He fulfilled his only desire every day without effort. He stood up and counted in his mind the time it took to do it. He counted time as if he had it under control as he escaped. He knew its age, but he insisted not to be surprised by its effects. He called on his mind and body to keep them alert, vigilant, and aware of the decline that was battling them. He dressed with presence, and, in a meticulous protocol, plunged and clenched his two fists in his pockets, the left on his handkerchief rolled into a ball, the one that his wife had given him, and the right on a small cross which he had also been offered, but he no longer knew by whom. Reassured by their symbolic presence, he finished getting ready.
He succumbed to another ritual, that of sitting in his armchair and drinking a bowl of coffee while looking out the window, in front of him, at the hilly landscape and the gorges which fractured the distance. He thus gave free rein to his imagination and the book of his memories. He appreciated the kaleidoscope of images. He loved this river of images, one day a stilled stream, the other a bubbling water; it summed up his life, rather sharpened it, restoring to him the extraordinary happiness that sparkled in each of its fragments and imposing on him an inestimable motivation.
Reading the letter from the Vatican produced by Imedia after Françoise Nyssen's visit with Pope Francis1 .
It is always a surprise to discover, like this morning, an interview with a person, known or not, representative of our time, admitting that his meeting with Pope Francis was one of the most significant moments of his life, but not getting any action from it. As if this meeting should be one moment among many others in the ocean of memories.
The loss of faith rooted in modern man by comfort
We thus see people touched by grace in their daily lives, savoring an encounter, a moment, feeling that this encounter or this moment does not belong to them in any way but that they can enjoy it, intuiting that it comes from a provoked abandonment. by the vagaries of life, experiencing the force that emanates from this encounter or this moment, while drawing no action from it. They declare: “this is the happiest moment of my life!” » and will never do anything to reproduce it or try to understand what caused it! This remains an impenetrable mystery; this inaction embodies the passivity of modern man in the face of his life and the little faith he has in his ability to transform it. This loss of faith is now rooted in modern Western man, which is how he will fight for orange peels and completely miss the point. François Nyssen admits at the end of the interview: “I myself am not baptized, but when I left, I promised the Pope that I would pray for him.” What does that mean? The confusion is total.
How many couches collapse under the weight of words or silences that gather together in the sole hope of suffocating the soul?
Two things are missing for the alchemy to take place. First, education in the inner life. Françoise Nyssen was not baptized. She is interested in religion since she asks for an audience with the Pope and publishes dear Sébastien Lapaque… Moreover, she has always lived in books, so she knows the interiority and the power of this other life. Yet nothing about her confirms this feeling. She looks at him as something outside her, as something foreign, as an exoticism, one would be tempted to say. An attractive exoticism, with a strong power of “seduction” (or nostalgia?), but not enough to change everything and to adhere to it. She doesn't feel the lack in her, even if she sees the point of it very well. She is full. Let's think back to Ernst Jünger's phrase in “The Rebel's Treatise 2 ”: “Every comfort comes at a price. The status of domestic animal entails that of animals for slaughter. » We no longer have a thirst to discover ourselves, because we are full of ourselves. The passage of psychoanalysis in the modern world and the place it has taken replacing sacrament, penance and interior life marks a sterilization of our deep being and the messages that our soul expresses more and more sporadically. How many couches collapse under the weight of words or silences that gather together in the sole hope of suffocating the soul? She herself no longer sees the use of it, because she no longer feels love which, when expressed today, is transformed into interest or curiosity ... We are spectators of our life. We watch it helplessly and cowardly. The whole message of Christ encourages us to do the opposite, to turn the table over in order to be free. Oh ! He knew well that we would continue to be weak, however did He imagine that we would be so with so much self-sacrifice, with so much devotion?
Do men always thirst for God?
So the quest, the thirst, the desire is simply missing. And François Nyssen's interview is empty of it. She suggests cooking on the Pope's plane, but there is no question of interior life. She does not want to change even though she sees the effects in Lapaque's books, in the Pope's eyes, or elsewhere, fleetingly when the soul unfolds and pushes the interior furniture a little to signify its presence. No, she will not change because she likes what she is and she is not thirsty, even if she sees people she likes drinking from it, and finally because she does not believe that that can change something in his life! And that’s the most serious part! This sin against the Spirit! Secondly, let no one ask him to drink there! Pope Francis wants, he has repeatedly repeated and shown, not to force anyone and to respect everyone on the path of faith. Not even a little encouragement? Some time ago I heard a historian and theologian explain that during the meeting between Saint Francis of Assisi and the Sultan of Egypt, Sultan Al-Malik al-Kamil, "we were not sure that the saint asked the sultan for his conversion. For a bit, we would be led to believe that he took the risk of going to see him to talk to him about the landscapes of Assisi... You have to live in the 21st century to hear such nonsense! Worse, take credit for it. Faith appears worldly, too, and we must realize that it has adhered with all its pores to modern life and that nothing has been done to prevent it, quite the contrary; she drowns in comfort and the condition of a domestic tool that can be useful from time to time... You never know... It's in the old pot , it seems.
The virility of discomfort as the only refuge
Two lacks for a non-encounter: the lack of education to seek God in all things and that of no longer proclaiming His word. The fifth joyful mystery through the recovery of Jesus in the temple, and the third luminous mystery, the proclamation of the Kingdom of God. Reciting the rosary every day of one's life can be compared to the illumination of a medieval manuscript; one can no longer imagine one without it after turning one of its pages. It would have been interesting to offer a rosary to Françoise Nyssen and to instruct her on its use and to invite her to recite it. If it does not lead back to God, every word is worldly. “I myself am not baptized, but when I left, I promised the Pope that I would pray for him. » Here is the very example of a worldly and decaying word. Pray, but who? Great saints have often repeated: “If you pray without naming God, without being certain that you are addressing God, you are praying to the devil. » Now, the demon is worldly. He is even the inventor of the concept. In this silky world, only the virility of discomfort conceals freedom, it is valid for everyone, man or woman, it is the ultimate means of reaching and showing oneself worthy of God's love.
It is Sunday ? It is Sunday ! Smell the dawning day as we speak at home, Savor a hearty breakfast, it's a day of celebration! Let's not forget it or rather let's remember it! Getting ready for a big day, the big day! Listen to a grumpy taxi driver complaining about the world as it's not going well, Get distracted from this conversation, as from any discussion, Climb the steps, enter the building and let yourself be absorbed by it. Breathe, come back to life like a plant that has lacked water and light for too long... Take root. Pray. Pray ! Advise and be informed! Listen to yourself love! Listening to each other loved! Enjoying yourself, with yourself absent from yourself, Feeling back at home, in lands always unknown. Feeling completely, entirely, intensely loved... Wondering what deserves this... Hearing yourself gasp. Hearing yourself mean the end of eternity. Deo Gratias! Lamenting the end of this adventure that contains all adventures. Finding the world after having forgotten it, stammering and chaotic. Find the crowds, the noises, the clutter of the world... everything that is not Him. Sanctify lunch as if He were going to sit there with us. Savor a soft nap where dreams take your mind to an unknown and heavenly land. Waking up, foggy, in a disparate mood, getting up with difficulty. Rework the threads of oneself, and others. Always stitching up your life. Especially the one to come. Kneel, askew, try to stand in prayer. Dreaming to capture the unimaginable, the meaning that gives meaning to the void. Find a thousand excuses to run away, listen to them all one by one, paying particular attention to them. Believing that the truth could be exercised differently. Trying to rediscover the essence of what filled the morning hours. Being Sunday afternoon… Is it Sunday yet? Where did the magic run? Bored with useless thoughts hoping that time will pass faster. Hearing yourself calling from a distance: “Where are you? » Fear, shudder, tremble, cry, shudder at the terrible echo... Remember... Fear no more. Never have any fear again. Dreaming of it being Sunday morning... Hallucinizing yourself going to the appointment and declaring to Him in a whisper: “I'm here! » Dreaming of it being Sunday morning to reconnect with the marvelous.
Following the article, Why this hatred of authority? I received many reactions. The first was to confuse, or ask myself not to confuse, power and authority. Here, we can see one thing: many people on social networks still agree with this difference. It even marks for them a border that they decree insurmountable, even if few of them venture to explain the difference between power and authority. And, as the article was partly dedicated to highlighting this difference, perhaps not as we are used to doing, it shocked and provoked questions. In many discussions on X, the comments thought that this article defended Emmanuel Macron! That’s how you read diagonally on the Internet! But let us understand that the President of the Republic embodies for many French people an authoritarian form of power.
Thus, there was this intuition about obedience: “authority always inaugurates something new through the control that one can have over one's own passions. » In this sentence, it is possible to replace the word authority with dogma. I evaluate which of these two words is more frightening. The inversion of values and the meaning of words allows progressives to say almost anything and make it... a dogma. The progressive only feeds on “ideas in the air” according to the formidable formula of Claude Tresmontant. If I had to explain this formula a little, I would say that the progressive is rooted in his own thinking. He evolves his thinking to make it evolve first of all, the progressive is made to do, not obeying any authority, he flees the depression and solitude that produces in him a thought only turned towards oneself. From then on, he draws on his latest whims to build new ones. Do we not see the connection that exists between Wokism and the undermining work that has been done for decades in France against what has been called, while distorting it, the national novel? Those who would have been the left-wing supporters of Joan of Arc at the beginning of the 20th century are today her detractors and claim that she did not exist! This shows how progressivism is a machine that goes wrong on its own, believing itself to be correcting itself, it only accentuates its headlong flight. Progressives and the left in general are the true reactionaries of our time and are becoming more and more so, forced as they are to flee, because they are incapable of declaring their wrongs and errors. They are wrong and they deceive. They only react to events without ever practicing the slightest empiricism, because they inhabit the future (I say the future, not the future, because there is no future without a past, when the future represents a goal to reach which always escapes).
Authority ushers in something completely different. It suggests leaning on the past to define or redefine what we can imagine happening. Above all, it is not a question of absolutism, but rather of conservatism. This is also why there are so few theses on conservatism. There is a lot written about how to keep, how to save, how to promote, but less often how to get a vision from it. The conservative has continually left this place to the progressive who delights in it, even though he has nothing serious to do there. What reasonable person would have proposed transforming our aging and bankrupt democracy, living on life support, into a political system for the defense of minorities? I do not deny the protection of the weak, I deny that this becomes the only motive for political actions. Especially since the weakness of the progressive is hidden under a nauseating ideological cloak. In fact, it contains a right of inventory of the weak. There are weak and weak. However, politics mixes very badly with sentimentalism and our democracy is entangled with it. The conservative ignores detailing his action, building a grand plan and making it popular. Because he is looked down upon by progressive moralists who constantly imprison him with a moral screed that is based on sentimental judgment. Suspending this diktat would force us to accept the authoritarian label, but this time this label would no longer be given by the people as in the case of Emmanuel Macron - because the people recognize legitimate authority -, but by the press and the progressive intelligentsia. Who would complain about that?
Ernst Jünger in Heliopolis dreamed of a kind of state beyond the politics led by the “Regent”. There is no regent in our modern world, just two camps spying on each other without ever thinking that they can bring anything to each other. This antagonism is increasingly visible at all levels of society. It indicates a loss of common taste, a growing lack of culture, and an atrophied language which is reduced to its simplest expression - at least, to its simplest usefulness, like the American language. The American does to French what he did to English, he exhausts it - no longer knows how to express the nuances that dialogue requires. We label and classify everyone based on what they think or believe or vote. Discussion becomes a waste of time, and since the participants lack any meaning, the dialogue cannot gain any. There is an inevitability going on, a sort of destiny.
Destiny seduces and bewitches men when they no longer believe in freedom. The West no longer believes in freedom, because it no longer believes in God. Our civilization has known over the ages to weave remarkable links that have become inextricable with freedom; pulling on a thread that sticks out amounts to destroying our world. The inheritance refuses the right of inventory.
Not all migrants arriving in Europe today are fleeing a catastrophic situation. They often arrive with big smiles. They don't all seem destitute. They show no nostalgia for their country and arrive in numbers to find another number. Melancholy is absent, because it is compensated by the communitarianism that they import and that they rediscover. Finally, they travel as single people, without wives or children, which should be intriguing. At least. That there is a will behind this seems obvious, even if the conspiracy label will be brandished at this sentence. The old-style migrants left an unfavorable situation to find not comfort, but rather to escape hell, without being sure of finding comfort, but armed with hope as I said above. They left with women and children, because they wanted to protect them. National feeling has disappeared among modern migrants, are they a-national? If so, what could make them a-national, a supra-nationality? Where do they find the money to make the crossing? During the Iraq War, Christian religious authorities noted that passports and visas had been widely distributed, where before the war it was extremely difficult to obtain one. Finally, the fact that the majority of its migrants are Muslims should also raise questions. When we know that a Muslim must die (and therefore live) in a Muslim land, we can only ask ourselves the question of their lack of desire to join a Muslim land. Especially since these are often much closer geographically than Europe. So many questions that Pope Francis never asks. So many questions that seem to make sense.
Just listen to the captivating music of some tangos, Carlos Gardel, of course, Astor Piazzolla too, and others, who thus sang of exile, the distant, the inaccessible, to chase away their waves from the soul , their melancholy and live for the duration of a song in the combined happiness of their memories and their hopes, to feel the distress of someone who believes they have lost their country forever.
This conjugation is called hope. Where the soul vibrates to feel alive. Pope Francis, as a good Argentinian, feels in his veins the migration of his ancestors to this El Dorado, Argentina. That this modifies his vision of the migrant, whose overly generic name indicates from the start the difficulty of talking about him, is undeniable and proves to be a key to understanding his erratic speeches on the subject.
Exile forces the soul to reveal itself, and to veil. To reveal certain things in oneself that one did not know, that one ignored, that one kept hidden for fear of what they might conceal. Faced with exile, they emerge from oneself as if from nothing, become what they have always been, and dominate us. What merit forged in us by exile, often in spite of ourselves, because we refused to do so! Exile breaks down a barrier often erected in a hurry and without real thought. Man is a reaction animal. When he evolves in his usual element, he most often reacts to his own demons, resentments and mood swings. When he emerges from his cocoon, he reacts to survive by relying on what he believes in, often the fruit of his culture, but his nature is not foreign to it either. This rootedness protects him most of the time from self-disappointment, but not from melancholy, homesickness.
The expression, travel forms youth , comes from this experience. Exile forces the heart, mind and body to communicate differently with the soul which therefore reveals itself, but which also requires us to veil parts of our personality that it took for granted. Sometimes, these are revealed sections which veil other sections. What we believe turns out to be overestimated.
If the “misfortunes of France are exemplary”, it will take us thirty years to recover from the last: that of the laxity of the right combined with the sectarianism of the left. For nearly half a century, we have been subjected to the terrorism of an intelligentsia plagued successively by Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, socialism, social democracy, without forgetting corrupt capitalism, to which has been added since the artistic terrorism which has placed subversion, provocation and derision at the heart of its credo in an attempt to crush values based on beauty. As long as there is not a total reversal of the purposes of our activities, as long as our rulers persist in considering economic expansion as a supreme objective instead of granting the primordial concern of their concerns to the aesthetic dimension in our lifetimes, there will be no true civilization.
Afterword:
This afterword by my dear friend Georges Mathieu (1921-2012) to his book, Le massacre de lasensibilite , published by Odilon Média in 1996, keeps coming up…
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