Travelogue

Pius X at the beatification of Joan of Arc

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On December 13, 1908, at the beatification of Joan of Arc, Pius X pronounced these words which remain in the memories:

"You will tell the French that they treasure the wills of Saint-Rémy, Charlemagne and Saint-Louis which are summed up in these words so often repeated by the heroine of Orléans: long live Christ who is king of France ! By this title alone is France great among nations. At this clause, God will protect her and make her free and glorious. On this condition, we will be able to apply to it what in the Holy Books is said of Israel that no one was found who insulted this people except when they distanced themselves from God. »

Antigone, rebellious and intimate (4/7. Freedom)

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Antigone did not come to life at dusk. Antigone is born with dawn. It is at daybreak that Antigone becomes anti , which means facing and not against . At the reflux of the army of Argos, Antigone emerges from the shadows where she could have resided all her life, not to solve the riddle of the sphinx like her father, not to solve the riddle of the stages of the life, but to fill the space between each of them. Oedipus tore off his skin, his nails, his knuckles. Dusk describes an uncertain state in the morning as well as in the evening. Antigone rises with the day, with the dawn, when freedom takes life, and therefore body.

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Bismarck against France and Catholicism

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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.

Turn idea into feeling

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Max Jacob to a student:

Meditation is not about having ideas, on the contrary! it consists in having one, in transforming it into feeling, into conviction. A meditation is good when it leads to a YES, pronounced by the whole body, to a cry from the heart: joy or pain! by a tear or a burst of laughter. Just try to meditate on this: God became man. Repeat this within yourself until you come to conviction. It does not matter which images appear, image of Christ or child or young man or crucified. No matter. Repeat on your knees: God became man! For how long ? It depends on your faculties. There are good ten-minute meditations and bad ones that last an hour. In short, collect yourself twice a day at least.

I'm not talking to you about prayer, about contemplation, first because I don't understand much about it, then because I don't want to make you a mystic, but only a man.

Funerals

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Funerals are used to point with diabolical precision a dart that comes to burst the abscess of pain to let it flow out gently and smooth like the infusion of a patient, it hydrates those who remain on the edge of the bank of the alive, it brings him the comfort of always being a little with the missing person, but at the same time, it reminds him of his absence… It is difficult not to revel in it and not to hate it at the same time. The loss changes the whole layout of the living because he sees the imprint of the dead everywhere, some rooms are adorned with flowers when they have never been... The dead imposes a prism on the living who sees him in places where the latter has never set foot. The mental image makes it possible to remember and to imagine and frantically intertwines the threads of one with the threads of the other in a mad saraband that intoxicates and hoarse until we are no longer able to differentiate what which is true of what we invent. Time does nothing, or rather knits this confusion. But do we still want to separate memory from imagination?

We don't mourn someone, it's mourning that shapes us, it's the loss of a loved one that shapes us.

The Meaning… of Funerals

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The contemporary world is thrilled by using the formula, make sense , a perfect translation of the Anglo-Saxon expression, make sense . It is comforting to repeat this expression to yourself without it actually having any… meaning, so we pick up little things that make sense, but what are these mini-meanings found on the ground almost by chance? What are these skin of sorrow meanings that Through the methodical destruction of the family, transmission between generations is lacking, the meaning of our actions is lost, so we have to invent meaning , we have to create meaning, we have to give ourselves the illusion of still living, of not having abdicated. 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.

The penalty

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The pain resembles the backwash that comes and goes with languor, without languishing, on the hieratic rock that fulfills its role of whipping boy. She overwhelms it almost every time and, if she misses her shot, if she does not completely subdue the rock in the moment, she never resigns herself, she always regains her momentum and, as a kind of feint , bypasses it, surrounds it, embraces it and hugs it the next time!