I. Charism - La Salle.org

IV. DISCOVERING, LIVING, SHARING THE GIFT OF GOD 87
Each of the verbs which indicate the consecration, the promises, the
vows, are for, with an effect, a plan for life, for action: the establishment
and the maintenance of the Society of the Christian
Schools.
The Heroic Vow: a stage in the foundation of Association.
The Heroic Vow was a vow of association and of union, a re-foundation
of the Institute on a Community which claimed to risk
everything - its life, its duration, its capacities, its relations - in confidence
in God, to carry out its work. They were men who gave
back to God all that they were, their talents: all our powers, all our
endeavours, all that we believe in conscience and without human
consideration. They were men who had mutual confidence in each
other: I and WE, unanimously and with common consent, a vow
of union. They were men who had discovered that they were in solidarity
with all which had been done and all that remained to be
done. There was a dynamic of human relations and of what was
lived, which was profiled behind this “secret” commitment.
It was an act of hope in a faithful God: the formula opened with an
invocation to the Trinity and continued with a dialogue between
YOU: the Trinity and US, (I, I, and I).
The dialogue with God, the consecration, have for their aim the
establishment of the Society of the Christian Schools. It is affirmed
on two occasions in the text. John Baptist de La Salle and the two
Brothers have gone from the “community” of the Memoir on the
Habit, a term which expressed the “religious” horizon of the group
which arrived at Saint-Sulpice, to the “Society of the Christian
Schools”, an expression which included, apart from the religious
dimension, the school aspect of the Lasallian work.
This dialogue with the Trinity, which continues throughout the
vow, is the expression of an experience of God, shared by the three