Author: Emmanuel L. Di Rossetti

Which saints to turn ?

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The Marcial Maciel affair forces us to ask the question of Evil. Our time avoids rubbing shoulders with it. What do we know about the work of the devil and what can we do to protect ourselves from it? After trying to hide the good in life, is it any wonder that evil comes to light? The works of the devil are innumerable, but the Holy Spirit can do everything, especially transform them.

You had to have the eloquence of Léon Bloy to affirm: “There is only one sadness, that of not being a saint”.
This nagging question of holiness always comes back like a season that does not pass. There are many things we can get rid of, but never the question of holiness is one of them. It is consubstantial with us. As soon as we see or witness something right or wrong, something good or bad, we walk on the path of holiness. Whether towards her or against her. It takes a long time to realize to what extent the question of holiness is consubstantial with us. We are holy, we are a temple, we started from the Church which is holy, we are in the image of God who is Holy, and yet we shake ourselves, we fall, we struggle, we strive... So little results for so many promises. It is that the condition of saint requires a great deal of effort and gives little visible results. Read more about “Which saints to devote to?” →

Humility News

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The human vision of humility is like the human vision of love, reduced. Humility must exercise its magisterium at all times and in all places. Humility does not allow us to choose whether it should be exercised. Humility thus requires infinite availability and infinite vigilance. It requires a term which has almost disappeared from our modern language, docility. Docility has long been the cornerstone of education. Docility enclosed and guided the will by forcing it to apply itself with discernment and for the cause of a life. The docility of character requires assiduous training, like humility. Docility is the lieutenant of humility. She is also his stewardship, which is not incompatible with the rank of junior officer.

Docility is often the first step leading to availability and vigilance. Being docile requires being alert. Being docile makes life so much easier. Being docile these days is the first reaction to dictatorship in the modern world. Because docility prevents assertion and condemns narcissism. We do not imagine how docility allows us to accomplish great things.

To access humility, one must deny the ego.
What resonance can such a phrase have in our time? Denying the ego? Or, take into consideration the ego to better humiliate it? What madness ? How can we say in our time that being humbled is the surest road to humility? I remember Françoise Dolto's studies on this subject. Far from the image conveyed on Dolto by its thurifers. Dolto praising certain forms of humiliation to reach a “superior” state, a state where being detaches itself from its image; where being dominates and subjugates its image. And of course, Françoise Dolto praised this form of education in children. What was the dunce cap? What was the corner? These practices of another age as we would say today, were they not above all the possibility for the child to repent, and, to repent in front of others? There is no humiliation experienced in solitude. The ego calms down when it confronts intimacy. "I give thanks to God for never having had, because of my science, from the height of my master's chair, at any moment of my teaching activity, a movement of vain pride which raised my soul from the seat of the humility.
The surest way to holiness, that is to say the surest way to the state that is asked of us by God, is humility. Whoever utters these words showed in his life a natural humility. One day in the year 1257, when his fame could swell him with pride, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Brother Thomas therefore, is passing through a convent in Bologna. He does some service. He does not hesitate to do all kinds of tasks. He is available ; there is a liberation of the soul to be available, to bathe in docility. A monk passing through the monastery sees him and gives him the order to follow him. “The prior asks you to follow me”. Brother Thomas complies. He harnesses himself with the monk's belongings, some in the cart which he begins to drag, the rest on his back. Brother Thomas is of good constitution, but the load proves to be very heavy all the same. He works. The prior said: "Take the first brother you find". Brother Thomas appeared to the religious as the right person to help him. The monk is in a hurry, he rebuffs Brother Thomas who is struggling to carry everything and move forward at a reasonable speed. Brother Thomas shows docility in the effort, but he also shows great docility in the face of the reproaches of the religious. In town, the scene of the monk snubbing the brother is comical. People laugh at this caravan as it passes. But suddenly, a murmur runs through the crowd. It spreads like wildfire. Whisper is a name. A bourgeois insists on educating the religious. The brother you are mistreating is… The monk stiffened a little more, if that were possible. He dares not turn around. He dares not face his victim. The shadow of brother Thomas overhangs him, but this shadow has no meaning, brother Thomas does not overhang anyone with his shadow. Brother Thomas is in the back smiling, almost placid, he has had time to catch his breath. The monk approaches him and asks him to forgive him, he continues to wave the air with his arms, but this time to create intimacy with Brother Thomas, when before he had never ceased to show ostensibly the gap existing between him and this brother of small condition. He approaches him, touches his shoulder, everyone can see that there is no animosity between them, that on the contrary he breathes a form of complicity between them. Brother Thomas, dupe of nothing, actor of everything, replies to the monk who had just slipped in to him that he should have declared his identity, and instructed him of his quality, that there was no question of disobeying the prior. As the crowd kept murmuring against the monk, Brother Thomas affirmed that he was there of his own free will, that he accepted this charge without grumbling, that there was no reason to get angry with anyone. either, that obedience was the sine qua non of faith. To obey one's prior, to obey out of love for God. It costs nothing to get out of this way; the way of God's love. God's love takes on its full meaning in man's obedience. If man comes to derogate from this gentle law, nothing exists but the modern world. Without docility, without humility. Without love.

Fear news from Ernest Hello

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But if from fear in general we pass to fear of Jesus Christ in the Garden of Olives, we will find silence more suitable than speech. Her passion is a series of excesses, many of which are unknown to us, says Angèle de Foligno. But these sufferings, terrible as they were, were successive, not simultaneous. In the development of the Passion, he will not carry them all at once. But in the Garden of Olives, by virtue of the same terror, they acquired in him a greater perfection than that which was about to be given to them by reality itself. Perhaps the crucifixion was felt in a more terrible way in the Garden of Olives than on the cross. For on the cross he was actually felt. In the Garden of Olives it was felt in spirit.

The sweat of blood is the word of this terror. In general the man does not sweat blood. The sweat of blood is a thing outside of everything, as the terror of Jesus Christ was outside of everything. He felt God in a rage pressing down on him, and he knew what it was to be a God in a rage.

He carried the substantial fury of God. He saw his earthly future, which was passion, then the future of men: he saw their crimes, their pains. No one knows what he saw. No one knows what he smelled. No one knows what he was wearing. No one knows with what tremor this human nature quivered, which had no other support than a divine Person, and which saw itself as the object of God's wrath.

 

Ernest Hello, Words of God, Reflections on some sacred texts. Editions Jerome Millon.

Excerpt from The Holy Mass, yesterday, today and tomorrow , quotation from Mr. Dominique Ponnau, director of the Ecole du Louvre, Conference given in Le Mans, September 19, 1998.

"I remember. This memory is for me a cultural and human reference almost every day. It was in June 1985, in Pont-à-Mousson, at the end of the symposium “Music in the Church today”. Maurice Fleuret — in peace be his soul — the magnificent director of music and dance to Minister Jack Lang, friend of Pierre Mauroy, leftist, promoter as enlightened as he was determined of contemporary music, took the speech. Word of fire. Of supplication; one can say so, since he himself begged. I will quote him ad sensum , but this word I have never forgotten: it is his. Evoking what Western music, from its origins to the present day, owed to the Church, to the liturgy of the Church, what owed to the music of the Church the music of Monteverdi, Bach, Mozart , Beethoven, Stravinsky, Messiaen: everything . To the liturgical music of the Church, Western music owed everything, he said. And himself, Maurice Fleuret, in his own life as a musician, to the music of the Church, what did he owe? Everything . He owed her everything, he said. And this Western music which owed everything to the Church, to the liturgy of the Church, what did it owe to Gregorian chant? Everything , he said. To Gregorian chant, all Western music, he said, owed everything . But the Spirit of Gregorian chant, he said, this spirit which he could not imagine ceasing to breathe, where was it breathed? In the liturgy, he says. And that's when he begged the Church…: I beg you, he exclaimed, for the benefit of the ecclesiastics present, don't leave the monopoly of Gregorian chant to the State. It is made for the liturgy. And it is in the liturgy that it must be practiced.”

Letter to my friend Alvaro Mutis

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One day in the 1990s, we were walking down the street, we were leaving the Hôtel des Saints-Pères, and Alvaro Mutis 1 stopped short. We were almost at the corner of the rue de Grenelle, and he said to me: “Emmanuel, I have the impression that we walked like this together a long time ago in a street in Cadiz. And we were having the same discussion. I confess that I no longer remember our remarks. I am certain that if Alvaro Mutis were still alive, he would remember it.

Alvaro Mutis had a special relationship with life. He lived by handling memory and immediate reality. He always put one foot in one and one foot in the other. With him, these two worlds never left each other, they were close, went hand in hand, like conjoined twins, like a one-way life, for the better. Alvaro Mutis was living his life and other lives, lives he had lived before, or would live later. Above all, Alvaro Mutis lived, at all times, accompanied by a young boy, this still child was called Alvarito, he was always with us. Carmen, Alvaro's wife, accepted his presence even though it was not her son. I have never met someone like Alvaro Mutis. I mean there was something terrifying and intriguing about his presence, his presence as a child next to the same middle-aged adult. I told him that often. I told him that Bernanos, whom he loved, also had to live like this with the incarnated afterglow of a young self by his side.

I come here to tell what I know of Alvaro Mutis, Maqroll el Gaviero and a few others… These last years have been slow and long. We corresponded much less. He no longer wrote. He hadn't written for so long. The tremors had taken over. A certain emptiness too. Everything was doomed to disappear like the stump of a dead tree that disappeared in a week in the damp furnace of the Amsud. Everything had to pass, and this spectacle of life in action never ceased to amaze Alvaro Mutis throughout the ninety years he spent on this earth.

Continue reading “Letter to my friend Alvaro Mutis” →

Alvaro Mutis on the monarchy

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The paradox, quite painful for me, is that very young I was already a royalist. I could almost say, since childhood. My first readings of history led me to research where the monarchy came from and how it worked. I know full well that the monarchy, as I conceive it and other eras have experienced it, is now unthinkable.[…] For me, a power that comes from a transcendence, from a divine origin, and which is assumed as such by the king, as an obligation before a being and an authority superior to men, is much more convincing. From this engagement of the king comes the source, the origin, the reason for this power which is his during his life, as well as the right of his sons to inherit this power, after the ceremony of the coronation. This seems much more acceptable to me, and I commune and live with it much better than with laws, regulations, codes approved by a majority consensus, to which I must submit and which were created by men in my image. That the majority agrees on the fact that society should be like this or like that, for me it means absolutely nothing. For this society to deserve my respect, for me to feel concerned by it and for it to be entitled to my respect, it must be of superior origin, and not the fruit of a logical process, rehearsed and prepared by a group of men who claim to represent the majority of the population. Because in my opinion, it is then the most abominable tyranny that can exist.

Extracts from Souvenirs and other fantasies , book interviews with Eduardo Garcia Aguilar, Editions Folle Avoine.

Excerpt from Le Hussard. Poem by Alvaro Mutis

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[…] The century-old must of wine, which is sprinkled with water in the cellars.
The power of his arm and his bronze shadow.
The stained glass window which recounts his loves and recalls his last battle darkens a little more each day under the smoke of the lamps nourished with bad oil.
Like the howl of a siren announcing to boats a shoal of scarlet fish is the complaint of the one who loved him more than any other,
the one who left her home to sleep against her saber slipped under the pillow and kiss her a soldier's hard stomach.
Like the sails of a ship that swell or sag, like the dawn that dissipates the fog on the airfields, like the silent walk of a barefoot man in an undergrowth, the news has spread of his death,
the pain of his open wounds in the evening sun, without pestilence, but with all the appearances of spontaneous dissolution.
The whole truth is not in this story. Missing in words is everything that constituted the drunken cataract of his life, the sonorous parade of the best of his days that motivated the song, his exemplary figure, his sins like so many precious coins, his effective and beautiful weapons.

Excerpt from the poem Le Hussard published in Les Elements du Disaster, Editions Grasset. Tribute day to Alvaro Mutis, extraordinary storyteller, immense writer, wonderful friend.

Night. Poem by Alvaro Mutis

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The fever attracts the song of an androgynous bird
opening the way to the insatiable pleasure
that branches out and crosses the body of the earth.
Oh !
the fruitless navigation around the islands Where women offer the traveler
the cool balance of their breasts
And the terrifying sound in the hollow of their hips!
The tender, smooth skin of the day
is falling apart like the shell of an infamous fruit.
The fever attracts the song of the cesspools
where the water carries the garbage.

With the poem Nocturne published in The Elements of Disaster, Editions Grasset, I begin this day of homage to Alvaro Mutis, extraordinary storyteller, immense writer, formidable friend.

Christian testimony – 2

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When I started this blog, very quickly the idea of ​​writing on the liturgy came to me. Not to claim specialist status, but to share my experience of what is at the heart of a Christian's life. There were therefore two paths that had to merge: It was necessary to tell the mass (and its benefits), and then entrust the journey that had revealed it.

Part 2: Christianity, king of communities – At the foot of the altar

When I lived in London, the thought of spirituality never ceased to inhabit me. My quest boiled down to the permanent search for the inner life. This beating, throbbing heart could only be flesh and blood. That was my intuition. Twenty-five years later, it's a certainty that lives in me: not to let this heart beat and throb without giving it enough time, attention and affection. Unceasingly, seek to deepen this mystery which surrounds it. Anything that prevents this dialogue, anything that interferes with this connection, provokes my deepest contempt. This burning intimacy has perfect enemies hatched by the modern world, enemies like communitarianism and syncretism.

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On the stale air of our societies

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“We are told that the air of the world is unbreathable. I agree with that. But the first Christians found each morning at their door an atmosphere saturated with vices, idols, and incense offered to the divinities. They were for more than two hundred years relegated, slandered and marginalized by the current of the social river which carried them away and rejected them altogether. Do you think that the grace of their baptism kept them away from urban life almost in its entirety? They renounced taking part in major civic performances, such as the entry into office of a magistrate, or the triumph of a victorious general, because none of these ceremonies could be inaugurated without a sacrifice of incense offered to the emperor, divine character. The grace of their baptism kept them away from the thermal baths, a morning meeting place highly prized by the Romans, because of the nudity of their bodies and the shamelessness of their attitudes. They also gave up circus shows because of the scenes of cruelty that made them the main subject. But these early Christians formed a society, and this society by force of spirit broke through the shell of ancient paganism. Their earthly hope was limited to the desire not to die before seeing Christ return on the clouds, and they were the founders of Christian Europe. »

Dom Gérard, in Tomorrow Christianity