“Trust love even if it brings sorrow. Do not close up your heart.” “Ah no, my friend, your words are dark, I cannot understand them.” “The heart is only for giving away with a tear and a song, my love.” “Ah no, my friend, your words are dark, I cannot understand them.” “Pleasure is frail like a dewdrop, while it laughs, it dies. But sorrow is strong and abiding. Let sorrowful love wake in your eyes.” “Ah no, my friend, your words are dark, I cannot understand them.” “The lotus blooms in the sight of the sun and loses all it has. It would not remain in bud in the eternal winter mist.” “Ah no, my friend, your words are dark, I cannot understand them.”
Tagore, The Love gardener, XXVII
1. Trust love even if it brings sorrow
After a busy year, my end-of-year letter is the opportunity to wish you a Happy and Holy New Year. I write from the small village of Kalipathar, on the shores of an artificial lake, in the cold, dry and sunny winter. I arrived after Christmas and discovered the new parish priest life is linked to Father Laborde. Father Edward was born the year he arrived in India. Originally from Bihar, he lived in Pilkhana with his family, where Father Laborde regularly came to celebrate Mass.
On Christmas day, how not to think of Father Laborde on the second anniversary of his departure to the Father. In the tradition of the Prado, it is good to meditate on this mystery of the manger, which reveals God as much as man. God assumes the fragility of man so that we can believe in love despite all the sufferings of our lives. Fragility is the essence of man. This fragility is that of man as well as of life, of the poor, of the suffering, of the handicapped. It is not easy to assume this fragility because the world does not welcome and does not like fragility. This is why he rejects the poor, turns away from them, exploits them or refuses to defend them. This little child who hides the True Light, who enlightens every man in this world, but whom the world has not recognized, calls us to care for him. Similarly, the fragile life and the suffering poor are many calls to our concern.
A historic turning point: the poor a threat?
This year has given us great joy by restarting all our activities, particularly the schools and physiotherapy and psychotherapy departments. I was pleased to see our centre in Asansol welcoming children again. But there has been no shortage of problems against the backdrop of all the tribulations our world is going through. The work founded by Father Laborde nearly 50 years ago is now experiencing a turning point in its history.
Almost three years ago, I discovered that health projects led by a historical partner encouraged the sterilization of poor and uneducated women in slums, in line with government programs. A proposal supposed to solve the question of poverty... Today in India, as elsewhere, sterilization continues with the Panikar Vikas mission. The Indian government’s web page displays it under the title “population control”. Like Pharaoh, who once slew the children of Hebrews, as John Paul II wrote, “many mighty ones of the earth today behave in the same way. They, too, feel distressed about the ongoing demographic development, and they fear that the most prolific and poorest peoples threaten their countries' well-being and tranquillity.”
The courage to be faithful in the poverty of our means
We decide we cannot endorse a program denying the spirit of the Gospel and the legacy of father Laborde. With great courage and faith, we decided to separate ourselves from this partner to be faithful to the spirit that animates this work of God. We will not put our faith in such a science which, instead of defending life, suppresses it. Life is a mystery to be celebrated, not a problem to be solved. Howrah South Point is not a scientific program claiming to eradicate poverty. “The poor you will always have with you,” Jesus tells us... We are, above all, a spiritual community built with simple and poor means, which seeks to bear witness to the unique dignity and the particular value of each of the poor and the people's disabilities by helping them and sharing their daily lives.
The poor threatened rather than a threat
By living in a community, we get to know each other. But there is a part of everyone that you only discover within your family. During visits to slums during the winter or summer holidays, I find the children who have returned home with their families. In the happy environment of our homes, dressed in their beautiful school uniforms or dance sarees, I can quickly forget the poverty of their origins. In their families, I discover or guess an alcoholic father, family violence, abuse, a single mother, a disabled brother or sister, and problems that add to the precariousness of living conditions. Fear of the future leads to early marriages. The urgency, the need for help, then appears more glaring. During my visits, I also became aware of the insurmountable obstacles that oppose the poor in this world and add to their material and social difficulties. Access to care in hospitals is supposedly free, but money is extorted from them because they dare not protest; labour law is supposed to protect daily workers, but in practice, they are exploited.
In the promiscuity of the slums, children in poverty and girls in particular, are at risk. A very qualified and distinguished Indian doctor tried to convince me a few weeks ago that we had to educate our poor children to prevent them from becoming a threat to society... I told myself: If the poor becomes a threat, it will probably be on a small scale. But if a rich person is ill-intentioned, will he not be a threat on the scale of a city, a country, or even the world? Here, we are not addressing poverty in general. Every poor person we help gets a new name and a new face to love.
2. “A conspiracy against life”
The “Culture of Death”
I am becoming aware today in the midst of the poor, of what this “culture of death” means, according to the expression of John Paul II. Walled up in the comfort of modern life, this idea did not sound true. But immersed in the world of the poor, constantly rejected and despised, it becomes a reality. Moreover, in this India fascinated by our hyper-consumption society, we are helplessly witnessing the reversal of its secular values and the advent of a “utilitarian mentality”. According to this mentality, the elderly, the poor, and the disabled are nothing but a burden. In this mentality that values only the efficiency of technology and the power of money, man is reduced to a market value. This mentality can then degenerate into a “eugenics mentality”. An agonizing vision anticipated by Benedict XVI: “We cannot minimize… the worrying scenarios for the future of man nor the power of the new instruments available to the 'culture of death'”. Bernanos spoke of a “universal conspiracy against every kind of inner life”. John Paul II speaks of a “conspiracy against life” in the Gospel of Life. It is no longer only the inner life but life itself that is threatened today and with it, the person's dignity by the material power of money, which has taken everything with it, provoking, according to the words of Péguy, “the immense prostitution of the world”. And Benedict XVI evoked in Revelation “among the great sins of Babylon – symbol of the great irreligious cities of the world – the fact of trading in bodies and souls and making merchandise of them” (cf. Ap 18, 13).
The “useless”, brothers of Christ
Currents of thought push us today towards a world without frontiers, cultures, nations and God, in which the cultural and moral strength of peoples, the promotion of people’s freedom of conscience, fades away to leave all the room for the power of technology. These are presented as the future of man. Benedict XVI had sensed the threat to the Church when he denounced “the world dictatorship of ideologies advancing under a humanist mask”. We are called to unmask the impostures of the world and the false promises so as not to be subjugated by the “spiritual power of the Antichrist”. This limitless progress erases the boundaries between technology and biology, leading to transhumanist man and promoting market utility as the only value. The poor and small and the handicapped will be considered useless. Our strength as Christians is precisely to believe that these little ones are “the brothers of the suffering Christ”. Paul VI added: “Know that you are not alone, neither separated, nor abandoned, nor useless; Christ calls you. As for us useless servants, who keep his word, the Lord calls us 'friends'”.
3. Sleeping? Watch out!
Lose heart?
All the news that reaches us continuously through the multiple channels of information, an inhuman world sinking into indifference and injustice, the crisis in the Church, the war in Europe, “the world war by pieces” continue to erode our ability to hope. No need to be a prophet to understand that we are at the heart of a spiritual battle whose challenge is to keep our anger and hope. Because it is characteristic of the devil to come and worry and overwhelm us. We can feel helpless. In the middle of the year, crushed by all the internal problems, faced with so many disappointments, weariness, and hypocrisy, I felt that I was losing my heart. I saw myself yielding to the temptations of the “demon of my heart who is called what good?” After taking a rest, I found people who, having known Father Laborde, understood my difficulties. I also read Father Pedro in Madagascar, who confided in recounting the same temptation of weariness and discouragement and his daily struggle for hope. I drew strength from the children’s smiles. It comforted me, and the Lord set my heart wide. The highest form of hope, Bernanos tells us, is overcoming despair. I can become strong in God’s strength by peacefully accepting my poverty and helplessness.
Our weakness and cowardice
There is also another kind of danger to hope. It is mediocrity and lukewarmness. Pius X reminded the Christians of France that “the main strength of the bad is the cowardice and the weakness of the good, the softness of the Christians.” The apprentice demon Wormwood, in Lewis’s The Devil’s Tactics thus learns that to damn man, a long life of selfish, mediocre concerns are more effective than gross sins. Hope is a flame to be rekindled daily because selfishness, softness and mediocrity condemn us more surely than great sins or hatred. Sometimes this selfishness is hidden under right-thinking, false consensual charity, “the silly benevolence that softens the heart and warps the mind.” The salt of truth dissolves in a soup of false values of inclusivity and tolerance. If Christians lose the wisdom that gives meaning to the world, they are like salt that has lost its flavour. So woe, because “no more than a man, a Christianity does not feed on jams. The good Lord did not write that we were the honey of the earth, my boy, but the salt,” said the parish priest of Torcy in “The Diary of a Country Priest” of Bernanos.
The challenge of the spiritual battle: watching and praying
This is what is at stake in this spiritual battle. At the call of the Gospel, which has invited us to watch during Advent and which invites us to watch during Lent, we must watch. Weariness, disappointments, and fear can lead us to doze off, become indifferent to others, and forget God's presence. “Such is our true somnolence, Benedict XVI reminds us: this lack of sensitivity for the presence of God which also makes us insensitive to evil. We don’t feel God – that would bother us – so we don’t naturally feel the force of evil either and stay on our comfort path.” It is through prayer that we revive our sleepy hearts. It is through prayer that we gain the courage to “do the truth” in our hearts and welcome the transforming force of Light. Courage strengthens us in our efforts to strip ourselves of our illusions, of the pretence, of the lies that blind us. Thus our stony hearts can come back to life and feel compassion again for our brothers the poor, the little ones, for our Lord.
4. “You are the salt of the earth”
The real reason for our hope
The real reason for our hope, in these troubled times, is above all to know that in the pains of childbirth the great renewal of the world is being prepared. This time of spiritual battle is also a time of waiting, a Great Advent, in which Mary plays an eminent role, gathering the army of the little ones and the humble who have placed all their trust in the Lord. In the darkness of this night must fall all our too human hopes to give way to the dawn of a new day. This time is not the end of the world, but the end of a world. Must not all the promises of Scripture be fulfilled? “The wolf will dwell with the lamb, the panther will lie down with the kid…no more evil or violence will be done on all my holy mountain for the land will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the bottom of the sea” (Isaiah 11, 6.9).
Hasn’t the Lord taught us his prayer in which we ask the Father each day: “Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven”? It seems that we have lost the key to knowledge and are led astray by an eschatology of despair where everything converges towards destruction. But the Lord never asks us to pray in vain. And since “we do not know how to pray properly, it is the Holy Spirit who prays in us” and asks that God's Will be done. Apparently his Reign has not yet come...there would be visible changes.
Le Seigneur ne nous a-t-il pas enseigné sa prière où nous demandons chaque jour au Père : «que ta Volonté soit faite sur la terre comme au Ciel» ? Il semble que nous ayons perdu la clé de la connaissance et nous sommes égarés par une eschatologie du désespoir où tout converge vers la destruction. Or le Seigneur jamais ne demande de prier en vain. Et comme «nous ne savons pas prier comme il faut, c’est l’Esprit saint lui-même qui prie en nous» et qui demande que la Volonté de Dieu soit faite. Apparemment son Règne n’est pas encore arrivé... il y aurait des changements visibles.
This great renewal of Creation has been announced by the last popes, like John Paul II who asks us to be watchmen to announce, in the middle of the night, the coming dawn: “Such is the great hope of our invocation: 'Thy kingdom come!', a reign of peace, justice and serenity, which recomposes the original harmony of creation.” ; “Today, more than ever, we need people with a holy life, watchmen who announce a new morning of hope, fraternity and peace to the whole world. […] Strive to be in all walks of life, ‘the salt of the earth and the light of the world’”. Likewise Benedict XVI, at WYD in Sidney: “The Lord asks you to be prophets of this new era… a new era where love is not greedy and selfish, but pure, faithful and sincerely free… The Lord asks you… to build a future full of hope for all humanity. The world needs this renewal!”. To build hope, we must rely on the power of prayer. “Ask and you shall obtain... Nothing is impossible with God”. This strange phrase from the Gospel: “There will always be poor people…” (Mk 14:7) is not a call to neglect the poor. But the poor will always be there asking for our help, while we can lose the presence of Jesus. Without the charity he pours into our hearts, even our most intense efforts lose their eternal value.
5. Digha: the salt of the sea
The other big event of the year
With the reopening of all our departments, activities have multiplied, especially in our homes, which are the heart of our community. The other “big event” of the year was the excursion to Digha. This small seaside resort, three hours by train south of Calcutta, is located on the border with Odisha. It is not Biarritz or Deauville, but a few hotels, basic facilities protected by a dyke have been made to accommodate a budding seaside tourism. This name, however, makes the inhabitants of Calcutta dream. After the classic trips earlier this year to Belur Math, the Indian Museum and the Mother House in Calcutta, the children at my center started dreaming big. “Father, are you taking us to the seaside, to Digha? »
This idea slowly became obvious. Take every HSP home to the seaside…! The last excursion dates back to 2006 for the centers of Howrah, but our centers of Jalpaiguri never had this chance. These accommodate disabled children – some in wheelchairs – who require special assistance, and the distance is much greater. With the agreement of the didis, the challenge is launched... and taken up! For all these children, whether they are slums in Calcutta or tea gardens in Jalpaiguri, it is an extraordinary journey. Most have never seen the sea, or even taken the train in their lives. They never went to the hotel. It is the EPN center that will open the season at the end of September. A week before the big day, when the excursion is announced to the children, there is an explosion of joy. I am entitled to all sorts of charmingly naive questions: “Father, are we going to see whales? Dolphins? Sharks? How do you swim in the waves?” I take the opportunity to joke a little and explain to them that the sea water is sweet, but there they don’t believe me...
The excursion will be short, a morning on the train, a night on site in a hotel facing the sea, then the return the following morning. For the trip, all the children and the didis, dadas are on their thirty-one. As soon as we arrived, we were going to take a dip in the sea. The children wore Howrah South Point football shirts instead of swimsuits… and the didis their sarees. It’s very chic, with a seaside feel from the 1900s… Indian style. Children are amazed by this boundless expanse of water. The beach is completely covered at high tide, leaving only the rocks uncovered. The children receive the breaking waves by clinging on, and experience with amazement the power of the waves, they who know only the rippleless bodies of water of the agglomeration of Calcutta. In the afternoon we will visit the aquarium. The next morning, wake up at four o’clock to swim at sunrise in Digha, famous throughout Bengal. This time the low tide reveals a huge sandy beach and the children can go play in the waves. “Father, yesterday was good, but today is fantastic!!”
“Here we play, here we pray… here we study”
“Here we play, here we pray”... At HSP, we could make the patronage motto our own. It should be added, “here we study”. As a spiritual community, we learn to grow together. I get down to the difficult and humble work of witnessing to Christ, by my presence but also by teaching, especially with the Sisters of Carmel and the Missionaries of Charity to whom I preached three retreats this year on Lucia of Fatima and the little way of Therese. The best way to touch hearts is still to tell stories. Every evening, based on a story from the illustrated Bible, I tell them the Bible in Bengali. Children love it and it is an opportunity for many questions about the afterlife. Many children are fatherless or motherless. The child is then raised by his grandmother or his aunt, who is called in English, “guardian”. So they were struck by Cain’s question. “Am I my brother’s guardian?” They are also fascinated by Heaven. After the excursion to Digha, they asked me if there is a Digha in Heaven! “The Digha in Heaven is much more beautiful than the Digha on earth!” (Cheers). “Father will there be waves? No doubt… Father, we won’t drown? No, we can never drown again!” (Cheers). “Father will there be people in Heaven? Yes millions and millions of people. Father, how are we going to meet again? We will find those we love by thinking very hard of them...” (Screams of joy). “Will we find our parents, our brothers and sisters? Yes, all those we love and who have loved God…” (more shouts of joy).
6. The poor and the salt of joy
Pilkhana Slum Tour
It is in the City of Joy that FatherLaborde met these favourites. On August 11, on the occasion of the distribution of emergency food aid in the parish of Our Lady of Happy Voyage, I asked the priest to take me to visit the slum of Pilkhana, where the adventure of father Laborde started in 1966. The slum has changed a lot since then, with houses now mostly solid. On the day of the visit, in the middle of the monsoon, everyone in the street has their feet in the water as if to remind them that life's difficulties persist. I met Raymond Baptiste, the son of Cherubim Baptiste who had welcomed Father Laborde at the address “Pilkhana 3d Lane”. We also visit Seva Sangh Samiti, the first organization he founded.
A few months before, when I was talking about this time with Leo, for me the newspaper clippings gathered when the book The City of Joy was released. The book caused a stir in the press in Calcutta, while father Laborde, the main interested party with Brother Gaston, had greeted him with anger, the impression of having been betrayed. The inhabitants of Calcutta did not give him a better welcome, being indignant to see their city associated with misery, making people forget that it was once the artistic and intellectual capital of India. Eventually, the success of the book and time won the support of both, and the generously donated royalties allowed HSP to grow as Calcutta adopted “The City of Joy” as its official nickname.
The shock of “The City of Joy”
While writing this letter and pulling out the famous press clippings on Dominique Lapierre, I learned of his death. This sign from heaven makes me smile. This book, read almost 20 years ago, helped to get me out of my spiritual torpor, to awaken me to concern for the poor. I was drawn to the figure of Mother Teresa and the city of Calcutta. My life in Italy then resembled that of a partygoer fluttering from pleasure to pleasure. And yet the story of the rickshaw wallah (rickshaw puller) Hasari Pal, of Father Paul Lambert in his little room, venerating the figure of Christ of the Holy Shroud, amidst the anthill of the slum, like a cathedral of joy, vitality, hope, overwhelmed me. Strangely, I almost identified with the priest, so that I wanted with all my being to go to Calcutta to help Mother Teresa. I answered the call of the workers of the last hour. And twenty years later, on a visit to Calcutta to meet Father Laborde, I was shocked a second time when I learned that he had inspired the figure of Paul Lambert.
The washing of the feet
In April, I received a short visit from my mother and my three sisters. Joy to finally be able to share a slice of my life with my loved ones. We ran through the eight HSP centers between Howrah and Jalpaiguri. According to the Adivasi tradition, each centre welcomed us with a washing of the feet. I was amazed and amazed. The feet, considered as impure members, are the object of the most respectful form of greeting – pranam – which consists in touching the feet. It is the Charanasparsha. The simple form that we are most familiar with is the namaskar which consists of bringing the hands joined to the forehead to salute the divinity that is present in the other. A few weeks before, I had celebrated the Easter Triduum, and the ritual of the washing of feet moved the children and the didis, dadas who received it, to tears.
The small everyday joys
The salt of joy is also the small daily events treasured in the heart and which constitute the cement of the community. After preaching the retreat to the sisters, they sent boxes of butter and jam for the children. It was the first time they had tasted it. They were amazed to learn that it was once my daily breakfast. I also regularly organize cinema sessions every fortnight. These children who are usually so reserved in their feelings, surprised me during the viewing of Narnia. They wept over Aslan’s death. At the final victory of the armies of the Lion over those of the witch, the children were all on their feet screaming their joy.
Filming in the slums of Howrah
I also had the joy of receiving a film crew from France. Damien and his team were commissioned by the MEP to show five missionaries walking in Asia or the Indian Ocean in the footsteps of their glorious elders, carried by the sacrifices of these witnesses, sometimes going as far as the gift of their lives. With the team, we live a fraternal and intensive week, in the places of the mission, in the slums, in the brickyards, in our homes, in Howrah and even in Jalpaiguri. On the basis of the testimony of my vocation, we followed the story of several children from the shantytowns or of these handicapped children whom we are trying to put back on their feet in the literal and figurative sense. The filming was also an opportunity to experience intense joys and emotions: the bathing of disabled children in the river, the reunion with two minor sisters involved in the exhausting work of the brickyard. A heartbreak. It is not enough to welcome children into our homes, we must also convince the parents to entrust them to us until the end of their studies...
7. The community: the salt of life
Celebrations build community
Celebrations and feasts build our community thanks also to the constant and difficult effort to forgive one another. These moments of joy marked the life of HSP during the year, with the football tournament, the celebration of August 15, a double feast for Catholic Indians, Independence Day and the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. Last February 5 we celebrated, traditionally forty days before the full bloom of Spring, Saraswati Puja. Saraswati is the goddess of knowledge, language, music and arts. Everyone dresses in yellow, supposed to be his favorite color and we eat saffron rice – yellow – and other specialties for the occasion.
The great celebration of the year took place on March 25, with the consecration of Howrah South Point to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. A consecration embracing all the centers, the children, didis and dadas, teachers and our beneficiaries. We have taken literally the request of the Virgin Mary to consecrate everything to her so that she can exercise her maternal solicitude and lead us unhindered in the midst of the difficulties of this life. “On March 25, Christians celebrate the feast of the Annunciation to Mary, when she freely accepts to say her “yes” to God’s invitation to become the Mother of Jesus. On this day we are also called to say our “yes” to God in order to become builders of His Peace. This consecration is a free and voluntary act, the act of the poor among the poor who entrust themselves to the Providence of God with trust and love, who look upon their suffering brothers and sisters with loving mercy.” Yes, all these poor, abandoned, suffering or handicapped people are in reality the favorites of the Kingdom of God. And often they have to suffer from the world that rejects them, exploits them.
Born to paternity
I am in this mission as in the desert, uprooted and yet in my place. Immersed in the mystery of fragility with the mystery of childhood, the mystery of the poor, the mystery of the disabled. In the midst of all these anawim – the poor of the Bible – called by the good Father Laborde who remains like an invisible presence among us, I am beginning to find my place. Difficult to take over from a founder, a holy priest, difficult to escape comparisons. As a foreigner, having not yet acquired Indian nationality, I abandoned the idea of exercising official responsibilities to give more space to my ministry as a priest, as a father, with an “authority without competence”. My commitment and my life in the midst of this spiritual community give me a special place. I was invested with a symbolic authority, which is deeper and more demanding than a simple legal authority. A paternal authority, received both from Father Laborde, as an inheritance, and from this community that has become an orphan and that chose me.
Every day I am born into fatherhood by children, didis and dadas. They thank me for my presence and I perceive this authority as a mystery and a gift. Of course, there is also sometimes rejection and indifference. My place as a foreigner is far from always easy. Yet I find a lot of peace in this decision to welcome their choice. After assuming my weakness and mistakes, I try to help them grow so that they accept theirs. I seek to confirm in them the blessing received from the Lord. Thus established in trust, we can fully accept the mission received.
Two months ago, I also became a “grandfather” to the delight of the children who laughingly call me dadu. Priti, a young orphan whom I accompanied to her wedding as an adoptive father, gave birth to a little boy. She asked me to choose a first name. As his mother is Christian, I chose the name Peter, and as a nickname Pritom. The birth was difficult for the child who almost died. Came to visit the mother, we found the child in a state of malnutrition and asked our services to take care of him. How fragile life is! Each being is miraculous in this struggle against death.
The salt of joy, of wisdom, of the covenant
Salt, an inexhaustible symbol of life, purification and incorruptibility, is also that of the wisdom that gives taste and of the covenant with God. “But if the salt loses its flavor, with what will we restore it? May the call of Jesus to be the salt of the earth strengthen our courage to denounce the evil which is also in us, to allow ourselves to be purified by the truth, and to hear the cry of the poor and bend over towards our suffering brothers. May these words invite us to run the risk of life and love. Only the brave heart knows how to love.