However, this period was not without very serious challenges from external authorities.

The Memoir of the Habit was written around 1690 in defense of the community of teaching Brothers against the exercise of ecclesiastical authority. Specifically, it was a retort against the pastor of St. Sulpice that the Brothers wear a plain black cassock and an ecclesiastical collar, a demand the pastor had every right to make. Even so, the Memoir on the Habit was more than a defense of the Brothers' garb. it was a shared interpretation of the Brothers' experience and a public testament to the legitimacy of the new community within the wider church setting. De La Salle and the Brothers argued not only for the importance of a distinctive habit but for the right of the Brothers to be an identifiable group of workers in the Church, not clerics yet still distinguishable from the laity.

De La Salle clearly sets out the characteristics of the new community from the beginning of the Memoir on the Habit:

Complete trust in God, observance of a Rule, and sharing property in common for the purpose of teaching in gratuitous schools identify this community as founded by God. In thus listing the name and purpose of the community and the nature of its activities, De La Salle declared that the new community had created a distinct, shared identity for itself. The new group of teachers regarded themselves as neither clerical ministers nor as secular teachers. From the Memoir on the Habit, it cannot be said that the new community thought themselves in a better or worse state of life than clergy or secular persons. However, the new community clearly saw themselves as distinct from both groups.

In the Memoir on the Habit was the voice of a group of persons who looked upon themselves as belonging to a community, a community founded only on Providence, occupied in teaching gratuitously. In the Memoir, De La Salle stood within a community, looked back at the boundary he had crossed a few years earlier, and proclaimed that the community of christian schools as a legitimate group of men gathered by God to share in the mission of the Church through the service of education. If the pastor of St. Sulpice wanted to change the identity of the community, according to De La Salle, he had better "give the matter serious thought and examine with care the good and evil effects which may result" because this community had gathered in response to the movement of the Spirit, and it would be a grave mistake to disregard God's will in the Spirit.

Despite facing crisis, opposition, and uncertainty, the young community managed to spread throughout France and permanently establish a Society that lives today. In 1691, shortly after De La Salle wrote the Memoir on the Habit, he gathered with Gabriel Drolin and Nicholas Vuyart in the house at Vaugirard. They made a solemn oath to each other, a "heroic vow," to procure with all their ability and efforts the establishment of the Christian Schools. In 1694, a few years after establishing a novitiate at Vaugirard, De La Salle gathered twelve senior Brothers at an assembly now recognized as the first General Chapter. The assembled Brothers first discussed and then made perpetual vows of obedience, stability, and association; they approved a written draft of the Rule; and they re-elected De La Salle as their superior. With the consolidation of the internal structure of the community, De La Salle was able to concentrate on his writings, especially a series of catechisms, the Conduct of Schools, and the Rules of Christian Politeness.

By 1719, Brothers' communities were established in twenty-one cities throughout France. However, this growth was not without tension related to De La Salle himself and to the ambiguity of finding a place in an established educational system. That is, De La Salle and the community of Brothers had to carve an educational niche in a setting controlled by ecclesiastical authorities, the Guild of Writing Masters, and the Masters of the Little Schools. In addition to the tensions involving the educational establishment, De La Salle received numerous personal attacks. Realizing that his presence in Paris might threaten the establishment of the Institute, De La Salle retreated to southern France.

In 1714, the principal Brothers of Paris called De La Salle back to Paris to resume the government of the Institute. While De La Salle had been questioning his own efforts to establish the Institute, the letter written by those Brothers expressed to him that his life's work had in fact not been in vain. For De La Salle, the letter was an expression of a living body that was active, responsible, and conscious of itself. personally assured of the continuance of the Institute, De La Salle returned to Paris and assumed a quiet advisory role in its government.

In 1717, two years before De La Salle's death, a general assembly convened at St. Yon, outside the city of Rouen, to discuss and insure the union and uniformity of the Institute. The assembly commissioned De La Salle to revise the 1705 edition of the Common Rule. In his revisions, after almost forty years of living and working for the establishment of the Brothers of the Christian Schools, De La Salle set out with great attention to integrate and express with great clarity the insights he gained from his experience of community life.

The additions De La Salle made to the Common Rule represent his enduring message, and the community's enduring message to the Brothers of the Christian Schools. Two of the critical additions he made can still be found in their entirety in our revised Rule of 1987. The first is the prologue to a new chapter on "Regularity":

De La Salle's purpose was to emphasize that keeping the Rule, however essential to the effectiveness of the Institute's mission, could be valid to the degree to which it manifested love of God and love of neighbor. Despite the heavy emphasis he had placed on uniformity and regularity in order to secure the establishment of the Institute, De La Salle wanted to leave his Brothers with the message that love is the fulfillment of the law, a message still clearly applicable today.

The prologue to the original chapter on the "Spirit of the Institute," the second critical addition by De La Salle to the Common Rule, echoes the most central and the most vital elements of the life and spirituality of De La Salle. Looking back on the way the Spirit had moved him forward on a journey littered with pain and discouragement, De La Salle realized that faith was the bulwark which must sustain his disciples through the difficulties of their mission: "That which is of the utmost importance, and to which the greatest attention should be given in an Institute is that all who compose it possess the spirit particular to it." That spirit of the Institute is a spirit of faith. De La Salle saw that, if the Brothers persevered through faith in discovering the Spirit in the existential events of their lives, they would succeed in accomplishing God's work.

The chapter continues by stating that the Brother remains faithful to the Spirit, first, by putting everything "in the view of God" and, second, by applying himself to the work of instructing children "with an ardent zeal." By connecting these two thoughts, De La Salle makes it clear that it is impossible to separate the search for the Spirit and the love for human beings. A teacher shares in God's love for humanity by abandoning himself or herself to God in the work that one does. In committing themselves to the education of their students, people discover the Spirit of God in their lives. Love of neighbor and attention to the Spirit in active service encapsulate the creative response and the persuasive word of De La Salle's life.

The Meditations for the Time of Retreat represent the summit from which De La Salle was able to view for the first time the full extent of God's work which he had undertaken long before, when he began his first associations with the Brothers in community. In the MTR, De La Salle spoke to an established community of men that fulfilled a unique role within the Church. The creativeness of that role in the Church is discernible in the language that De La Salle uses to describe the work of the Brothers of the Christian Schools. The Founder uses traditional clerical language of the Counter-Reformation to describe his Brothers, and he assigns tasks to his Brothers that were normally reserved for the clergy. De La Salle's use of the words ministry and minister in the MTR is a clear example.

In the MTR, De La Salle absorbs the terms ministry and minister from St. Paul's letters and makes them his own. The ministry is used twenty-six times and minister is used eleven times. De La Salle uses these words twenty-one more times than St. Paul. Clearly, the Founder viewed the work of his Brothers as a genuine ministry within the Church. But what was so radical about defining the Brothers as ministers?

We might recall that the Counter-Reformation Church sought to reassert itself in a world changed by the reformers. It did so by institutionalizing the role of priest as the minister of grace. The purpose of life was to "save one's soul," and the priest was there to show you how to do it. Care of the soul tended to be reduced to providing the sacraments, a teaching promulgated by the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) and restated by the Council of Trent in 1565. Though as a doctor of theology De La Salle was familiar with those decrees, he spoke of those who teach the young as "cooperators with Jesus Christ in the saving of souls" (MTR 3). Not only did De La Salle expand the definition of minister to non-clerics, but he extended Òcaring for soulsÓ beyond the sacraments to include the education of youth. As Elizabeth Rapley points out in The Devotes, in the Church of the Counter-Reformation, education of youth, especially the catechizing of youth, was limited to clergy. Rapley goes on: "All catechizing by laity was contrary to the spirit of Catholic pastoral reform. According to the Council of Trent and succeeding councils in France, the instruction of the people in faith was the prerogative of the parish clergy. Where priests were unavailable, clerks in minor orders could act as substitutes. Laymen were admitted to catechize only where necessary."

De La Salle also spoke of the Christian teachers as "ambassadors and ministers of Jesus Christ" and as "sharing in the ministry of the holy apostles." Such phrases were traditionally applied only to priests. As Michel Sauvage states in the first volume of the Cahiers Lasalliens, "We must not minimize the importance of such declarations from the pen of the Founder of the Brothers. He knows well that the bishops are the successors of the apostles. And yet he does not hesitate to apply this expression the the Brothers." While De La Salle remained devoted to the Church, and especially to the pope, his commitment did not prevent him from responding to the movement of the Spirit in the existential events of his life. De La Salle was willing to add to the accepted forms and structures of ministry in the Church of his time.

As in the time of De La Salle, the understanding of ministry and religious life in the Church has undergone a monumental shift in the past twenty-five years. This shift is just the prologue to the real transformation that will take place in the lived reality of ministry in the world of the next millenium.

Ministerial expansion and the rebuilding of religious life in this setting are inevitable. New forms will emerge in response to critical and unmet needs brought to light by the Spirit of God. De La Salle's attention to the Spirit and steadfast faith in God enabled him to respond effectively to a very similar cultural and ecclesial transition. It is now the time to search our own shared experience for the movement of the Spirit, and to respond decisively and creatively to the unmet needs of young people and the poor brought to light by our lasallian charism: steadfast faith in God and attention the the Spirit.

We, the Brothers of the Christian Schools, are a community of memory and anticipation. Our common future is built in the light and shadow of our past, our history. The shared interpretation of that history reveals the memories and possibilities that can energize us or paralyze us. The document on Shared Mission from the Forty-Second General Chapter states that "in every culture and every religion there can be found the seeds of the Word of God and the power of the Spirit of God" (3.1). De La Salle was seminal in the Church of seventeenth century France, as was the new community that gathered around him. We can discover those seeds today in our U.S. culture, our Christian story, and our lasallian heritage. And in our corporate history, we can discover those memories of hope that will energize us and propel us to celebration, commitment, and the creation of God's kingdom present in the world.