Not everyone has the chance - the grace - to meet a person ... almost resuscitated. A group of Fondacio guides, mainly from Ile de France but with a few regional delegates, experienced such a meeting at the Hermitage. Bernard Bastian, former moderator of the Puits de Jacob community, spoke in an exceptional way on the theme of Easter in our lives.
A first for Bernard Bastian: responding to an invitation from our community on the Hermitage site, "drawn by the father"(drawn by the Father) ... ... It was quite a crazy decision (to come and go in one day from the outskirts of Strasbourg) for someone who admits to having been"sick for fifty years"and who truly went through death in 2009.
Indeed, the former moderator of the Well of Jacob community then experienced a very serious health ordeal, with tetraplegia for several weeks and a two-month coma. He said he was saved by the prayer of the Church and of the community which then accompanied and supported him against all odds. Including his desire to 'jump ship ' in the darkest hours.
Simple and vital consequences
His intervention began with a sober reminder of these major events. In what followed, no soothing theological remarks, just words steeped in the fire of an extraordinary experience.
The essence of his teaching concerns our identity as sons and daughters of the Father, in the image of the Son Jesus. And on the simple and vital consequences implied by this positioning.
The moments of meditation and reflection on the Passion, in particular on the last words of Christ, allow us to deepen a "dying of sons and daughters"... Where the relationship of trust and filial abandonment is maintained until the end and allows this form of choice contrary to our only human logic.
"My life, no one takes it, it is I who give it" ... "Father, forgive them" ... "In your hands, my spirit" ...
It is impossible to give an exhaustive account of the richness of the day.
"To marry absolutely."
Let us underline a few essential accents.
Bernard Bastian reminds us that our human growth proceeds by maturation and deployment and by mode of ruptures, of “deaths”. Sometimes it's about dying to live: to enter into life"even more real, personal, willed by God for each of his children. Every cracking, breaking, gestation in our lives can be, in the Passover of Christ, seen, analyzed, accompanied as a new birth in which another aspect of ourselves is revealed. If we believe in the Passover and the resurrection, we cannot simply let ourselves be stopped by some form of death. ". Invitation to re-read Elijah's intervention with the Shoumanite, of Jesus with the widow of Naïm (2 Kings 4, Luke 7...).
A firm invitation also to "absolutely espouse the psychic plan of the evils encountered, but not to stop there". Because it is a question of a new life in our persons on the occasion of such crossings, which cause faults, ruptures, a singular fragility...
"The Lord creates." It is about dying to oneself, to one's "prefabricated self" (our ego as seen by Maurice Zundel)...
Like cutting a diamond
Forgiveness, "Easter of Easter" is evoked, which opens up another way of sons to us... ..."He who forgives grows because something of human claim dies in him. Like a quantum leap of flesh and spirit...
Sometimes we have to consent to "die faster" to what is playing us in order to live more like real sons and daughters!
Accept "docilely" what the ordeal will operate as a salutary stripping, as one cuts a diamond...
Father Bastian also underlines how much "root", "matrix" sin amounts to refusing the paternity of our God the Father. To refuse to be a son, to receive one's origin from another... The prodigal son (Luke 15) offers a very clear illustration of this. To be a disciple, on the other hand, is to be a son. It is therefore up to us to seize every opportunity to allow ourselves to be "sons".
Even at the hour of our earthly death, letting ourselves "sink" into Christ's own death, having himself left this world entirely turned towards his Father, without resigning when everything became absurd...
In Mark 15, the centurion perceives this: "Truly, this man was the Son of God! ".
Odile Foch
For our meditation
"Two to the Father"...
" It is by God that I am created, created mortal. Now, He is my Father. A father does not beget his child in order to kill him. If, by creation, He destines me to die, it is in order to give birth to me. (…) Jesus dies in his death the death of all men. I hope so, I will die in the filial death of my Saviour… He will take me in Himself and we will die together towards the Father.»
[Excerpts from the homily of Father François-Xavier Durrwell, theologian, written by himself].
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