The silence of the mountain

IT’S A SUNDAY IN JUNE, I’m 22 years old and I’m attending mass in the Lyon region. The Church celebrates the feast of the Blessed Sacrament or the Sacred Heart of Jesus, I don’t know anymore. At the moment the host is raised, I am struck by lightning. The obvious: God does not exist. In a fraction of a second, everything collapses. I am certain that this inner collapse is not psychological but spiritual. A host of questions rush through me: what am I doing right now with all these people saying prayers that no longer have any meaning? What is the value of these two thousand year old texts? So many questions shared by many unbelievers, of which I am now one: I no longer have faith.

I grew up in a traditionalist Catholic family and from the age of 5, I wanted to become a nun. What I saw there was an earthquake. It’s very scary, a bit like someone suddenly going blind. One of two things: either God, in fact, does not exist, which means that I have based my entire life on an illusion and that I must seek emergency psychiatric treatment; either God does exist, and then what is the meaning of what is happening to me?

I then decide to “corner” God. It lasts three weeks. I go to mass every morning, I confess often. If it exists and if I insist, it will not be able to escape, it will manifest itself to me. I choose to go on a spiritual retreat. There, in the silence of the mountain, I consent again to the existence of God. I find a life of faith that makes sense, without being able to explain it to myself. It took me another ten years to understand what had happened to me during this crisis of faith: what if it had been given to me to verify that I was ready to give everything to God? The answer was obviously yes. Today, I consider myself “addicted” to Christ, and I find myself well in Psalm 41: “As a thirsty deer seeks living water. » My faith is calmed even if the trials made me lose my carefreeness and weighed me down with a certain gravity. Thinking back on the fundamental choices I have made in recent years – my life fully given to God in the daily life of my existence, through my choices, my commitments, the birth of my sons, my marriage – I am convinced that it was the path on which Christ preceded me.