12th century monastic prayer
Teach me, Lord, to use the time you give me to work well…
Teach me to unite haste and slowness, serenity and fervor, zeal and peace. Help me at the start of the work. Help me in the heart of the work… And above all fill up the gaps in my work yourself: Lord, in all the work of my hands leave a grace from You to speak to others and a defect from me to speak myself.Keep in me the hope of perfection, otherwise I would lose heart. Keep me in the impotence of perfection, otherwise I would lose myself in pride...
Lord, never let me forget that all work is empty except where there is love...
Lord, teach me to pray with my hands, my arms and all my strength. Remind me that the work of my hands belongs to you and that it is up to me to give it back to you… That if I do to please others, like the flower of the grass I will wither in the evening. But if I do for the sake of good, I will remain in good. And the time to do well and to your glory is now.
Amen
Tag: Catholicism
Bismarck against France and Catholicism
Bismarck wrote to the Comte d'Arnim on November 11, 1871:
We must desire the maintenance of the republic in France for one last reason which is major. Monarchical France was and will always be Catholic. His policy gave him great influence in Europe, in the East and even in the Far East. One way to thwart its influence for the benefit of ours is to lower Catholicism and the papacy which is its head. If we can achieve this goal, France is forever annihilated. The monarchy would hinder us in this attempt. The radical republic will help us. I am undertaking a war against the Catholic Church which will be long and perhaps terrible. I will be accused of persecution. But it is necessary to lower France and establish our religious and diplomatic supremacy as well as our military supremacy.
Antigone, rebellious and intimate (6/7. The vocation)
So many stories about identity! The word does not appear in Greek epic or tragedy. Identity at the time of Antigone is based on lineage and belonging to a city. Identity was impregnated with rootedness. The family and the city brought together under a virtual banner all of what the other was to know about himself during a first meeting. During antiquity, no one proclaimed his identity or promulgated it, and no one decided on his identity. It wasn't about putting on a costume. Men depended on their identity. Identity was like a charge, we had to be worthy of it. It established being and becoming. The modern era has made it an issue, because it has transformed identity into having, a sort of asset which one can dress up or discard. In its modern fantasy of believing that we can choose everything all the time, the modern era has relentlessly replaced being with having. Yet this logic, this ideology has its limits: some things cannot be acquired, among them: otherness. Living one's identity, being what one is, inhabiting one's name , allowing intimacy and therefore knowledge and deepening of one's being, these are the sine qua non conditions for an encounter with the other. The first difference between Creon and Antigone is located in this precise place, the ground on which the fight is built, Antigone preserves anchored in her this gift of the elders, of the gods, this rootedness which defines the authority to which she leans for stand up to this man, his relative, the king, who espouses the will to power and finds himself blinded by it to the point of hearing only his own voice, its echo. Continue reading “Antigone, rebellious and intimate (6/7. The vocation)”
Based on the values
Authority has lost its letters of nobility along with humility. Authority has become synonymous with implacable order, reckless force, tyranny. What an inversion of values! While authority according to Antigone prevented tyranny! The modern age has this impression of authority because it has been trampled on by men who have used it; while serving authority. But has authority been damaged by these disastrous experiences? A value cannot be damaged by a man. Fidelity unfolds above Saint Peter without his being able to do so. Loyalty unfolds above betrayal because it encompasses it. Loyalty asserts itself in betrayal. Betrayal carries with it no meaning except its own satisfaction. Any value also speaks of indecision and uncertainty within man. All value is a guardian and a shelter. No need to choose, value adapts to our weakness since it precedes our uncertainties. The modern world confuses authority and power by making them bear the same wounds and the same pains. God had to be taken out of everything. Neither the ancients nor the contemporary would understand, but that didn't matter, they counted for nothing now. If ever God did not leave, he would have to be killed. The 20th century wanted to be the time of the death of God. He will have killed only the death of his idea. Above all, he will have created a new anthropology based on suicide.
Novena for France
What a great initiative! A novena for France. A novena to express our love for the Blessed Virgin and ask her to watch over our beautiful country with all the saints. It is useless to belch on social networks or on the Internet or even in the street, there is no point in belching if we do not ask the intercession of our most holy Mary for our country. If we don't do it, if this effort of prayer is not intimate and obligatory to us, then we have nothing to do with France. We feed ourselves with words. The intercession of the Blessed Virgin is the way to receive enough graces to hope that the future of our country will be worthy of its past. Never believe that our future is due to anger, agitation, side effects, whatever we do, good or bad, the future also belongs, above all, to our prayer. Never think we are enough. The acceptance of our weakness, of our lack, of the insufficiency precisely of our strength and of our will proves that divine intercession is obligatory. This acceptance marks our entry into the novena! Without knowing it, the docility linked to this acceptance, the “conformity” of our soul, allows us to enter this novena. Let us be guided when the Lord has only one deep desire: to lead his little flock. Docility is the fruit of tenderness...
The Humanity of Cheyenne Carron — Reflections on the Film The Apostle
What amazement came over me one recent morning while listening to the voice of a young woman auscultated by Louis Daufresne in his program, The Great Witness , on Radio Notre-Dame. I was going to learn that this young woman's name is Cheyenne Carron. Christian, she directed a film, The Apostle 1 , the story of a Muslim touched by grace who decides to convert to Catholicism and has to suffer the outrages of his relatives.
Continue reading “The Humanity of Cheyenne Carron — Reflections on the Film The Apostle”
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.
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.”
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.