beyond redemption, then pray for me, because even I have doubts about my contrition (such is the Devil in my flesh) although the following lines should give you a clear idea of my attrition.
Everything began when I took your advice, Father, and enlisted in our Glorious National Army. For three years I fought at the front, as part of our Crusade. I lived with glorious and terrible people, with soldiers full of ideals and others who had ignoble instincts but were drawn to God when they had to choose between perdition or Glory. I became united with them, I was one with them. It cannot be said that I was a great example of sanctity, because when confronted with so much horror instinct makes us cling to life, and it is a soldier’s duty to realise that dead men do not win battles. With my blood I helped convert Mount Sinai into a Golgotha.
Blessed are the righteous, quoniam et ipsi saturabuntur, for they shall be filled. I wonder, Father, if we will be filled even if we have to beg for mercy among the dead, the defeated, and the destruction of war?
Three long years spent scorning one’s own and other people’s lives eventually turn a crusader into a soldier, and God’s hosts into a warlike rabble. The life of a survivor demands something beyond life itself: the celebration of the triumph of Good over Evil is another essential part of Victory. God’s wrath may drive us mad. Father, I have known the sins of the flesh.
Flesh is like a tiger living inside man, the Anphion who by his art can move all stones, move everyone, shift even the foundations of their souls. As you know from the confessional, Father, flesh can be all-powerful. It can create the pride of sin in us, and even offer the perverse satisfaction of pleasure to a body that seeks only to die, and draw from it, despite all sense of shame, a cry of life so strong it melts the anvil on which the crusader seeks to forge his steel.
Things probably happened the way other people say, but I see them more as a landscape where my own memories live. I still ask myself what trees were like when they were planted, or what my mother was like when she was young, or what I looked like as a boy.
Everything that has survived has undergone a gradual change because its reality does not fit with my memory of it. What has been lost along the way remains fixed at the moment it disappeared and took its place in the past.
That is how I know what has gone, what I left behind or what left me behind at each point in my life, never to return to where the real world changes little by little, to where its presence allows no room for the past.
Perhaps that is why I remember my father as young, tall, gaunt and full of nervous energy, clinging on to my mother, who is ancient, weary and gentle. I remember Brother Salvador in his military cassock harassing my ancient, weary and gentle mother, and some foul-mouthed policemen insulting my ancient, weary and gentle mother. Above all though I remember a boy in league with his ancient, weary and gentle mother, someone I cannot remember the way the others claim she was: young, lively and gentle.
They wanted to change the course of the world, to alter the Lord’s designs. They ignored the fact that non est potestas nisi a Deo, with the result that we had to set the guilty on the straight and narrow. We had to glorify our Victory.
When I came back mortified by wretchedness and sin, Father, and approached the seminary in search of forgiveness, your pardon might have been more effective than the lengthy ordeal you, my masters, imposed on me. Although I had more training than almost all my colleagues, I was happy to accept the position of teacher in the infants’ section of the Holy Family school. I agreed to become a deacon in the Order of the Holy Father Gabriel Taborit, an order wholly dedicated to teaching . I chose to enter this minor order so as to forget the error of my ways and regain the Light.
The Light! How it distresses me to talk of the
Everything began when I took your advice, Father, and enlisted in our Glorious National Army. For three years I fought at the front, as part of our Crusade. I lived with glorious and terrible people, with soldiers full of ideals and others who had ignoble instincts but were drawn to God when they had to choose between perdition or Glory. I became united with them, I was one with them. It cannot be said that I was a great example of sanctity, because when confronted with so much horror instinct makes us cling to life, and it is a soldier’s duty to realise that dead men do not win battles. With my blood I helped convert Mount Sinai into a Golgotha.
Blessed are the righteous, quoniam et ipsi saturabuntur, for they shall be filled. I wonder, Father, if we will be filled even if we have to beg for mercy among the dead, the defeated, and the destruction of war?
Three long years spent scorning one’s own and other people’s lives eventually turn a crusader into a soldier, and God’s hosts into a warlike rabble. The life of a survivor demands something beyond life itself: the celebration of the triumph of Good over Evil is another essential part of Victory. God’s wrath may drive us mad. Father, I have known the sins of the flesh.
Flesh is like a tiger living inside man, the Anphion who by his art can move all stones, move everyone, shift even the foundations of their souls. As you know from the confessional, Father, flesh can be all-powerful. It can create the pride of sin in us, and even offer the perverse satisfaction of pleasure to a body that seeks only to die, and draw from it, despite all sense of shame, a cry of life so strong it melts the anvil on which the crusader seeks to forge his steel.
Things probably happened the way other people say, but I see them more as a landscape where my own memories live. I still ask myself what trees were like when they were planted, or what my mother was like when she was young, or what I looked like as a boy.
Everything that has survived has undergone a gradual change because its reality does not fit with my memory of it. What has been lost along the way remains fixed at the moment it disappeared and took its place in the past.
That is how I know what has gone, what I left behind or what left me behind at each point in my life, never to return to where the real world changes little by little, to where its presence allows no room for the past.
Perhaps that is why I remember my father as young, tall, gaunt and full of nervous energy, clinging on to my mother, who is ancient, weary and gentle. I remember Brother Salvador in his military cassock harassing my ancient, weary and gentle mother, and some foul-mouthed policemen insulting my ancient, weary and gentle mother. Above all though I remember a boy in league with his ancient, weary and gentle mother, someone I cannot remember the way the others claim she was: young, lively and gentle.
They wanted to change the course of the world, to alter the Lord’s designs. They ignored the fact that non est potestas nisi a Deo, with the result that we had to set the guilty on the straight and narrow. We had to glorify our Victory.
When I came back mortified by wretchedness and sin, Father, and approached the seminary in search of forgiveness, your pardon might have been more effective than the lengthy ordeal you, my masters, imposed on me. Although I had more training than almost all my colleagues, I was happy to accept the position of teacher in the infants’ section of the Holy Family school. I agreed to become a deacon in the Order of the Holy Father Gabriel Taborit, an order wholly dedicated to teaching . I chose to enter this minor order so as to forget the error of my ways and regain the Light.
The Light! How it distresses me to talk of the
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