When news, good or tragic, hit us, we remember our
surrounding with great precision. Where were we when a man walked on the moon…
when we heard that lady Di had died… when we saw the images of 9/11 for the
first time…
I was sitting with Irvin in a Starbuck in Orlando, in
Florida, the day before we flew home. I was absentmindedly looking
through facebook on my phone. On my French friends pages, I saw several times pictures
of a young man with blond hair, smiling. Before I could even read the captions,
I understood and felt my heart sink. Raphael Picon had died.
Raphael was a theologian and a pastor who had spent several
years in the US with his family, pastor of an American church. He became a
Professor and Dean at the faculté de theologie de Paris where I studied,
arriving after my time there had ended.
As a Dean, Raphael had quickly disentangled
issues I had as I was trying to gather evidences of my credits. This allowed me to see my “Licence
de theologie” validated as equivalent of a Master of Divinity, saving me from three additional years of seminary.
I eventually met Raphael and his wife Cécile thanks to our
common friend Olivier. Both of them worked with passion on the magazine
Evangile & Liberté. We enjoyed several lunches and dinners together,
meeting at the home of Olivier and Aurélie, the six of us abundantly talking
about churches and seminaries, families, children and travels. Raphael and
Cecile were fluent in English which helped Irvin to be part of the
conversations.
A few weeks after our last encounter, Raphael found out that
he had a brain tumor. Such a diagnosis could have created a total unraveling.
Instead, he calmly started a treatment of daily chemo and radiotherapy while
reading the drafts of his last book on Emerson “le sublime ordinaire” (daily or
ordinary sublime).
In a warm email, he thanked me for asking the prayer chains
I belong to pray for him. One of his friends had slipped a prayer for him in
the Western Wall in Jerusalem, he mentioned. Those initiatives meant a lot to
him. But after those months of harsh treatments, another tumor was found and
this time was not operable. From then on, news never ceased to be bad news.
Until now.
I wished I could have gone to the memorial services and to the
ceremonies at the Faculte de theologie. I thought a lot –
I still do – about Cecile. We share the same first name, and years at the same high school
although we did not know each other yet. Thanks to Olivier, I was able to read
the testimony of his oldest son, who is 15, which ends that way:
“My father accepted his illness naturally as well as his
upcoming death. And he did so for us, for the livings. He never expressed any
concern about our future, the future of the four of us. He never gave us advice, because he trusted us, his “ordinary sublime”. He was convinced that
life would resume if it had even ever stopped. He fully accepted suffering and
death, to the point he led us in forgetting about it – and maybe forgetting it
himself – in an ultimate and eternal gesture of life.”
What is a blessing? Irish poet John O’Donohue says it is “a
circle of light drawn around a person… a gracious invocation where the human
heart pleads with the divine heart. When a blessing is invoked, a window opens
in eternal time.”
The life of Raphael, his books, his family and the memories
he left behind are such blessings. The windows he left open for us have sowed
and enriched our existence.
