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.

What gives the initiatory journey its quality often boils down to what it brought to the person who lived it, how it managed to change the point of view of this person, how it allowed him to evolve, to metamorphose, and to be the same… new. When I arrived in London, I had been educated with the Jesuits and the Marists, and yet I knew very little about Catholicism. Religious education in Catholic schools since the 1970s had shrunk dramatically. But I would be wrong to only blame religious teaching to have your approval here and to feel that you agree with me. I, me, ego, was perhaps not very attentive to what was said, not for lack of faith but for lack of conviction to learn my religion. If I come looking for something without thinking about what I'm going to give, I risk missing out on the essentials. The content of this article is contained in these last three sentences. Innocuous, but obliging the thought to be made and to be undone. And that's where my thoughts were headed: did the inner life amount to cutting oneself off from the world? I think (with hindsight, I had no idea twenty-five years ago) that the inner life was tantamount to cutting yourself off. First of all. After all, there is no pressing need to say "I" except in contact with others. What would be a need for individuation vis-à-vis oneself, or vis-à-vis a god? Only a god, or a demi-god could want to stand out from another god. An almighty god already knows everything about me.

In London, I fled what prevented the interior life. The first victim of this flight (which in this case had everything of a fight, of an “agonism” as Unamuno would say) took the form of community. I had the intuition that the community was denying this holy intimacy. The community forced syncretism, it asked me to share my intimacy and barter all or part of it with others; she wanted to destroy it, trample it underfoot, crumble it. I developed an early dislike for community and for syncretism. They forced me to break with what I loved. I saw this two-headed hydra, I pierced it up to date and I apprehended its game, its perfidy, wanting to force myself to accept its finished form: communitarianism. Syncretism, the agreement of the lowest common denominator, the need, so little obvious, so obviously perverse, to find an agreement, this agreement which under its good-natured airs so often seems the cornerstone when it is going to become the crack of the building, this agreement of unequal equality, this democracy as the modern world calls it, provoked my deepest aversion. Even today, I mean, after so many years, I refuse syncretism. But in a community, how can we act otherwise? How, if not to provoke an open war? I think I need that space in order to stay a Christian so I don't have to compromise all the time. There is no misplaced pride here, rather there is a willingness to assume one's limits. Community can be tempting, but it always has a propensity to turn into communalism. Once all the ideas of each other have been filed down and planed, combed through the agreement, each will be nothing more than a group whose common veins will not be long in boiling with the will to power.

Let us advance that the syncretism of the community gives a quality to those who did not necessarily have any, but it diminishes those who benefited from a stronger personality. I admit that I don't know if syncretism has any utility other than politics. It is possible, for example, to say that Christianity invented the most perfect democracy, but Christ never, oh never, showed the slightest syncretism. And for good reason, He came to lay the foundations of a new world. The confrontation becomes clearer: purity and syncretism face each other. Community leads to syncretism which leads to communitarianism. By reducing the individual to his role in the group, it forces him to take into greater consideration what he has not disavowed, he condemns him to cling to what unites and to forget what divides, the group does not even need to threaten it, the individual knows the importance of finding an agreement. Otherwise, he can only leave the group.

From syncretism to communitarianism
During my stay in London, I observed the communities around me for a long time. They were numerous, because London, a good Anglo-Saxon city, had always practiced apartheid. Not with each other, but with each other. The city divided into Chinese, Indian, African quarters, etc. People mixed during the day, cloistered at night. I was a foreigner, therefore less permeable to this way of life. But that was forgetting the power of the city (which has never really ceased to exist since antiquity). Stranger or not, little by little, microcosmically, London forced communities to create and recreate themselves. Among the foreigners, bands of Italians, French, and Japanese were forming. Uprooting pushes the community anyway, because it circumscribes isolation, organizes loneliness. I remembered my town in Brittany which already, ten years earlier, was showing symptoms. The West Indian community, the Maghreb community (a tad, at the time), the Armenian community and the Turkish (equidistant)… At the end of the 70s and the beginning of the 80s, for the communities to live happily, they lived hidden ¹ . Communitarianism advanced masked, perhaps a little less in the Parisian suburbs than in the provinces, but it was only a matter of time. A few bars, a few restaurants, vague neighborhoods here and there, often on the outskirts, out of sight; not unknown, but ignored, feigned. The secret was called discretion. No claim. Few miscellaneous facts. The community, before the advent of SOS Racisme, but also of the National Front, does not oblige to take part, or in a very parsimonious way, to settle ancestral struggles, or settle a specific dispute. If syncretism invites itself there, it does not overflow and does not fight civil peace, it does not prevent “living together”. The communities live folded in on themselves, their components come to find themselves there as in an oasis where memories flow. As soon as they leave this organization, the components of the community become individuals and are forgotten, and if ever their face, their accent, prevent them from concealing themselves, they will attenuate this handicap by their exalted integration — politeness, friendliness, willingness to do more — we are facing the process of integration, they manage to be other and even ² . They are still themselves, but they are also a bit more ³ . This plus is a tunic for winter evenings. Gossips call this plus a compound of tinsel, like an old and desolate thing that does not deserve to be given the slightest importance. But these same mockers also call politeness, or even education in general, a compound of tinsel. Outside the community, each individual is equal to another individual: he can be insulted or find himself involved in a fight for at least as many reasons: because he has a big nose, because he has short hair, because he wears blue clothes, because he doesn't smoke… All of these reasons are at least as good as the racial reasons. Moreover, for those who know a little about quarrels, insults are very often only a reason to push to the limit, to have an opportunity to become violent, to give vent to one's violence ⁴ . Communitarianism also recovers here a good reason to revolt and to call for the rescue of the will to power by picking up the insult and making it a symbol. Communitarianism turns nothing into a symbol because it wants to imitate life. Communitarianism collects the insult, equalizes it (understand: makes it conform), legalizes it (understand: establishes it in law), proclaims it (understand: exhibits it like a plume that must be followed until the next elections). Process summed up in one word: syncretism. Political act and declared as such, so desired. Worm in the fruit, which will grow and which, in our modern democracies, means apologies from the authorities, strong emotion at all levels of society, implementation of special and unequivocal measures, sworn proposals to definitively resolve the problem with the most drastic measures possible, the desire to put an end to this problem that we should no longer encounter at a time of such great technological advances...

Would the syncretism that naturally arises from a community also signify the end of it? From syncretism to communitarianism, it is the community that dies. Syncretism will gradually grind down all the differences, and if it accepts that they continue to exist, it will sanitize them. Syncretism becomes the master standard, it rules everything, it decides which quality can be noticed.

The end of personalities, the end of particularities
There is a certain courage in entering into a community. There is a resignation to realize in communautarism. It is cowardice. It is the establishment of ease, baseness and sewage. A community consists of several people who breathe together, who want to breathe the same air because they know each other and recognize certain commonalities. They may want to be together for many reasons: because they have the same skin color, because they speak the same language, because they have the same passion. A priori, the community could even be an antidote to envy. But as often in the history of men where a good idea has disastrous conclusions, the community experiences abuses. There is always a world between a priori and a posteriori! A world that man has never properly considered. I mean other than from his point of view. And this drift is called communitarianism. If in appearance, communitarianism blends into the community by borrowing its characteristics, relying on its characteristics, it acts by business. Its fundamental purpose is to create envy. Communitarianism has well understood that an individual who finds himself in a community feels stronger, is quicker, accompanied as he is by companions with whom he feels in communion of thought, to let a certain will to power flow into his veins, ready to be heard, to thunder, to demand. With method, communitarianism presses on the wounds: failures, bullying, humiliations will clump together and sharpen the anger against. Communitarianism lives on being against. Communalism creates antagonism to forget the natural and inherent agonism of life. Heat the embers of revolt, reopen the wounds, revive the sufferings of the past, with the sole aim of creating revolt, always more anger. Versus. These techniques made common today, used mainly by socialism in all its forms, but also conversely (like the other side of the coin) by capitalism, taste the passion of envy by bringing suffering to the pinnacle to turn her into anger. As if there was no other way to do it.

Syncretism is a remedy for exchange. He takes the finery of the exchange to extract information and turn it against the person and thus that he is based in the group. The person becomes part of a whole that goes beyond him. It becomes a crowd "unfit for reasoning." (…) very fit for action”. Gustave Le Bon in The Psychology of Crowds.

Catholicism or the unequaled community
There would therefore be a courage to be part of a community and a resignation to accept communitarianism. The acceptance of communitarianism resembles a cowardice, a resignation more exactly, or first of all; first a resignation which therefore leads to a resignation, a cowardice. Any resignation is imprinted with cowardice for a Christian, with renunciation of his mission.

Entering into community also leads to seeking the same and finding the other. This is where there is courage. There is also courage in wanting to go beyond what one is; and it is necessary to go in front of an unknown person, all the more so when this person is a constituted group. So there is a real courage to enter into community. But there is also an ease. Ease is this search for the same (which can bring the other, but it is only a possibility, a coincidence). What community is not realized in reunions? What community can exempt itself from being together? The community must breathe the same air, agree on the same themes (or feign agreement to cement the group). As is often the case in human endeavors, an extra soul is needed for the other side of the coin to take over. Communalism is the worm in the fruit of community.

To my knowledge, only one community exempts itself from being gathered together for more than 90 minutes per week. And yet its members do not exchange words. This does not mean that within this community, some do not live together longer in the week, but it is by no means an obligation. This is the Christian religion. If it is impossible not to consider it as a community, it is also the only one that cannot be transformed into communitarianism. It brings together totally different people who, if they did not have God to aspire them upwards, towards much higher than them, towards the summits, would perhaps not get along, would perhaps even war one way or another. And Catholics achieve an even more extraordinary feat by extending this community to the dead and to all the living across time and space with the communion of saints! Of course, if the Christian religion had not suffered from communitarianism, it would not have three denominations, however no other community can claim to be so little lobbyist, to bring together such different people, and to keep them around of an idea that surpasses anything that can be imagined. And it seems obvious to me that if an institution like the Church has existed without fail for 20 completed centuries, despite all the attacks (internal as well as external), all the infamies (external as internal) it is due to the diversity which composes it which , for many, inspires and reveres her well-worn name of catholic, universal.

The family antidote to the community
When I was in London, I sat down at a kneeler, I saw other people in the same position as me, I knew that we were part of the same family or even siblings. Yes, from the same family. What does that mean? That the family would be an antidote to the community? How many people surrender to the community to forget their family? From one family to another...

The family has this virtue of being a melting pot and of not allowing itself to be transformed into communitarianism. This is also the difficulty of the family: a crucible is a breeding ground for bacteria. Especially since in the family the ties are inalienable. The family is a cabinet of curiosities that cannot be visited. Intimacy and modesty are logically her two breasts. But since the original sin, everyone knows that tragedy lives in the world. The ancient Greeks had perfectly analyzed this process of evil which comes out of good: The man who tries his hand at good and who sinks, victim of his fate, of his destiny, of his clumsiness and his pride, always of his pride. But let's leave out what we've perverted. Let's leave aside the misdeeds, the immodest and outrageous family. Leave that aside, because we are Catholics and no, we are not politicians. A politician would come here to pick up the slack, collect the facts and the rumours, he would come and place all these bad and corrupt things that the family can also create, because it is human and the human condition is imperfect, he would place them for us in another crucible, a crucible that he would like to be edifying, and strong of what he would have collected, he would teach us after having carried out a marvelous and effective syncretism, that the family is, in fact, the worst thing that the world has ever known ! He would thus raise in less time than it takes to write it an army of partisans of the family against an army of partisans of its destruction. What a beautiful war to put in place! What power felt in its elaboration!

In search of lost humility
During my wanderings in London, I remember these groups I encountered: a community of French people, Italians, Japanese… Small juxtaposed groups. All these communities had a common characteristic. Their skin was thick, rough like those fish bristling with spines that criss-cross the oceans without ever fraternizing. The communities did not clash, but they protected each other. A community that protects itself already reveals a fear of the other. A fear of what is not it. A community that protects itself is one step away from transforming into communitarianism which is a cult to the same.

The individual who enters the community comes to give what he is, he comes to discover what he is not, he comes to express his state and share it, to find common points of course, but also to discover feelings. different in people who, if they share an ethnic or cultural origin, are nevertheless beings in their own right and therefore can be, being surely, infinitely different from him. That's the exchange we're talking about, isn't it? We are talking about an individual transforming into a person, aren't we? We are indeed talking about this particular alchemy which consists in adding a culture to a nature and making it a being subject to free will, aren't we? We are indeed talking about this alchemy which is called civilization and which proceeds from the nature and culture of a people and which gives it its history, isn't it?

Is acculturation a syncretism?
There are different syncretisms.
Japanese syncretism allows Shintoism and Buddhism to rub shoulders, does not ruin anything, neither to one nor to the other. This is in no way a crossbreeding: Shintoism and Buddhism exist side by side and it is only a question of compromises — and not of compromises. Another form of syncretism akin to acculturation takes on a much more positive tone. Syncretism approaches what it seems to fight: the truth. Acculturation adopts syncretic colors. Acculturation is syncretism plus one, in this case truth. Catholics know it well, its advantages and its disadvantages, because it has been the foundation of Jesuit strategy for centuries. The Jesuits thus practiced acculturation by absorbing habits and customs and “pushing” them in the right direction: God. In the discourse of a Jesuit, the interlocutor counts almost as much as the tenor of the discourse. It has been common to comment on the method, but the results have been surprising. The Jesuit is infinitely less concerned with Christianity than with converts ⁵ . At the time of glorious Rome, the legions returning from foreign countries installed the new pagan gods of their victims in their pantheon, a means of integrating its new pagans more easily. But before Christianity, everything was only political among the Romans, and syncretism reigned supreme, as cement of the Fatherland (who would blame the Romans for their syncretism when it was so much the seed of Europe?). Acculturation offers exchange. Acculturation raises questions, because it obliges, not to deny one's position, but to rethink it according to one's interlocutor. Acculturation is based on syncretism, which well practiced, forces humility, the essential quality of the encounter.

Humility Guardian of Good
Humility is the most perfect antidote to envy. Nothing fights this cancer better than envy. The source of evil always draws from pride; it cannot dry up. Humility forces you to chart a course and follow it. This path towards the other, without preconceptions, by becoming petrified, most certainly represents humility. Humility is a journey within and outside of oneself. Draw in yourself the strength to break with pride, to stifle it and to go towards the other without prejudice. This natural empathy must be one of the first qualities of the Christian: he calls it the beautiful word of compassion. It is an empathy driven by faith.

I have always found communitarianism impossible. I always found it impossible to let myself be locked into a group and lose all intimacy because this group had to take precedence over everything. Unfortunately, I found communitarianism everywhere I went, every day of my life, on almost every street corner. Communitarianism impedes the truth so well and allows people to believe themselves powerful so quickly. The difficulty for a Christian is obvious: to ask someone who has encountered the truth not to be intransigent with error! And the problem with truth is that everything else is error. And everything else is a continent. Sin is error, the sinner is in error, but we know the difficulty of calmly explaining error and making it understood. Nowadays, everyone thinks they have the truth. Everyone thinks they are right. Welcoming the sinner and refusing the sin is the Christian's challenge. The deep nature of Christianity, the word of Christ, forbids it and serves as a guide against the temptation to enter into communitarianism.

But communitarianism awaits all of us at all times; at any moment, we want to slam the door on each other. Why argue with someone who doesn't understand that Mass is a sacrifice? Why argue with someone who shouts at seeing the Pope as an impostor? Why speak with a follower of secularism thinking that religions are at the origin of all wars? From one extreme to the other, the same desire to put an end to the current discussion. The truth is like the tradition which is the cement of the family: when you come into contact with it, you can't help but believe you have it. To believe that you possess the tradition is to mislead it. It is entering into communitarianism.

How to proceed so as not to lose one's soul and not, either, to condemn without appeal? What is our faith if it is like a cudgel? And can the club be a hypothesis? During these long months in London, I was often in contact with communities, but I ignored them and fled just as often ⁶ . Certainly out of pride. I looked good in my twenties. But just as much out of humility. It could have escaped. Of this humility which draws from within, which goes in search of oneself, in search of this other in oneself which speaks in the inner life, of this boy who had already lived very quickly like a character from Nimier. It is here that the border is drawn: whether the sins are white or black, a man has access to an infinite tonality. It is always necessary to seek the man beyond the sin ⁷ .

When I first entered the church of Corpus Christi, I was at the end of my London journey (cf. Christian testimony — 1). I had passed this church many times, but I had never touched it. I hadn't deserved it. In this church located on Maiden Lane, just behind the neon lights of the Strand theaters where I worked in the evenings, I found myself naked, rid of everything superfluous. Before the beauty of the rite, before the revelation I received, I discovered the deep meaning of my faith. It was then that I understood that the Mass was the sacrifice of Christ, the triumph over sin and death. I was really beginning my journey, the vocation of any Christian of the Catholic faith, I was going to follow Christ's entry on earth, his life, his teaching, his death and his resurrection. What the Mass tells us: the history of salvation. But for that, I had to continue my undertaking of nudity and purification: Asperges me, confiteor et beauté infinite de la mass de form extraordinaire: introibo ad altare Dei ⁸ . Like Abraham obedient at the foot of the altar ready to sacrifice his son at God's command. Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam (Towards God who fills my youth with joy). To the most sincere of the confessio. Just before going up to the altar. The ascent to God.