It was a year ago. Alvaro Mutis joined the sky. The immense Colombian writer deserves to be read and re-read. This sparkling monarchist projected a bridge between old Europe and South America. His poems, his stories, his novels carry and carry our history through the figure of Maqroll el Gaviero, solitary sailor, disillusioned, dreaming of the Empire of Byzantium or the reign of Saint-Louis aboard old tubs close to sinking.
Category: Modern world
From traditional…
“We are dwarfs on the shoulders of giants; we see more than they, and further; not that our gaze is piercing, nor lofty in stature, but we are elevated, heightened, by their gigantic stature”.
This quote from Bernard de Chartres (12th century) found in Rémi Brague's latest book, Moderately Modern (Editions Flammarion), always strikes me as brighter each time I read it. Tradition is never what traditionalists or progressives say it is. Tradition resolutely ignores divisions. She doesn't even know confrontation. Tradition boils down to a deep sense of balance and serenity. If we dive into her, we immediately realize that she is inaccessible to most men, that few are those of whom she could be proud, that they were always armed with prodigious humility. But all those who wanted to put her in a cage because they hated her influence or those who did the same because they wanted to protect her from herself and keep her for themselves, did not understand or saw a thing. . The tradition is unalterable. Contrary to popular belief, its destruction is impossible. At worst, is it possible to forget it. And forgetting it does him no harm. She knows how to reserve herself. She is never in a hurry, panicked in the face of her time. She takes her time, since she accompanies him. If men forget her, she knows how to leave traces here and there so that we rediscover her existence when the time comes.
It is like water: no one can break it or hold it.
You should almost not refer to it. You should act as if she wasn't there. We deserve it so little… It immediately loses its luster when we talk about it, when we bring it down to our level. Tradition is intrinsically linked to life; in reality, they are one. They go together.
Which saints to turn ?
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
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
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.
Letter to my friend Alvaro Mutis
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.
Christian testimony – 2
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.
On the stale air of our societies
“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
On totalitarian states
"Totalitarian states, which use lies and violence alternately (lies to cover up the violence and violence to silence those who discover the lies), owe most of their success to the fact of having paralyzed the forces of reaction against imposture and falsehood. This on a moral level. »
Dom Gérard in Tomorrow Christianity
The abandonment of Benedict XVI
“Eli, Eli lama sabachtani?” 1 When Benedict XVI signifies, in a few simple words, that he renounces the office of pope, it is an earthquake that shakes the world and strikes Catholics. The wildest rumors are circulating and everyone wonders about the causes of this decision which, even if it is not unique, causes amazement. Personally two feelings inhabit me: abandonment and sadness, its pilot fish, not to say desolation. The abandonment resembles an echo that keeps reproducing and growing, like a haunting complaint.