Monastic prayer of the 12th century
teach me, Lord, to use the time you give me to work ...
Teach me to unite the haste and slowness, serenity and fervor, zeal and peace. Help me at the start of the book. Help me at the heart of the work ... and above all fill the voids of my work yourself: Lord, in all work of my hands leave a grace of you to talk to others and a defect of me to talk to myself.Keep the hope of perfection in me, otherwise I would lose heart. Keep me in the helplessness of perfection, otherwise I would get lost 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 belongs to me to give it back to you by giving it ... that if I do to please others, like the flower of the grass I will fad in the evening. But if I do for the love of good, I will remain in good. And the time to do well and your glory is immediately.
Amen
Tag: intimacy
Antigone, rebellious and intimate (7/7. Love)
7th and last part: Love
Antigone's desire is family, she does not want to leave her brother unburied; Creon, he wants to assert himself as king and show his power. Antigone favors family ties that embody love and reveal a being. Creon establishes his power by signing an act of law which must establish his authority. The same word characterizes their action: desire. But desire does not recognize desire in the other, one might believe, especially if one is tempted to worship desire for itself, that desire dubs any desire it encounters. Between Creon and Antigone, it is the measure of the desires that counts. Face to face, Antigone and Creon will increase the measure of their desires to the adversity they encounter. But is the source of Antigone's desire still understandable today? Indeed, Antigone's desire, this desire which is based on justice, justice done and returned to the remains of her brother and to the gods, this desire takes on its full meaning, because it is communal, it is part of a city and in a family, reduced vision of the city, and in a belief, Antigone leans against the gods to challenge Creon. Antigone does not express a personal desire, she defends an eternal law, she defends her duty to say it, to claim it before any power that thinks itself above her. Since when do we no longer hear anyone standing up in the public space to claim their duty at the cost of their life? The worst ? We have become accustomed to this silence, this resignation, the transcendental laws no longer tell us much, so nothing comes to overhang and therefore correct the laws which pass in front of us and encircle us like rubbish in a stream of water. The communities that fortified the individual within a space that protected him and allowed him to grow were shattered. The individual now looks like a crazy electron who can only build himself up from gusts of wind that constantly exhaust him and confuse him and erase even the taste for the meaning to be given to his life. Social life is based on law and law alone, but in a place without geography made up of people above ground, all rights are equal and crushed in an odious shambles. Creon has the power. Antigone is the daughter of Oedipus. At a time when it is no longer a question of having, of possessing, of acquiring, Antigone weighs—since it is necessary to evaluate—very little. The methodical destruction of all metaphysics is akin to a crime against humanity. Perhaps the greatest the world has ever known. Since with one click, I can acquire everything, I only need to know my desire to satisfy it. We also understand that this individual desire that nothing protects from his appetite accepts no limits and especially not those set by others; then comes into play envy, debased, debased desire.
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What is it to be above ground?
The most enlightening example concerning human nature is in the New Testament when Peter and Jesus Christ speak together and that Pierre insists with his master so that he believes his completely sincere devotion. Thus, Jesus announces to him that the rooster will not have sung that he will have denied it three times. The first place where every man speaks is this one: his weakness. Taking into account everyone's limits, not always to resolve it, but also to overcome them, forces to reason from what you are and not from what you think you are. Any man who does not know his weaknesses, who forgets them, who does not take them into account is above ground as we used to say today. Affairs meaning that you are nourished by a pasture that is not ours, that you deny your pasture to find any other pasture than your best, because other. Affairs also means that the words received could be obtained everywhere else in the world without this posing a problem, these words being without roots, translatable in all language and exportable like a "framework" in computer science. The objective is characterized by the desire to reach such a level of abstraction and uprooting that the question will no longer even make sense.
Antigone, rebellious and intimate (6/7. The vocation)
What stories about identity! The word does not appear neither in the Greek epic nor in the tragedy. The identity at the time of Antigone is leaning on the line and belonging to a city. Identity was soaked from rooting. The family and the city brought together under a virtual standard the entirety of what the other should know about oneself during a first meeting. During Antiquity, no one proclaimed their identity or promulgated it, and no one decided on its identity. It was not a question of putting a costume. Men were in their identity. The identity was akin to a charge, we had to be worthy of it. She ruled being and becoming. Modern era has made an issue, because it has transformed the identity to have, a sort of achievement which can be disputed or departing. In its modern fantasy to believe that you can choose everything all the time, the modern era replaced with a relentless method being by having it. Yet this logic, this ideology has its limits: certain things cannot be acquired, among them: otherness. Living your identity, being what you are, living in your name , allowing intimacy and therefore the knowledge and deepening of your being, these are the sine qua non conditions of one meeting with the other. The first difference between Creon and Antigone is at this specific location, the terrain on which the fight is built, Antigone preserves anchored in it this gift of the ancients, of the gods, this rooting which defines the authority to which it is leaning for Take up to this man, his parent, the king, who marries the will to power and finds himself blinded by her until he only heard her own voice, his echo. Read the rest of "Antigone, rebellious and intimate (6/7. Vocation)"
Antigone, rebellious and intimate (3/7. Destiny)
3rd part: destiny
The man descends from the tree. Man, like the tree, is defined as well by his roots or his fruits. Man, like the tree, depends on external and interior elements to reach maturity. Man looks like this trunk sculpted by the tests based on his roots and bearing more or less beautiful, more or less good fruit ... The similarities between the plant world and man are endless. Water that nourishes the roots with the sun sprinkling the fruits, with oxygen exuded by the leaves, all this life that rushes and circulates in an irremingly human condition. The tree is a family metaphor. From the fruits to fruits and leaves, a metaphor for the history of man and the family is developing. What evil fairies presided over the birth of the labdacid family from which Antigone descends? Any beautiful consciousness these days would see a calamity and a pathological explanation of antigone decisions. How does this little antigone become this heroic fruit by being born on a trunk so full of stigma and bruising? Destiny blows and guides this family in an uninterrupted and obtuse way and, suddenly, Antigone frees itself from this shackles, releases all her family from this shackles, she defeated the camisole, and completes to dismiss fate. What a prodigy! By far, hung on their branch, two leaves always seem identical, it is enough to approach to see how differ. Read the rest of "Antigone, rebellious and intimate (3/7. Fate)"
News from Ernest Hello about fear and its perfections
Fear in general therefore has perfections which evil does not have.
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, he was felt in spirit.
Antigone, rebellious and intimate (2/7. The funeral)
Part 2: The funeral
“ My dear Ismene. I come this morning to tell you that I took care of everything. I took the same undertakers for our two brothers. I couldn't choose and since our brothers didn't leave any last wishes, I took matters into my own hands to get it sorted out as soon as possible. I still ordered embalming so that they are presentable. If you want to go see them, they'll be ready around 3 p.m. You do not have to. Well, if you can take ten minutes, that might be fine. It may be better to keep an image of them happy, children for example. I took the same urn model for both. A priest will come to the funeral home and give a short speech before the cremation. I ordered him to come to the funeral home. You see, I took care of everything. Eteocles will be buried in the cemetery which is located about thirty minutes from Thebes by taking the national. For Polynice, it is more complicated with the law of our uncle, Creon. I decided to scatter his ashes on the battlefield as the king does not want him buried. Makes sense, right? Tell me what you think, I'm not stopped on this point. This portrait of Antigone living in the 21st century delivering the remains of her brothers to the funeral director summarizes the rite of funerals today. The family has since the Industrial Revolution been rendered unproductive. Funerals are no longer part of the family tradition. The modern world is reassured by using the formula make sense , as the translation of the Anglo-Saxon expression is heard today, and as it is so comforting to repeat it to oneself without it really having any… sense, because what what are these mini-senses found on the ground almost by chance, what are these skin-deep that invite themselves in almost without our being there for nothing, if not the residues of a past sense, a common sense, a good sense sculpted by the centuries? Through the destruction of the family, transmission between generations is lacking, the meaning of our actions is lost, so we have to invent meaning, create meaning, we have to give ourselves the illusion of still living, of not not have totally given up. Deceit is backed up by ignorance, and on this point too, trickery is not new. The meaning given by death within the family, this meaning almost completely forgotten nowadays, is recalled by Antigone in Sophocles' play where she stands as a guardian of the values that liberate, because they protect man from death. 'animal. Antigone reaffirms what man can and cannot; it takes hold of a force destined to protect us from our will to power and to teach us the time of responsibility; a time nowadays entrusted to specialists replacing the family, the people who compose it and the tenuous links woven between them over time.
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Antigone, rebellious and intimate (1/7. The family)
1st part: the family
From the first reading of Antigone, an ambiguity settles in the mind of the reader. Does Antigone embody action or reaction? What moves Antigone? The reaction never exists by itself whereas the action needs no one, it legitimizes itself in the act. Action always inaugurates something. Contrary to what is often said or believed, Antigone does not wait for Creon to be Antigone. Like Electra for revenge, Nausicaa for hospitality, Penelope for fidelity, Antigone embodies duty. It is action, because it serves: it is accomplished in duty. It is accomplished in servitude (are we pretending to forget that servitude means “to be a slave”?). Contrary to what is often said or believed, Antigone is never an individual. She never stands alone. If the law of Creon pushes it to action, and if this one can seem a reaction, it is only on the surface, by simple chronology.
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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.
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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.