Tag: history

Antigone, rebellious and intimate (2/7. The funeral)

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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)

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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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Charlie's Fate

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"The enemy therefore limits you gives you your form and founds you". This sentence of Saint-Exupéry expresses our condition fairly well at the end of this first week of 2015. The enemy forces me to evolve according to his codes, within a space he has circumscribed. I am first prisoner. He chooses the field and is trying to stay confined to it. Of the two immutable human data, space and time, it takes me space. Remove the space in time is a bit of Laurel to Hardy. The other unit continues to live, but it is disfigured. She lost the balance offered by the otherness of her spouse. Time is not the same following the space in which it evolves. Geography performs fate with a measure as precise as the hourglass. Read the continuation of "The fate of Charlie" →

Novena for France

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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...

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Letter to my friend Alvaro Mutis

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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.

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The abandonment of Benedict XVI

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"Eli, Eli Lama Sabachtani?" 1 he renounces the function of Pope, it is an earthquake that shakes the world and which strikes Catholics. The most eccentric noises run and each to question the causes of this decision which, even if it is not unique, causes stupor. Personally two feelings live in: abandonment and sadness, his pilot fish, not to say desolation. Abandonment looks like an echo that continues to reproduce and increase, like a heady complaint.

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In the heart of darkness, life

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After seeing "Tree of Life", I have long forbidden myself to write about this film. Two forces clashed in me. Subjugated by poetry, by the state of bliss in which I was plunged, I was afraid of disturbing the surface of this work. I got so tangled in the mystery of this film that I did not understand the negative reactions and was unable to have a critical mind 1 . "Tree of Life" is based on a book from the Bible, "Le Livre de Job". And this dark book speaks of the life and relationship of man to God. Which is present in many books in the Bible. But Job's book begins with a dialogue between God and Satan who play man. The impression that this inaugural dialogue leaves us is strange. Of course, the start dialogue would not be entirely from the same era as the central story. No matter in fact, the impression left is during the book. How can God play with his beloved creature? A hasty conclusion reports on the improbable of the situation. In truth, once the bark has been removed, Job's book delivers the heart of the relationship between God and man. And "Tree of Life", the film of Terrence Malick, has this same ambition.

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In the shadow of Ernesto Sabato

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When Ernesto Sabato died on April 30 at 99, he repeated the words of Maria Zambrano: to die this elusive action that is carried out by obeying, happens beyond reality, in another kingdom . In his house in Santos Lugarès ("holy places" near Buenos-Aires), Ernesto Sabato obeys this last injunction. He prepared for a long time. In Resistance , his moving literary will published in 2002, he wrote: I forgot great sides of my life, but, on the other hand, certain meetings, moments of danger and the names of those who have drawn me depressions and Blepitum still piles in my hands. And yours too, you who believe in me, who have read my books and go help me die.

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Priest "Generation Benoit XVI"

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Dear Father,

It is with great pleasure that I welcome your departure. Not that I am happy that you are leaving the chapel of Notre-Dame du Lys, but because I am happy to have met you and that you are continuing your priesthood by showing the example of the priest according to Benoit XVI.

Yesterday, for the feast of the Holy Trinity, you celebrated your last mass according to the extraordinary rite in the 15th arrondissement of Paris. In this pious little chapel, where you arrived in 2009 when the diocese of Paris began to assume responsibility for the chapel and to appoint priests to its service. And while you had already been ordained a priest for almost ten years, you learned to celebrate Mass according to the 1962 missal! A great lesson in humility! You have cast yourself in the mold of the bi-millennial form. To meet the request of your superiors, but also that of a group of die-hard faithful lovers of the extraordinary rite.

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Newman and Socrates

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The links between ancient Greek philosophy and Christianity are numerous. The most famous of the Greek precepts: Gnothi Seauton , "Know thyself", inscribed in Delphi retains a certain mystery. Another end of the sentence has stuck with us: “But not too much”… Know yourself… But not too much! Plato leads Socrates to reflect on the Delphic formula in the Philebus :

SOCRATES: In short, it is a species of vice which takes its name from a particular habit, and this part of vice in general is a disposition contrary to that recommended by the Delphi inscription.

PROTARCHUS: It is a precept: know thyself, that thou speakest, Socrates?
SOCRATES: Yes, and the opposite of this precept, in the language of the inscription, would be not to know oneself at all.
"Know thyself" in order to improve yourself, to erase in you what hinders your development. Not knowing himself is already a fault for Socrates. "But not too much", because man so easily believes himself much more than he is, son of Adam, man is the plaything of his presumption. “But not too much” so as not to take yourself for a god.
This is one of the foundations of Greek culture, the idea of ​​knowing oneself, the idea of ​​wisdom, of advancing in wisdom, but also the feeling that if you dig too deep, surprises can arise, and not necessarily good. The Greeks were very aware of man's weaknesses, his shortcomings. The Greeks are even, with the Christians, those who have most highlighted the possibility of human weakness, it is also what makes them so close to us. The weakness of man is expressed in their gospels, the tragedies. Pity and terror are the two pillars. Know yourself… but not too much.