Abbe Pierre

I must confess that when asked to answer in a couple of pages the question, "Who is Jesus Christ for you?", I was truly desperate. To end my torment I will reply immediately. Is not to ask a question such as this, to ask someone to explain the ineffable ? I will make an attempt. We must start from the beginning, know that I am a child of a Catholic family in which every member sought to live in all sincerity faith, hope and charity. During adolescence then my relationship with Jesus, if I may use this word, was extremely simple, loving adoration, with no trace of fear and with the ingenuity of childhood.

This relationship changed and began to become my own at first with a period in which all my religious feelings were marked by pantheistic attraction. It was at about the age of sixteen that, while in this state, I was profoundly struck in a way escaping all discussion. It was an encounter with "I am" of the burning bush. «Go to Pharoe and say "I am" sends me to tell you...». I feel incapable of communicating to anyone I know or whom I may meet, how my whole life has been marked, without interruption by the exigency of this "I am".

A little later, on the occasion of a college pilgrimage I was not only able to see Assisi and hear of all that Saint Francis was, but above all after some hours spent in the "Carceri" of Assisi, I was fired by two intuitions and these too were never to leave me: evidence that, in adoration, one can attain total and universal communion and on the other, the certainty that, in adoration, the greatest action can be born, such as was the case in the life of Saint Francis, I am tempted to say, without his knowledge.

And so it was with this double baggage: "I am" and the two intuitions of Assisi that at the age of 19 I took the Capuchin habit. That was sixty years ago. In those days formation years in the Capuchin Order, novitiate, philosophy, theology were spent in conditions of strict cloister, which entailed every day, (something which in our day would probably be considered impossible or exaggerated) besides the chanting of the psalms in choir of each hour during the day, three quarters of an hour of adoration before supper in total darkness, we were denied the help of a book; during the night, awake from midnight to two in the morning; after the recital of Matins and Lauds, again a whole hour in darkness.

Today, now that I am over eighty, I see ever more clearly that those almost seven years lived with this "dose" of adoration, if one can put it this way, were the greatest grace of my life (nevertheless I would refrain from advising any one to attempt to imitate this manner of being formed for a life dedicated to God for a future call to action, not a contemplative life).

One detail, more eloquent than many phrases: after the year of novitiate, it was the custom to follow a rather puerile habit. I was about to say "we", but this would be incorrect since I was the only novice during the second semester of the novitiate (with a Father Master, a former naval officer whom I often found in tears). ... We were invited, as we were finishing the novitiate, to choose a holy picture and to write on the back something to recall that first year in the monastery. I wrote simply, without thinking too much: "o Ens etiam Esto". I think that I can sincerely say, at the age of 84, that what those words meant to me when I was twenty has never ceased to be the tissue of all my spiritual life: merits, if there are any, and sins, of which there are.

In the years which followed, more through reading the Gospels than through my studies, alas all too superficial, another dimension of "I am" was to develop by means of the only word which may be added to Him: Love. This was access to faith in the reality of the Trinity in God: if the Eternal one is Love he cannot fail (since Love is that which leads us to go most out of ourselves) to be said to be absolutely totally himself, that which human language will express with the words "Word", "Son" expression of Him, unique because total.

And so I began to perceive in an extremely simple manner, which put me before this mystery as before a certainty, that in God, inevitably, from the Father and the Word in Love, proceeds the Divine Breath called Holy Spirit. You will now understand why at the start I referred to the ineffable. To speak thus, of something which one has experienced can be confusing.

Only then, the Person of the incarnate Word really began to be for me the object of study, adoration and love. He was no longer the Christ of my infancy, no longer even the Word, inconceivable, He was the immense and wondrous enigma of "God made man", true God and true man who walked with me. The essence of Christian teaching presents us three mysteries: the Trinity; the Redemption and the Incarnation. I will not be lengthy, but the idea of the Redemption is presented in several ways. I reject two.

- To think that because through sin man had become hostage of Satan, the Redeemer came to "give himself to the devil" in ransom to set the hostages free.

- The second (and I know that this one has not yet been not entirely overcome, in the preaching of many): Saint Anselm suggests the tentative explanation called "satisfaction". The Redeemer would have lived the Passion to calm the anger of the Divine Father. It is impossible for the parable of the Prodigal Son and his Father to be in agreement with this doctrine. No, it is unacceptable to think that Jesus asks on his knees: "Father, is this enough?"

It is only a short while that the Redemption has ceased to be incomprehensible for me. It was when I came to realise, seeing our drug addicts of today become the executioner and victim of themselves, that the Redeemer came to offer himself in ransom, not to the devil, not to the anger of the Father, but to the insane pretension of man, endlessly afflicted because he believes he can be his own master. The Redeemer who says to this thief: «Free yourself of yourself by restoring yourself to yourself. And the price of this restitution, I, God made man, give myself to you».

You ask me to say who is Jesus for me. This is a question on the mystery of the Incarnation. The Incarnation still puts me before two incomprehensible matters. How, in one unique person, can there be two orders of knowledge: on the one hand knowledge as "true man" who must learn from his mother to walk, to speak to pray ... while this same and unique Person does not cease to be the ineffable whom we call the "Blessed Vision", who once permitted me to write (trembling for fear of being reproached) at the foot of a picture of Saint Francis of Assisi: «Praise to you O Lord, for my brother rainbow which you gave us yesterday as a guarantee of your covenant with You, the All High with us miserable. Praise to you o Lord for the rent in the clouds, for your smile through the tears for your joy under the cross!»

What more is there to say. If theologians or mystics can enlighten me on this twofold consciousness of one person, I would never know how to thank them. But I doubt that as long as we are in the darkness of time, we will ever understand.

The second point about the event of the Incarnation which causes me to wonder, while God looks on, is the fact that if we consider the millennia which have passed since the appearance of the first man free and responsible, and if we consider the space of the planet Earth, we cannot fail to say: «But Lord, why so late? And why with such minute means when, if you wanted to wait, one would be tempted to say, you could have come today when the words of Jesus could be transmitted by satellite across the whole earth and the Revelation made accessible to everyone?».

For a long time I kept a scrap of paper on which were written these words: «You, and us all yours». How is it that, apparently at least, we are still so far from this? Unceasing in me is the question cried out to Jesus: «And the others?»

Jesus Christ is present to me, not so much as he is known through the Gospels, but as a Risen presence with the new body of the Resurrection, glorious matter, "new earth and new heavens". Must not the same reality be thought of regarding His mother, the Virgin Mary, since we believe in her Assumption? Does this not mean that she too is already new earth and new heavens, as, in apparitions, she show herself? In His reality as glorious Body, I no longer find it difficult to think of Jesus all-present like the air we breathe everywhere.

All told, it is in mystery, (and to many good believers this may appear insolent), in the mystery of the presence of Jesus Body Glorious, in the minute matter of the consecrated Host, that I can come nearest to Him. Those moments when I have the possibility of celebrating Mass and spending time in the presence of a tabernacle, in truth to say nothing, are for me, poor harassed priest, brief moments of a being who, laying down his burden, says to an Other, to Jesus: «Help me, it is too heavy».