First Installment of Two : - An Extended and Very Personal "Au Revoir", with Musings on the Sacred Heart, France and the Soul of the World

(Note: As of June 2009, the entry below has been slightly edited and revised. The second promised installment will not appear at this weblog. But both parts have been combined into a single text and will shortly appear as an article at a new site, Cor Jesu Sacratissimum. Address: http://www.corjesusacratissimum.org.)


First, my apologies again to you my friends, known and unknown.

I have given you the idea that this weblog would be updated more regularly than this. And now I have to say that I really have little clear idea as to the future of this endeavour, beyond this extended "Au Revoir", which will be appearing here in two parts.

This "Au Revoir", which will cover all the themes mentioned in the last entry, and more besides ...

I am now in France, in a situation that is self-chosen, entirely self-chosen, and also very demanding and precarious. And in sometimes overwhelming difficulties, my access to the internet has been very limited.

Now in the past, for the sake of Unknown Friends, I´ve tried to keep strictly personal content to a minimum here.

But for once, I'll allow myself some laxity - and also speak of more intimate things, which may be more of interest to my known friends.

I´ll also allow myself the laxity of writing in a very unstructured, fragmentary way. Some of what follows is not even fragments, but simply scraps, scraps from the contents of my consciousness ...

Yes our situation is very demanding and it also seems to Kim and myself, very, very rich.

2006 has been, at one and the same time, one of the hardest years of my entire life, and I think, perhaps the most profound and rewarding.

Recently, we have been a fifth time to Paray-Le-Monial, where Saint Marguerite Marie began receiving visions of the Sacred Heart of Christ in 1673 ...

Day after day, we have been at Mass there and we have been in the profound stillness, that can be felt in the chapels there.

"Avez vous bu le silence quelquefois?" Or in the English translation, "Have you ever drunk silence?"

This is a question that the anonymous author of Meditations on the Tarot asked his readers. But which he asked in FRENCH. And this is not unimportant to my theme ...

For why was it that this anonymous author, a Russian, living in England, chose to write his Magnum Opus in French? Some of his reasons, I think, may be, at least a little, intimated further on in this piece ...

But to return to the question of whether one has drunk silence ... In the English translation, the anonymous author goes on to say that, if the answer to that question is "in the affirmative, you know what concentration without effort is."

And concerning this, he says:

"It is the profound silence of desires, of preoccupations, of the imagination, of the memory and of discursive thought. One may say that the entire being becomes like the surface of calm water, reflecting the immense presence of the starry sky and its indescribable harmony.

And the waters are so deep, they are so deep! And the silence grows ever increasing ... what silence!

Its growth takes place through regular waves which, one after another, pass through your being: One wave of silence followed by another wave of more profound silence, then again, a wave of still more profound silence."

Yes, in Paray I experienced perhaps the deepest and most significance silence of my life. Perhaps.

Now I know well that the waves did not become as profound, as our author suggests they can become. But at least the beginning of profound waves of silence did become present. I trust that.

Yes, in Paray I have experienced perhaps the deepest and most significant silence of my life. Perhaps. Now I do not believe that the waves became as profound as our author suggests they can become. But at least, the beginning of such waves did become present. I trust that.

Yes some of the richest prayers of my life have been spent in silence before the relics of Saint Marguerite Marie and those of her Jesuit confessor, Saint Claude Colombiere in their respective chapels. Also sitting before the Blessed Sacrament in another chapel in Paray, I felt moved to write these words in my journal:

"There is this Sacred Story trying to unfold between Christ and us.

He is trying to heal each and everyone of us.

This is amazing.

Amazing.

Each and every one of us, he is trying to heal.

He is trying to heal ME and billions more like me.

It is amazing.

... He is trying to heal us all.

He is trying to heal me.

That woman behind me.

All of us.

Amazing.

Completely, utterly amazing.

Heal me, and billions, trillions like me.

Each of us."

Yes, sitting before the Blessed Sacrament, I was with the faith that this healing was offered through an individual relationship with each of these uncounted entities ...

He sought to reach out to each of us through individual relationship ... !! ...!

And this has so many corollaries. One corollary I also noted in my journal at the time.

"He can "use" each of us.

(He never wants to "use" any of us!)

But he can extend through each of us.

We can help him. We can help his work."

So, so many things to dwell upon in pondering this question: "How to help his work?" So many answers to that question.

At one level, obedience. Obedience to the deepest matters one is able to discern in one's prayer. Such obedience, I believe, led Kim and me to France, and to Paray-le-Monial.

Such obedience, I believe, led Kim and I to France, and to Paray-Le-Monial ...

Much unfolds for us around a work, a work to be done.

Can I speak yet of this work? Perhaps in halting scraps ...

Recently I replied to Mama Pelican on this weblog about Mother Angelica.

Though I suspect some of what shes sees has more to do with an American species of Catholicism, than Catholicism itself (See footnote to this in comments section).

Mama Pelican also speaks of her discovery of the beauty of pre-Vatican II books ...

Friends, I am also more and more moved by a beauty I find in many writings, images, works of art associated with the immediate pre-Vatican II era.

I, who was first a fully fledged, card-carrying New Ager, then a liberal Anglican, then a liberal Catholic, and then ... Words fail.

And in France, it seems to me, we see more than anywhere else I have lived, a most concerted to BURY the pre-Vatican II church.

The result it would seem are empty churches or a Catholicism my wife calls "zany."

"Zany". What does she mean by "zany?"

Among other things, she means a Mass, wherein the Mystery of the Mass is no longer central.

Where instead, what has so often taken centre stage is singing and "happy-clappy" entertainment, that is neither reverent nor consciously present to the Mystery, but which is animated by something bordering on inane or even manic ...

At a Mass in the Pyrenees, my wife and I are looking up at a MODERN mural of the Resurrected Christ behind the altar. In this image, painted certainly in the 1960's or since, he smiles sweetly down at us ...

But there is no GRAVITAS in this modern face of Christ. Is this an image of the Christ who weeps with us, as well as smiles? No, it is zany.

Again, how to do, to serve the work of Christ?

Again, obedience.

Including obedience to WORK WITH WHAT LIFE PRESENTS ONESELF. Which includes that mural. That is just one small example.

The life that aspires to obedience brings with it, I see now, the recognition that the Spirit is speaking to us, in oh so many, many different ways ...

Another example of working with what life presents oneself, is that of the inspiration, which I believe Kim and I followed, to come to France. And then being presented here with a dying, zany church, in which it seems to us, that Christ is more and more obscured ...

But life presents so much more, besides.

Here is another example.

This summer, life also presented me with the Da Vinci Code at last, and also some comments from Rudolf Steiner ...

Around these two, so much could be said, but I must content myself with noting just a little.

Noting for example, that I am seeing a direct connexion between two statements. First there is the statement that I find on pg 403 of the Da Vinci Code:

"The Priory, like many European secret societies at odds with the Church, had considered English the only European PURE language for centuries. Unlike French, Spanish and Italian, which were rooted in Latin - THE TONGUE OF THE VATICAN - English was linguistically removed from Rome's propaganda machine, and therefore became a sacred, secret tongue for those brotherhoods educated enough to use it [Emphasis in original]."

And then there is the statement, or at very least the implication, that Rudolf Steiner makes - that English is also a tongue which can so easily facilitate the aims of certain secret societies. Certain secret societies, which for decades, he claims, have aimed to promote global capitalist domination, through that language.

Yes, in lectures given in Dornach in October 1920, Rudolf Steiner touches on these societies and on the invisible entities working through the people in them.

He stresses the role that English plays for this endeavour, noting on the other hand, that within peoples speaking Romance tongues (such as French), these same entities "would be extremely constricted."

Yes, I am hearing a connexion between these statements from Dan Brown and Rudolf Steiner, and between these and much more besides ...

For example, I connect all this to a recent cover of The Economist. That cover shows the tricolour of the French flag - blue, white and red - with the bold headline, "What France needs".

And in the middle panel, the white panel, below the headline, there is the image of Margaret Thatcher.

My wife sees this cover and recoils in shock. "Oh my God", escapes her lips.

I ask her why.

She says is struck by paradox: For in one sense, she is already here in France: "Margaret Thatcher" has already conquered France.

And of course, globalised capitalism is everywhere.

But in another way, my wife notes "Margaret Thatcher" really is NOT here yet ...

I nod in agreement. No "Margaret Thatcher" and all she so radically brought to Britain, if not Europe, in 1979 has still not fully engulfed France.

That is why the Economist feels she is needed.

Like myself, The Economist can feel her ABSENCE here.

For of all the European countries I know, in many ways I feel the greatest resistance to capitalist globalisation here in France. In many ways, I feel the greatest need to preserve tradition and SOUL here ...

In many ways, I wish to repeat. Not all. As my wife noted, great contradiction and paradox exists ...

And what then, of Ireland, which I love with all my heart?

Well yes, particularly in the Catholic Ireland of the West, there is also a marked attempt to resist the colonising culture of global capitalism.

But in the East, in the East where I also lived, alas, one feels much more the influence of this colonising influence, brought on a wave of Anglo-American impulses.

That is, impulses that the French call "Anglo-Saxon". And feel they need to resist. In so many cases, at least.

Yes it seems to me that in many ways, the French sense more keenly this loss of SOUL that the so-called Anglo-Saxon colonising impulses bring ...

It is a quality of soul that Margaret Thatcher, it seems to me, did much, so very much to bury in Britain ... bury under a culture, so-called, more and more exclusively dedicated to economic FUNCTIONS ...

A "culture" that is, whose aesthetic, religious, spiritual, as well as political,legal and moral dimensions are more and more dictated by and hence, REDUCED to economic agendas.

Now here is more of what Rudolf Steiner says of the invisible beings working through the English language.

"They have set themselves the task of keeping life as a whole restricted to the mere life of economics. They seek to gradually root everything else ... to root out spiritual life, to chip away the political life and to absorb everything into the life of economics."

Yes eighty years ago, Rudolf Steiner you warned of the threat of reducing all of culture and politics to economic functions.

And now I feel it everywhere.

A successful musician tells me how she left the record industry, because of corporate pressure to make her music more commercial.

University doctors tell me of the crass, commercial ethos that now pervades the academy. (If academy it can still be called, for it has been "dumbed-down" to meet economic agendas).

Artless, graceless buildings arise everywhere, sacrificing Soul for economic ends. And children grow up in built environments of rigid angles and uninspired monotony.

And if individuals nations try to express their unique souls, there is indeed mighty pressure to CONFORM, that is, to MARCH to the global capitalist beat.

And everywhere people's individual lives also become stripped of Soul.

Friends, I receive e-mails which haunt me. Thus a dear known friend expressed to me the stripping of Soul he experiences in his own life in America.

Yes, here is a fragment from a haunting letter that elaborates for me, the soul-destroying trajectory, so well well advanced in America and Asia - but now being summoned forth in Europe too:

"In this fast-paced, busy, time-starved,complex environment we've created, we are forced to compartmentalize our lives.

For example: Up at 6:45, to work by 8, pick up the kids after soccer practice, throw together dinner, pay the bills, do the laundry, go to church at 10 a.m. Sunday, meet the parents for lunch, fix the fawcet in the kitchen...

Church, religion, spirituality, get compartmentalized along with all the other things we do in life. ...

Is it any wonder that the lessons and brotherly love we shared at 10 a.m. Sunday get brushed aside in the boardroom Monday, when we decide to up profits by laying off a thousand people? ...

Connectedness -- we've lost it in America, at least to a great degree. (That makes it easier to lay off people!)

If you look at the European model of community and work, and weeks of vacation each year, and the East Asian model of all work and no play, America long has fallen in between. But we're moving toward the East Asian model; in fact, we've been accelerating in that direction.

Nowadays, [with]greedy business owners and corporations ... there seems to be a mentality spreading that ANYTHING that is good for a company's profits is a good idea.

Lying, stealing, cheating, destroying the environment and exporting jobs overseas ... [We have]an acceleration to the disconnected, dog-eat-dog jungle style of capitalism in East Asia.

In East Asia, where I lived for two years and worked at a business magazine, capitalism is perverted thoroughly in this way ... Japan is woefully ill in spirit, having replaced all their values with the worship of wealth. Korea is far down that track, and China is racing up behind those nations ...

I see a societal illness -- and let's admit that society never has been and never will be perfect -- that results from imbalance, away from spirituality and toward self-centeredness."

Yes dear known friend, how your words strike my soul ... "FORCED to compartmentalise" as you put it. Forced that is, to acquiesce to an increasingly mechanical society that leaves no room for soul.

And without Soul, we move ever more to the self-centred dog-eat-dog horror that you see so clearly ...

Yes all of this, it seems to me, has to do with the Da Vinci Code, and with Rudolf Steiner's warnings more than 80 years ago about the dangers of a society CONQUERED by the forces working through Anglo-American Secret Societies.

To a degree, France resists. And the Economist is NOT happy about it. The Spirit of "Margaret Thatcher" simply must be summoned here as well. But she is still "constricted" here ...

What am I saying here? Am I insinuating?

Or am I just pointing? Stammering and pointing: "Look there. Look there."

Because for the moment, I can do no more than point and stammer. I will, of course, let you friends, decide for yourselves. Perhaps after you have read the second and concluding installment, which I hope will appear before long. Though I am having difficulties, as I say.

In this second installment, I will suggest more on all these themes. I will speak more of both the darkness and the light. The light of the love of Christ that does indeed shine on in the darkness.

In saying this, I am with an image that France gave to the world, or rather that Our Lord gave to the world, through France, in the Seventeenth Century.

"Through France", how the sense of this impressed my soul in Paray-Le-Monial: Through France!

This image then, is that of the blazing Sacred Heart encircled by a crown of thorns.

Yes the encircling is very real, but how much more real are the blazing flames of love on the altar of His heart ...

End of Part One.