From head to heart
Coming from a working-class background, I was educated in a faith focused on others. In the 1970s, while many of my friends were leaving the Church, I remained thanks to Catholic Worker Action (ACO). But I cut myself off from the Catholic tradition to join a union movement. One day, in an ACO team meeting, something struck me. We were talking about our unbelieving children. But what did we ourselves say about our faith? Almost nothing. My friends often found me annoying with my constant questioning. At the parish where I returned from time to time, I saw people with a very simple faith. And I, with my rational faith, was I really a Christian?
In order to have answers, at 67 years old, I decided to enroll in the two-year theology course of the Center for the Intelligence of Faith (CIF). I had heard the prayer of a brother of the Christian Schools on the parable of the sower and I wondered how to be a “good soil”. When I understood that I had carried within me this desire to form myself since the day of my profession of faith, it overwhelmed me. It was like a homecoming. But, at the beginning, it wasn't easy to cross the ring road to attend a class given by a priest in a Roman collar in a middle-class neighborhood of Paris! I thought I knew the Catholic faith. I discovered that I didn't know anything. Fundamental theology fascinated me and gave me the pillars to go further.
I had always been reluctant to pray the prayer of petition. I perceived it as a negotiation with God. I was so suspicious of it that I gave up talking about “prayer” in favor of “meditation on the biblical text”. At the CIF, we were given a text in which the prayer was presented as “a heart to heart with Jesus”. Putting these words into what I had been experiencing for a long time was a revelation. I understood that this heart to heart with God could also be experienced in prayer of request and collective prayer. It is in a way a collective heart to heart which brings us into communion. I am able to deliver this speech today thanks to the training course. He strengthened me, stabilized me. I came out freed from false representations of faith, confirmed in the fact that I was on the right path.
