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Showing posts from May, 2012

THE MIDWIVES

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Salwa is a short woman, podgy and friendly as an angel. She is a religious and is 63 years old. She came for the Near East for a study period in Montreal. The first cold wave of November already makes her suffer. To face that weather, she is always wrapping up herself in her nun clothing.                                                                    Dressed in black from head to toe, she looks like a kind of Taliban lady in a Catholic burka. She says that she is a nurse and a midwife. During her 40 years of work in Jordan and in Lebanon, she took care of 15,000 deliveries. Bending towards my ear, she confides: -       I baptized 600 dying Muslim babies, without the knowledge of the mother, of course. Did I do well? My bishop told me yes.    Smiling, I answered her that was pirating. She smiled in turn, but not without a touch of surprise in her mischievous eyes.   I explain to her that when we believed that the children dead without baptism were stored aw

BABEL

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Genesis 11 There was a time when, in the Church, everybody was using the same language and the same words. « Since God is One », we would say, « the Church will have a supreme authority over all authority. And since God is Truth, the only truth will be that of the authority. »     And so, many human beings met in the Church, saying: « Amen! We will be one! And everybody will be with us. We will build a tower of which the foundations will cover the face of the earth and of which the head will penetrate heaven.                       Each human being will be cut as stone equal in size to all the other stones. All the stones will fit one another and they will be fixed forever by the mortar of a unique thinking decreed by the unique authority.       And so, there will be no more divisions on earth and we will become invincible. We will be like God. »          Now, God came down to see the tower that those humans were building. He saw how, in the name of unity, peoples,

THE TREASURE AND THE PEARL

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To live: what for? Here is the big question… so much pain and so many tragedies. Why? For wind only, would say Qohelet. The Homo sapiens has been asking himself that same question for more than three hundred thousand years without having yet found the answer. The man called Jesus has looked for, he also. Something was pushing him to want to know at all cost the meaning of that life apparently so off-putting and at times so absurd. I am sure that he has searched like nobody else and that he may have doubted like nobody else did.   Nothing fell into his lap. Nothing was dictated to him by the angels. Moreover, the answers that the venerable religion of his people was offering him left him unsatisfied. During his youth which he spent working wood and living like everyone else, his head was a jumble of strange thoughts which were making his heart bleed. He wanted to see, he wanted to know, he wanted to snatch from darkness the meaning, the reason, the path, the lo