Jean-Paul Sartre and the Nativity

We are in 1940, in Germany, in a camp of French prisoners. Among them, some priests asked Jean-Paul Sartre, who had been a prisoner with them for a few months, to write down a short meditation for Christmas’ Eve. Sartre, the atheist writer, accepted. And he offered to his companions those beautiful lines.

“You have the right to demand and see the Manger. Here it is. Here is the Virgin, here is Joseph, and here is the Child Jesus. The artist poured all his love in this drawing, maybe you will think he is naïve, but listen. You only need to close your eyes and listen to me, and I will share how I see them from inside me.

The Virgin is pale as she looks at the child. Worried wonderment is what should be painted on her face, a wonderment that only appeared once on a human face, because Christ is her child, the flesh of her flesh and the fruit of her womb. She carried him for nine months. She gave him her breast and her milk will become the blood of God. She holds him, and she says, “my baby”!

But sometimes she is taken aback, and she thinks “God is here” and she feels a religious fear growing for this mute God, for this child, because all mothers have been taken aback in such moments, by this fragment of their flesh that is their child, and they feel exiled as they face this new life that has been done with their lives and that is inhabited with foreign thoughts.

But none has been more cruelly and more quickly teared away than from this mother because He is God and He exceeds on all sides what she can imagine. And that’s a heavy trial for a mother to fear herself and her human condition in presence of her son. But I think there are other quick and smooth times where she feels that Christ is her son, her own baby, and he is God. She looks at him and she thinks “This God is my child! This divine flesh is my flesh, He was made from me, He has my eyes and his mouth is shaped like mine. He looks like me, He is God and He looks like me.”

And no woman ever had God for herself. A God very small that you can hold in your arms, a God you can cover with kisses, a warm God who smiles and breath, a God one can touch and who lives, and I would paint Marie in those moments if I was an artist, and I would try to convey the tender audacity and the shyness in her as she moves her finger to touch the soft small skin of this child God, as she feels his warm weight on her lap and as he smiles to her. So that’s for Jesus and for the Virgin Marie.

And Joseph. Joseph? I would not paint him. I would show a shadow in the back of the barn and bright eyes, because I don’t know what to say about Joseph. And Joseph himself is not sure what to say. He adores and is happy to adore. He feels in exile, a little. I think he grieves without admitting it. He grieves because he can see how much the woman he loves looks like God. How much she is already on God’s side. Because God came into the intimacy of this family. Joseph and Marie are separated forever by this fire of clarity, and all his life, I imagine, Joseph will be about learning to accept. Joseph himself does not know what to say about himself : he adores and is happy to adore.”

(From « Baronia or the Son of Thunder” a play written by Sartre about his time as a prisoner of war. This text is also included in « the Writings of Sartres” by M. Contat and M. Rybalka, NRF 1970)

All Saints Day between Two Worlds

Last week was All Saints Day. I came across those lines by artist, author and poet Jan Richardson, who reflected on grief and on the closeness we keep with the people we lost.

“One of the things I quickly learned after Gary died was that death has a way of tearing open our hearts toward eternity. We are no longer residents of this world only; we no longer move only in this time. It is one of the strange and beautiful effects of intense loss. Even as I continue to make a new life in this world, I am keenly aware that my heart is held by one who lives beyond this world. And that means my heart lives both within and beyond the borders of what I can see and know in this world.

It is All Saints’ Day, and I am thinking about how this is a day to name this—how we live in these two worlds. Except that it’s not really two worlds. Somehow, now and eternity are bound together in a deep mystery. This is a day to remember that even in the pain of sharpest loss, somehow we all live in one world, and death does not release us from being in relationship with one another.

This is a blessing about that. On this All Saints’ Day, as we both grieve and celebrate our beloved dead, may we know how they endure with us, holding our hearts and encompassing us with a fierce and stubborn love that persists across time and distance”.

ENDURING BLESSING

What I really want to tell you
is to just lay this blessing
on your forehead,
on your heart;
let it rest
in the palm of your hand,
because there is hardly anything
this blessing could say,
any word it could offer
to fill the hollow.

Let this blessing
work its way
into you
with its lines
that hold nearly
unspeakable lament.

Let this blessing
settle into you
with its hope
more ancient
than knowing.

Hear how this blessing
has not come alone—
how it echoes with
the voices of those
who accompany you,
who attend you in every moment,
who continually whisper
this blessing to you.

Hear how they
do not cease
to walk with you,
even when the dark
is deepest.

Hear how they
encompass you always—
breathing this blessing to you,
bearing this blessing to you
still.

—Jan Richardson
from The Cure for Sorrow: A Book of Blessings for Times of Grief

Images : the Longest Night and the Advent Door by Jan Richardson

The North Wind and the Pendleton blanket.

Being the pastor officiating at your niece’s wedding provides unbelievable privileges! For instance, you get to present your gift during the ceremony!

Ok, it is not exactly the way it happened….

Irvin and I concluded the ceremony with a Native tradition: a Pendleton blanket that is being wrapped around the young couple, a warm symbol of the comfort they bring to each other from now on.

Credit Doug Crawford

Then Irvin and I blessed them with a prayer said first by Irvin, that I translated in French afterward.

  

Now for you the North wind does not blow; You are shelter to one another.

Now for you there is no hunger; each brings what the other needs.

Now for you there is no darkness; You have learned to see with the heart.

Now for you there is no loneliness; Two have become one.

Credit Marie-Laure Mourier 

The blanket is made of thick wool. Before we headed back to the US, Julie and Quentin told us they tried it and appreciated how warm it was. 

“It is true, the North Wind does not reach us anymore, commented Quentin, tongue in cheek. We have the blanket now!” 

A Blessing for Leaders

Elizabeth concluded the retreat by reading this Blessing for Leaders by John O’Donohue. 

I translated it in French on my French blog – a fun challenge! 

This is actually a great read for leaders – and anyone having authority on anything and anyone, including one self.

May you have the grace and wisdom to act kindly,
learning to distinguish between what is personal and what is not.

May you be hospitable to criticism.
May you never put yourself at the center of things.
May you act not from arrogance but out of service.
May you work on yourself, building up and refining the ways of your mind.

May those who work for you know you see and respect them.
May you learn to cultivate the art of presence in order to engage with those who meet you.

When someone fails or disappoints you, may the graciousness with which you engage

be their stairway to renewal and refinement.

May you treasure the gifts of the mind through reading and creative thinking
so that you continue as a servant of the frontier
where the new will draw its enrichment from the old, and you never become functionary.

May you know the wisdom of deep listening, the healing of wholesome words,
the encouragement of the appreciative gaze, the decorum of held dignity,
the springtime edge of the bleak question.

May you have a mind that loves frontiers
so that you can evoke the bright fields that lie beyond the view of the regular eye.

May you have good friends to mirror your blind spots.
May leadership be for you a true adventure of growth.

Amen!

The painting is by Bill Jacklin, detail, Calle II, oil on canvas, 2008.