The eternal and joyful greeting: "May the Lord be with you." (1/3)

Whist writing his long letters to thank retreat goers, Florin Callerand liked to write some "Meditations over the Gospel." It was like a satchel for an everyday journey, full of food to enjoy along the way, an evangelical water bottle to quench the thirst of the roads of our daily lives.

He named the November 1995 letter: "The ever-present “Dominus vobiscum," "May the Lord be with you." Twenty-five years later, with the Latin era behind us for most, we have only kept in the title The eternal and joyful greeting: "May the Lord be with you."

As this text is very long, we will present it to you in three parts. This way, we will be with him all the way to Ascension Day. It could well be that we may hear these words differently, as the time of the release from lockdown is approaching and the Eucharistic celebrations will resume...

Danièle Valès

Part one :

All Christians of a certain age remember this liturgical construction, used frequently by priests speaking to the faithful during the celebration of traditional masses. The reason these types of proclamation are used less nowadays is to avoid falling into a routine whereby through overuse these expressions lose their profound significance. Luckily, in a way, sufficient emphasis has been maintained: since the opening of the liturgy until its end, passing by the introduction of the Gospel and the preface to the Consecration. Yet, we must take this key expression of the Church to its children as a leitmotif, that should never be forgotten in any situation in the most ordinary of lives as it ensures true transformation. “May the Lord be with you.”

Without this illumination ending in awareness, it is impossible to find a valid reason for existence. “Where do I come from, what am I doing, where am I going?” All these questions are intractable if mankind remains enclosed in solitude, in his own individualist or cosmic bubble. Without the awareness of the creative, redeeming divine Presence within, mankind would necessarily be plunged into dramatic perplexity, whether he admits it or not. This is what we call “loss of sense!” today.

The increase in suicides in children under the age of 12 or the equivalent in all kinds of drug use in adults was already predicted and deciphered by all these authors who diligently expressed their desperation. I’m thinking of Arthur Rimbaud, for example, who in 1866 published his infamous poem in the “Figaro” at the time: “Anywhere, anywhere, as long as it is out of this world!”

We must recognise that the moral situation of Humanity, despite enormous scientific progress has only worsened and has been unable to really save us. In this vein, it seems that religious science - the one which goes to meet God where he is, lives and acts - when alone, is in a state of stagnation or even regression.

Even if we now have the good habit of living the Mystery of the Presence accompanied by God in all things, it could be most beneficial to remember certain times in our past existence where oblivious to this Presence, we suffered a glacial feeling of inner void where only our own ‘self’ was found!

We should also know how to feel compassion for the deep suffering of so many people today, to help them find the liberating process that we have had the grace to follow and which will end in the opening, of God-himself within them, their eyes, their ears, their secret heart.

I would like to quote several dramatic testimonies, most often given by poets or savants, sincere men who dare to look, analyse and express as if they were standing on a stage so the whole world can see their sombre experience of metaphysical loneliness!

“We have no news,

no news since...

We have no news

no news, all alone

We have no news,

no news for us...

We have no news

no news of deaths.

We have no news,

no news of hope.

We have no news,

no news of love.

We have no news of God!“

This text by Jean Mogin which describes the absence of the vital relationship at the heart of itself between the human creature and its God, into endlessly repeated words, can be found in the writing of all too many who we call agnostics or atheists, albeit expressed differently! Yet ourselves, have we not been and are we not still like that?

And would we not find there the substance, if we can call it that, of what is mysteriously known as the original sin, whose consequences prevail: the loss of God’s Presence, or using a symbol, the exile from the earthly Paradise where God and man behaved as two intimate beings! It is as if the stream having lost contact with the source, which nonetheless still existed, found itself suddenly dried out, like a bed of shingle without water!

“The human species will pass on”, writes Jean Rostand, a man whose unique explanation of the universe is luck, “Just as dinosaurs and stegocephalia have passed on... There will no longer remain of us even what is left of Neanderthal man, where at least a few items of debris have found asylum in the museums of their successors... In this minuscule corner of the universe, this pathetic, colourless adventure of protoplasm will be cancelled. No one will ever know what he might have been!

This, it appears, is the message of science.”

After so many affirmations denying God itself, this honest man cannot help but question everything by writing at the end of his text in a sententious tone: “It appears!”

In fact, we will learn that a few weeks before “he passed” just like Jean-Paul Satre and others, like Lacan, the psychoanalyst, he murmured before his astounded loved ones: “I would really like there to be more than Nothing!”

In fact, this “it appears” reveals a glimmer of hope like a star that is not yet lit but promises to shine more brightly in the future. We could ask ourselves if this quiver of internal instability searching for balance and solidity on an actual underlying and secret exchange, could be the first resonance of the Breath of God himself who created this man by calling him to existence distinctly. A little as if the solid ground underfoot an unstable man, staggering as he walks, says to him: “Even if you fall, I will be there to pick you up...” because God loves his creatures. So, the meeting must happen in full consciousness some day, even if the long delay is hard to bear, on one side just as on the other!

“Late, I loved you,” writes Saint Augustine in his Confessions, “O Beauty so old and so new!

Late, I loved you! You were within me and I was on the outside... You were with me, but I was not with you. The creatures kept me far from you, those who would not exist without you. You have called me and in doing so you have broken my deafness! I have tasted you and I am hungry and thirsty for you! You have touched me and I burned fervently for your peace... When I have joined my whole being with you, there will no longer be any suffering for me, nor sorrow, and my life, full of YOU, will really be alive!”

The whole of humanity should be grateful to Saint Augustine for “decoding” what he was able to do, following many prophets and psalmists, of nature, turned towards God, for this profound research he had been carrying out. He wrote with the full feeling of proof, “Oh Lord, my heart is without rest unless it is resting within You!”

In an identical sense, the mystical cry par excellence was launched by a Saint from the 17th-century French school of Spirituality, Cardinal de Bérulle, founder of the Oratory, “I cannot say me, or God, without saying You...!”

Such are the expressions and the explanations that you have to give in to the feeling that, according to our most secret desire of Infinity and Limitlessness, the priest at the alter decrypts as he expresses the liturgical Words,

“May the Lord be with you.”

As there is no man who can pretend that the dilemma of religion has not appeared within him! “Who Am I? What am I on earth to do? Why am I here, where, what should I reach for?”

This same dilemma of God, origin, accompaniment and end of all being is concentrated as if in the first Word he says to us and what it actually means. “Do you want Me with you?”

We feel within us, with an impression of incurable dependence, that there is nothing in the world, nor within ourselves, which could not be “a beginning...” and at the same time we experience a demand for autonomy, we aspire to be free, we cannot stand being held in a straightjacket. Dependants as we are, we have to constantly make choices; our life hangs on our options, we are not slaves, we can have power over many determinisms, and we keep our freedom of choice and of excelling when an unexpected obstacle appears!

So it is right at the heart of ourselves, in the consciousness we have of ourselves, that the dilemma of religion surges! It is expressed there, as we address it, in the very first Word of He who created us in the freedom of his love, making us, from the very beginning a little like Him!

Florin Callerand

La Roche d'Or, 2nd and 4th October 1995

On the celebration of Theresa the Child of Jesus

and of Francis of Assisi

French to English translation by Debbie Garrick and Cécile Simon