“I felt an intense thirst for emptiness”: he crosses the Massif Central on foot and without a penny

While he was a novice with the Jesuits, Charles Wright crossed the Massif Central on foot and without a penny: it was the “mendicant month”, an experience desired by Ignatius of Loyola. In his book Le Chemin des estives, he tells how to (re)become a contemplative.

Trained as a historian, Charles Wright was the pen of a minister, publisher, journalist, before becoming a novice in a Cistercian monastery. He publishes "Le chemin des estives" at Flammarion in 2021.

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For a month, I lived in extreme frugality. During this trip, I realized that possessions encumber us, and that we can live very intensely and joyfully with very little. In destitution, the little one receives brings impregnable joys. A glass of water becomes the most divine of beverages, a hard-boiled egg a feast. We also realize that everything is the fruit of generosity, of donation. Ignatius of Loyola wanted his novices to learn indifference, in the sense that this word had until the ^17th century. It's not about not caring about things, but about being content with what you get. From time to time, it was a lot: I even managed to eat foie gras! Most often, it was three times nothing: stale bread, rotten peaches... Learning to accept everything that happens with the same humor, this provides fabulous freedom...

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Is it possible to be contemplative in a world that privileges the virtual over the real?

It's difficult. I also left on the roads of the Massif Central because I could not satisfy my thirst for the absolute in Macron's France. We were suffocating in the city centers. Black Friday, the loops of BFM TV, the solicitation of Instagram and the narcissism of Twitter left a great void in my heart. Everywhere there were too many words, too many speeches, too many comments. I felt an intense thirst for emptiness. I needed to wash my ears in silence. I wanted the baptism of simple things. The Carthusians call “spiritual virginity” the attitude of the soul which aspires to release from the ephemeral. There I was: I wanted to get back to basics, recharge my batteries in the elementary, reconnect with reality in its native nudity, in its primordial transparency. And then commune with things in the quite simple Epiphany of their being there. Far from noise and screens.

Back from this adventure, I also converted to a pendulum existence. I divide myself between Paris and the Ardèche, where I live close to a monastery in a wooden hut placed in an infinity of greenery. I like this swing between urban frenzy and the extreme simplicity of this Ardèche retreat that I share with two monks and a few sheep. There, I learn to taste the fullness that there is in silence, and to experience reality carnally. "I'm back on the ground, with the rough reality to embrace", as Rimbaud said so nicely.

How to be more free?

You cannot do this without companionship with the Holy Spirit, who is a spirit of freedom. The Christian life is freedom. So to be free, you have to impoverish yourself a lot. The whole Gospel speaks of leaving, of detaching, and also repeats to us how difficult it is. I have a lot of sympathy for the rich young man. Christ loves her because He knows how hard it is to break free from clinging to one's possessions. The progress towards counting is a slow and difficult march.

So yes, we must leave, leave. Knowing however that some departures can be leaks. In my book, I confronted these two figures of wandering, Arthur Rimbaud and Charles de Foucauld. The African adventure of the poet from Charleville is an escape from himself which leads him to resentment, to sad passions, to death. Foucauld's wandering leads, on the contrary, to plenitude and profound peace. Leaving, detaching oneself in order ultimately to have no other anchoring than this rooting in the deep heart, where Christ breathes in us, I believe that is what a Christian life is. "You are there my love and I have no place except in You", as Saint-John Perse writes in Amers.

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Leaving everything, is this also the only way to go towards the ultimate contemplation: that of God?

Scripture insists that our lives are pilgrimages. This is Abraham's vocation, you have to constantly leave, go into exile, not settle down. We also leave because we experience the feeling of an absence, of a lack, the nostalgia of a fullness. There is a burn in us. One feels exiled from one's true place. The unknown devours us, according to the magnificent expression of the poet Xavier Graal. This is what Michel de Certeau says in La Fable mystique: “A mystic is he who cannot stop walking, and who knows from each place that it is not that. In the spiritual life, one must always go further. God is the Eternally Sought.

Can we contemplate when we know that everything will pass?

You know the Carthusian motto: “The worlds roll, the cross remains. Yes, it's true, everything passes, except... the Gospel. It's been two thousand years, and its freshness remains intact. Fashions change, historical epochs pass by, the stars offered to our veneration become demonetized, but the extraordinary power of renewal, subversion and life contained in the Gospel remains. To come back to Rimbaud and Foucauld, I believe that the difference between their itinerary comes precisely from there: the “universal brother” was connected to this source of life. He sailed with Christ. This gives a foundation to chart your course, even when, like him, you have ants in your legs...

The simple life you describe is not possible in a large urbanized metropolis...

Yes, but you have to be well advanced in the spiritual life, which is not my case. The old Jesuit Fathers acquired this fabulous freedom to be simple always and everywhere. They walk their interior cloister in the city centers, in the middle of the tumult of the world. I admire this freedom. I who am not there, I still need to retire often. But loneliness is not an end in itself. For me, in any case, it is one of the means that I have found to learn to live connected to the inner source, and to be able, one day, God willing, to conform to the motions of the soul. 'Spirit, even in the thick of the action, in the sound and the fury...

Even the ordinary is not given to the majority of people. How to sharpen a contemplative gaze when you don't even have a tree to lay your eyes on?

Four years ago, I spent a few months with the Little Brothers of Jesus to discover how they lived the charism of Foucauld. It was in Lille Sud, where an incredible misery recapitulates surrounded by bars of HLM and concrete. What struck me was to see how the Brothers managed to unceasingly detect beautiful things in the midst of all this ugliness. It's proof that the contemplative gaze is something that sharpens, sharpens. Perhaps arranging small withdrawals each day, moments of suspension from the frenzy and time pressure, can help: take a minute of silence in a church; to entrust to the Good Lord the people encountered in the metro; each evening, remembering a face, a moment... Moments of happiness, moments of grace, you have to remember them, otherwise they vanish into limbo, as if they had no exist. Yes, Christ is present everywhere and always, it is we who are not there. That said, I admit that it is easier to recognize him in the harsh and wild splendor of a valley in the Ardèche than in the stairwell of a bar in La Courneuve...

There is also the question of time. Should we take our time to contemplate? Can we decide to become contemplative?

In the hermit life that I have experienced, the greatest danger is the amplitude of time. In order not to be caught up in the great emptiness of the days, the first thing we advise someone who goes to the desert is to make up a schedule. Generally speaking, monastic wisdom invented a whole art of marking time. The monks know that the search for God must be based on a rhythm, just as there is a biological rhythm with the ages of life, and a rhythm of the cosmos with the sequence of the seasons. This is why their days obey a precise schedule, with a time for each thing. I believe that this schedule that seems so constraining from the outside is actually very liberating. The monks do not need to worry about organizing their days, they are available for the essentials. Perhaps we should take inspiration from them, by sanctifying one or two contemplative breaths in our days?