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Notebooks of life · Travels · 26 min
Approaching the places, the wanderings and the retreats where the earth keeps memory of the human quest.

Series: Le Puy-Arès 2026: an account of an inward journey | Article 5

12 July 2026

Dear readers,

This is the last article in this series, inspired by my three-week journey between Le Puy-en-Velay, Conques and Decazeville along the Via Podiensis, one of the routes to Compostela, and by my spiritual retreat at Arès. The four preceding articles can be reached through the link above. They recount the quality of the encounters between the walker-pilgrims, the spiritual benefits of long walking as I experienced them, the abbey church of Conques with its tympanum and its stained-glass windows by Pierre Soulages, and finally Decazeville, that former mining and steel-making town, now fallen on hard times, which is attempting to come back to life.

Today I want to tell you about the final stage of my journey, a week’s spiritual retreat at Arès, a small town in the Gironde where, in 1974 and 1977, a man named Michel Potay claims to have received, from the One whom some call Life, G-d, Adonai, Allah, the Eternal, others still the Nameless or the Wholly Other, a message calling for a profound refounding of our societies through the sole weapons of brotherly love and an active spirituality freed from dogma. This message has known several editions under the title The Revelation of Arès, and the latest, called the fiftieth-anniversary edition, appeared in 2025 under the title The Sign, a few months before Michel Potay’s death.

Before going any further, it is probably worth summarising in a few lines what this Message asserts, since its main lines will be called upon throughout this article. According to it, neither religions with their rites, nor politics with their laws, have resolved the problem of evil and the ills it causes in human lives. The messages, such as the Torah, the Gospels, the Qur’an or many others, which urged human beings to overcome evil, have been altered by manifold theological deviations that have weighed down and veiled their meaning, causing the original living impulse to degenerate into religious systems, themselves the models for political systems, which separate human beings into compartmentalised or even opposed communities.

The Message of Arès calls for spiritual life to be set free by returning to the demanding foundation that alone can overcome evil: freely engaging in a slow and genuine work of betterment and self-transformation, which is the path towards the integral realisation of the human being, the reactivation and embodiment of his sublime potentials of oneness, love, freedom, creativity and understanding of the universe, potentials that will then connect him to every particle of Life running through the universe. Then, through the progressive spreading through society of the active good generated by those engaged in this path of exemplary living, the world will be able to begin changing in depth without falling back into past errors.

Thus individual salvation is not a matter of divine favour granted as a reward for the accomplishment of rites and the observance of rules, even rules of love, codified in human registers. Likewise, the outcome of history will depend on human beings themselves, not on some planetary upheaval brought about by a higher or divine identity. It is the sum of the thoughts, the words and above all the actions on our planet that determines the overall direction taken by our collective destiny: a direction that may lead towards a definitive return to bestiality, with humanity losing all memory of its sublime origin, or even towards total destruction, or, conversely, towards the advent of a world of peace, justice, fairness and love. The human being is the sole creator of his individual spiritual destiny, just as human beings as a whole are the creators of their collective historical destiny.

So much for the central axis of the Message of Arès. What remains is to ask whether one can give credence to the founding event on which this Message rests. The time of the prophets, of the rishis of the Vedas, of the nabis of the Torah, of the Jesus of the parables or of the messenger of the Qur’an being far behind us, the possibility of the supernatural erupting into the life of a man in the twentieth century seems scarcely conceivable, even to believers whose own religion nonetheless reports such founding events. In our technological societies, which have expelled from the realm of the possible any phenomenon that science cannot immediately explain, the categories of believing or not believing appear to be the only ones relevant when faced with the unknown and the extraordinary.

I am therefore aware, in beginning this article, that I am unwittingly drawing a dividing line between those of my readers who will lend an ear and those, perhaps the more numerous, who might legitimately feel a reflex of unease or even rejection: here we go again, another believer, another religious type, worse still some visionary about to tell us of revelation, of a G-d who speaks. Believing or not believing is indeed immediately the alternative posed. Is it a matter of believing the man, his message, the G-d in whose name he claims to speak? The question is, moreover, a many-sided one.

Now, I am neither a believer in the common sense of the term, ‘one who holds a religious faith’ according to the Oxford Dictionary, nor indeed an unbeliever, in the sense that the universe would be for me nothing more than an immensity of assorted matter, our life being reduced to trying to enjoy ourselves as fully as possible until death. I would even venture to say that I stand beyond this alternative, and that this question concerning the events of Arès, revelation or not, a G-d who speaks or not, legitimate enough at first sight, does not seem to me a question that can be grasped while remaining within the binary logic, true or false, that is habitual to us. What I would like to show here is that neither belief nor its rejection can truly settle such questions: only the doing (the lived trial, the personal accomplishment) can, and this, as we shall see, is precisely what this Message teaches and makes possible.

Let us first see why judgement alone does not suffice. Depending on the frame of thought that is yours, the events of Arès fall on the side of the possibly true or of the probably false. From the scientific approach, they can be neither verified nor fitted into any current scheme for representing reality, and are therefore false. From the angle of a spiritual seeker or a historian of religions, they resemble other events of which the founding writings of religions keep record (those concerning Moses and the burning bush, for instance), and could therefore be true, subject to the authenticity of Michel Potay’s testimony. It is possible to debate the matter at length, which is in any case unproductive, since none of the partisans of true or false can supply any evidence to validate his opinion.

Many human questions can only be properly grasped if we accept setting aside, for a time, our most common mental reflexes of immediate, unreflective acceptance or rejection, and admit that our beliefs, like our disbeliefs, for as long as we have not examined them in depth, are not truly our own, but those we inherit, first from our families, then from our circle of relationships and from the surrounding culture. It is only at this price that we can understand that our habitual binary logic is sometimes insufficient for thinking things through.

I shall take but one example, borrowed from the scientific domain: quantum physics had to renounce, as early as 1927, the strict alternative between the wave-like and the particle-like nature of light. The principle of complementarity, formulated at the time by Niels Bohr, holds that these two descriptions, mutually exclusive according to classical logic, are nonetheless both necessary to account for the whole of the observed phenomenon. A discipline as demanding as physics has thus established experimentally that an alternative may be wrongly framed even before being settled, and that there exist levels of reality where the excluded middle of our ordinary logic simply ceases to apply.

What holds for light may perhaps hold for the question at hand: the choice between believing and not believing is less a matter of judgement to be rendered than of a frame to be widened. And, in this instance, the way of widening that frame has always been, for me, not to content myself with intellectual speculation alone but to pass it through the crucible of experience. Thus, faithful to this intuition, I submitted my thinking, from adolescence onward, to the findings of practice, and this is why questions of faith have never really concerned me. I later discovered, moreover, that according to the Buddhist tradition, the Buddha systematically refused to settle certain questions, for instance when they concerned the eternity of the world, its spatial finitude, the relation between the life principle and death, or the post-mortem destiny of one who has attained awakening, beginning with that of the Buddha himself.

The Cūḷamālunkyovāda Sutta, one of the sections of the Pali canon recording the discourses of the Buddha, thus depicts the monk Māluṅkyaputta who, exasperated by the Buddha’s silence on these points, threatens to leave the monastic order unless he is answered. The Buddha replies with the famous parable of the man struck by a poisoned arrow, who refuses to have it removed until he knows the name, the caste, the height and the village of his assailant: that man dies before obtaining his answers, exactly as one who made the liberating practice conditional upon the prior resolution of these metaphysical questions would never attain the cessation of suffering he seeks.

Metaphysical reflection does not thereby become useless; it must only serve and follow the living experience of self-transformation. This primacy of the lived journey over speculation finds, moreover, a very concrete echo in the experience of the path: as on the road to Compostela, one must set off walking rather than remain for days at a stopping place, poring over a map that is but one possible representation of a reality exceeding it.

This is why, two years after discovering, in April or May 1975, a small pamphlet called ‘The Gospel delivered in Arès’ (the name Michel Potay had given to the first part of the Message), I had decided to travel to Arès to meet the man who had published it and to visit the places where the event it recounts had occurred. That visit and that meeting allowed me to move from the interest that the text and the outlook it carries had aroused in me from my first reading of it (an outlook that, to my mind, is liberating for humanity) to the certainty that Michel Potay’s testimony is truthful, which allowed me to answer the question of authenticity raised above. For all that, I did not know a great deal more about who G-d might be, but I had a strong intuition that here lay a path by which to lead humanity out of injustice, suffering and illusion, and to recreate a civilisation founded on freedom, love and peace.

Since then, I have gone regularly to Arès, not out of faith but out of conviction: the conviction that this Message, as it was later explained by Michel Potay, and as I have gradually been able to deepen its meaning, answers the twin preoccupation I carried in adolescence, when I made my own the motto of the Grand Jeu: ‘Révélation-Révolution’. For the poets René Daumal, Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, André Rolland de Renéville and the painter Josef Sima, the founders of this short-lived french artistic group at the end of the 1920s, the aim was to practise an ‘experimental metaphysics’ seeking to widen our consciousness until it reached a level of reality broader than our ordinary reality, where the ultimate truth of the world might finally be revealed; this mutation of consciousness, spread through society, was meant to precipitate a Revolution, a radical transformation of human society.

This Message thus answered, for me, this expectation of a clear path, freed from theological encumbrances, which, while standing in continuity with past messages (those of the religions, which have not been fulfilled in their fullness), also honoured the memory of all the struggles for social justice and human dignity. From then on, I placed it among what I call the Words of Life of the twentieth century, those whose regular company seems to me to cast a clear light on the challenges of our time, forever bringing the gaze back to the root of all ills: the lack of spiritual understanding of our human condition, and the absence of love as a factor of cohesion and social progress.

In concrete terms, each visit has thus become for me a privileged moment of return to myself, where I take stock of my life, where I examine what I bring under the gaze of the Wholly Other: my progress along the path of my own betterment, my accomplishments towards the respiritualisation of the world, rather than a moment in which I would come begging for favours and forgiveness, as is often, as we shall see, the aim of pilgrimages.

This year again, at the close of my walk from Le Puy-en-Velay to Decazeville, I therefore travelled to the site of the events on which this Message rests, for a week that I have called a spiritual retreat rather than a pilgrimage (that latter word seeming to me an awkward term, given the weight it carries of a religious past). It remains to be verified what exactly this weight covers.

The various pilgrimages that exist, be they the Christian pilgrimages such as those to Lourdes, Santiago de Compostela, Rome or Jerusalem, the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, or the Hindu or Buddhist pilgrimages, all display, once the structure of pilgrims’ motivations is laid bare, a number of constants that may be summarised thus: a desire for purification (whether conceived as forgiveness of wrongs, an increase in personal merit, liberation from karma, or teshuva, a return to G-d), a hope of healing and of the easing of suffering, an expectation of an inner transformation deeper than daily life allows, and a need to reconnect with a sacred memory and with a wider community. The differences then lie in the status of the obligation (the Hajj as a pillar of Islam, as against freely undertaken pilgrimages), in the way grace is conceived (juridical pardon, karmic merit, the intercession of the righteous, purification of the spirit), and in the relation to the body (immersion in water, walking, prostrations, particular dress).

Each tradition unfolds, in its own way, a universal need: to turn space and time into a path of transfiguration, whereby man steps outside his ordinary determinisms to place himself beneath another gaze (that of G-d, of the divinities, of the Buddha, of the righteous) and to attempt a reconfiguration of his life in harmony with what he recognises as Source. Yet the inner posture of pilgrims seems indeed, beyond differences of belief and rite, to remain one of expecting a reward, a favour granted to the pilgrim who has made the effort of reaching the place of pilgrimage, by some higher authority whose good will determines his future. The Christian pilgrims of the medieval period thus walked towards Compostela in reparation for their own wrongs or those of a departed relative, hoping in return to obtain the remission of their sins.

This attitude of personal petition, which of course displays a multitude of nuances and modes of expression according to the individual and the tradition, joins, at the cultural and social level, its collective equivalent, likewise common to most of the great traditions: ‘messianic’ expectation. Beneath the languages proper to each tradition, comparative studies do indeed stress a common core: messianic expectation is the religious form of an anthropological need to believe that a fracture (between justice and injustice, truth and falsehood, Creator and creation, awareness and ignorance) can be mended. In the Abrahamic religions, this mending passes through a personal figure, both sign and agent of G-d’s faithfulness to his promises, who takes upon himself the impossible task of aligning human history with the divine design; in the Indian and Buddhist traditions, it is formulated rather in terms of restoring the dharma, that is, the deep law of things.

Thus the Jews await the coming of the Mashiaḥ, charged with restoring the sovereignty of the people of Israel, re-establishing the Torah in its full force, gathering in the exiles and opening an era of universal peace and justice. Christians await the return of Jesus, the Parousia, which will trigger the judgement of the living and the dead, the end of injustice, the triumph of love, the resurrection, and the full restoration of creation. In Sunni Islam as in Shia Islam, messianic expectation unfolds around the Mahdi, the ‘guide’ who must appear at the end of time (even though the two branches conceive its modalities differently: Twelver Shiism holds him to be the Imam already born and hidden, while Sunnism awaits a figure yet to come), and around Jesus (’Isa), recognised as Messiah, whose return forms part of certain eschatological interpretations; together, they will restore divine law (sharia) in its purity, ensure the defeat of the forces of evil and the establishment of a period of justice in which believers may live their faith fully, before the Last Judgement. In Hinduism, Kalki, the tenth and final avatar of Vishnu, is to appear at the end of the present age of Kali Yuga, characterised by decadence, deceit and violence, in order to restore the dharma and inaugurate a new age of righteousness, the Satya Yuga. In Buddhism, the figure closest to a ‘Messiah’ is Maitreya, the future Buddha awaited as the fifth Buddha of the present aeon (this aeon designating, in Buddhist cosmology, the immense cosmic cycle over which a thousand buddhas succeed one another), who will come once the teaching of the historical Buddha has declined, to restore the Dharma and once more offer a clear path towards awakening.

It is clear to see, then, whether at the individual or at the collective level, that spiritual realisation, as the fulfilment of a personal life, or the realisation of an ‘ideal’ society, as the fulfilment of history, depend in the last resort, in all these traditions, on the good will of a higher authority, variously conceived and named, yet summoned, through personal prayer or communal commitment, to intervene as quickly as possible in order to accomplish what is considered not to depend entirely on human beings. And the various pilgrimages take their place within this long, patient supplication of humanity, as tools for eliciting divine clemency in the face of human suffering. Christianity has pushed this logic further than any other tradition, going so far as to assert that the man Jesus was none other than G-d who had offered himself in sacrifice in human form, so as to redeem outright the sins of those who would believe in this mystery and follow the authority of his representatives on earth (the Church and, for a long time, the nobility that served as its secular arm).

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Now, this is precisely what the Message of Arès comes to overturn. As we saw in the introduction, at Arès the pilgrim is restored to his full freedom and dignity, salvation there never being the fruit of a favour but of work undertaken upon oneself. Within this framework of understanding, two passages from two texts separated by several millennia resonate, for me, with the meaning that my coming to Arès takes on, and restore, it seems to me, the deep meaning of what a pilgrimage is, beginning with that of our life itself, which is then nothing other than a long pilgrimage towards our Source.

The first is found in the book of Deuteronomy, chapter 16, verses 16 and 17. This passage establishes the three pilgrimage feasts that marked the rhythm of the Hebrews’ year and at which they were required to go up to Jerusalem:

In this passage, ‘shall appear before’ is an attempt to render in current English a Hebrew form built on the root rā’â, meaning to see, here conjugated in its reflexive-passive form in the imperfect (the literal translation would rather be ‘all your males shall make themselves seen of the Lord’, here elohim, the plural form of eloha, which a kabbalistic reading designates as the divine aspect that is omnipresent within the living, and whose manifold forces sustain and order existence, in the visible dimension as in the invisible ones). And these males were not to ‘make themselves seen’ ‘empty-handed’, or ‘in vain’, another possible translation.

Pilgrimage, reconsidered in the light of this passage, then takes on a meaning far removed from the common sense of petition or hope of favour ordinarily ascribed to it. The pilgrim comes, this time, to be seen (not in vain, not out of curiosity or idleness); he must come with the gravity of one who knows he is going to be seen and that he cannot come empty-handed, the hand being by its very nature the instrument of action, of the concretisation of thought, of what is accomplished. Thus the pilgrim comes to be seen with what he has accomplished, understood here, since Hebrew thought is above all an ethical thought, as what he has accomplished by way of ‘good works’.

Nothing of a petition here, only an evaluation, and even, if I shed on this word the light of what the Message of Arès teaches me, a self-evaluation: since, after all, if I can be sensitive to a transcendence, to something greater than myself, it is because I have a deep kinship with that transcendence (G-d within me), as Meister Eckhart expresses it in one of his sermons: ‘The eye with which I see G-d is the same eye with which G-d sees me. My eye and the eye of G-d are one and the same eye, one and the same seeing, one and the same knowing, one and the same love.’ The Hindu tradition expresses, moreover, the same notion in chapter 6 of the Chāndogya Upaniṣad, in the famous dialogue between the sage Uddālaka Āruni and his son Śvetaketu: ‘That which is the subtlest of all is the Self of all this. That is the truth. That is the Self. You are That, O Śvetaketu.’ ‘Tat tvam asi‘, ‘You are That’: this is the formula that Adi Shankara, the great architect of Advaita Vedānta, would systematise some twelve centuries later, in a sentence drawing out all its ontological consequences: ‘Brahman satyam, jagat mithyā, jīvo Brahmaiva nāparaḥ‘, ‘Brahman is real, the world is illusion, the individual soul is not different from Brahman’. The transcendent Brahman and the inner ātman, that deep Self which Indian thought distinguishes from the ordinary psychological self, are but one.

It is within this process of sincerity towards oneself, within this demanding confrontation devoid of judgement, crossed only by the loving gaze of that ‘eye in which G-d sees me’, which is the very eye by which I may try to sound myself in truth, that a mystery is accomplished, one that I have felt every time I have come to touch my forehead to the ground where, according to Michel Potay, the Staff of Light rose five times in 1977 to dictate to him the second part of the Message of Arès. A new strength then fills me and renews in me the inextinguishable energy which, since my adolescence, drives me to rise up against the evil that tears at the wonder of our world: the evil in myself first, all those inherited tendencies, like a flaw handed down through the long chain of renunciations of love that makes up the collective history of mankind, which for a long time fed in me the proud and domineering ego that serves as our daily spokesman; the evil in society next, the sleep of illusion that leads us to mistake life for material existence alone, our future for the extension of our living space, our identity for a being separate from others and from the world.

The second passage that resonates with what I have lived at Arès evokes precisely this aspect. It is found in The Book, the second part of the Message, in chapter 41:

This lapidary French of the original, with its simple vocabulary and a syntax that has always seemed to me close to that of the oldest biblical Hebrew, working through the juxtaposition of words that it is sometimes difficult to join by a conjunction, gives me the impression of a language of fire, as though each word were a flint whose friction against another had the power to trigger the fusion of our language, eroded as it is by millennia of lies, speculations and rivalries. Thus the brother who comes here, to the site of the events of Arès (do we truly measure what ‘brother’ means in the primordial language of the founding I who holds the worlds upright?), the brother who has the lip to speak as the I speaks, that is, to point to a possible way back to happiness for the world, that of love and spiritual freedom which the whole Message recalls, that brother takes the Fire, this Fire of the living Power coiled at the depths of matter as at the depths of the universes and of all the dimensions of Life, directly from the Hand of the One who is its Author. The forehead burns, as though the slag of our troubled thoughts, which screen off the evidence that only spiritual intelligence can perceive, were burning away, and this Fire then enters into man, both as living energy, as warming energy, and as energy that will go on acting within him for as long as the brother renews his choice to advance along the path of good and of love.

For the whole relationship between the Wholly Other, the Nameless, and the human being is nothing but synergy: if man returns towards Him, like the prodigal son in the parable of chapter 15 of the Gospel of Luke, who returns to his father after having entirely squandered his inheritance, the father runs to welcome him and to make merry with him; but if the son turns away again, the father, out of his absolute respect for the freedom he has given him, compels himself to withdraw.

What I am describing here, this intense experience renewed at each visit to Arès, naturally with the nuances imposed by my own shifting inner states from one year to the next, is precisely the illustration of that primacy of the lived journey over speculation which I invoked at the beginning of this article, in insisting on the need to widen the frame within which the judgement between believing and not believing confines us. One cannot stand before the mysteries represented by supernatural events that exceed our means of scientific validation and content oneself with deciding between believing and not believing, a choice founded on everything that pre-exists our confrontation with such phenomena.

For events that found millennia-old communities, such as Moses called by G-d at the burning bush, Jesus and his resurrection, or the rishis of the Veda, and so forth, the force of conviction carried by generation upon generation, together with the fact of being born oneself into such a community of believers, can no doubt carry one’s assent; but for more recent events, whose communities are minute and not yet acknowledged by the weight of history, only personal experience can supply the elements needed for a decision. Just as one afflicted with cancer agrees to try an experimental treatment once others have failed, or as we take up meditation and practise it for a long time before seeing its results, or as the apprentice violinist must spend hours and days training before he can play a beautiful melody, so too there are, at times, paths on the spiritual way that must be walked at night before they are lit up beneath the light of day.

To close this article, I would like to touch on one final aspect linking it to the remarks I made at the end of my recent article on Conques. In speaking of Soulages’ stained-glass windows, I stressed that their simplicity, and the fact that they diffuse light without letting the gaze escape towards the outside, seemed to me to bring the abbey church into a new dimension, that of a spirituality of stripping away and of the shifting simplicity of the Living. At Arès, I found something like a kinship of nature between the atmosphere created by the windows at Conques and what I feel within the house of prayer. Its simple architecture, white walls with a single bell tower, and its interior, likewise white, with carpets covering the floor and a bench running along the walls, always give me that same impression of stripping away, one that brings you back to what is essential and to yourself. This place makes me think, all at once, of the atmosphere of a small Romanesque chapel, of the interior of a plain mosque, and of a Zen meditation dojo. Nothing there distracts the gaze, and each person is alone in his meditation or his chanting, dressed in a white tunic that separates him for a time from his social attire, so as to project him into the world of light.

‘I am here’, says the Message, and if the I who spoke in this place in 1977 remains an absolute mystery, within this ‘here’ I have been able to observe how thought grows light of the useless words that usually turn over in the brain, making way for a sensation, difficult to describe, of a light fullness, and of a here and now that is simultaneously almost outside time. I have lived this experience several times with such intensity that here again the binary logic, true or false, that is habitual to us, is entirely surpassed, and words once more come up against this limit. How is one to describe the sensation of an energy rolling like a wave beneath your feet, when they rest on a perfectly flat floor whose only softness comes from the carpets covering it? Must one concatenate two words and speak of a moving stillness? How is one to tell of the feeling of being empty of oneself and full of oneself at the same time? How is one to speak of that distortion of time I have sometimes felt, that of an eternal instant, or of eternity coiled within the instant?

Do these astonishing moments, which suddenly occur with nothing to herald them, remind us that our perceptions, our emotions, our thoughts, our energy, our very identity, no doubt possess other dimensions, ones to which the emergence of the soul, rising little by little above the daily effort to be better, more aware, more open, may perhaps one day lend a less random consistency, a stability more conducive to a true intelligence and a true vision? I have no formal answer, save the certainty, validated by experience, that the good man awakens to a reality broader than that of our daily troubles, and that this opening is nothing other than the dawn of a new world, built upon another state of consciousness for humanity, one that will be possible if enough human beings desire it and pay its price!

And so this series of articles comes to its close. I have tried to share with you both the itinerary and the reflections the journey provoked in me, giving pride of place to the inner experience from which thoughts are born, rather than to philosophical speculation alone. This is the whole purpose of the Notebooks of life section under whose banner I have placed them: to let you feel the inner movement that precedes words and ideas.

I hope I have succeeded a little in this, at least enough to keep your interest awake and to prompt you to explore a few new angles of view.

I am setting off at the end of this week for a fortnight in the mountains, whence perhaps a few photographs or fragments of text will find their way to you. At worst, I shall see you again at the start of August.

Until then, I wish you all the very best; may the wind of love and freedom pass through your hearts!

Jérôme Nathanaël

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

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Notebooks of life · Travels · 24 min
Approaching the places, the wanderings and the retreats where the earth keeps memory of the human quest.

Series: Le Puy-Arès 2026: an account of an inward journey | Article 4

6 July 2026

To Émile L., my great-grandfather.

Dear readers,

Here is the penultimate article in this series, in which I share with you what my walk taught me, from Le Puy-en-Velay to Decazeville, passing through Conques, where I discovered the abbey church and its stained-glass windows, and then my spiritual retreat in the town of Arès. You will find the three preceding articles by following the link above, which points to the complete series.

Today I turn to what my visit to Decazeville inspired in me, the final stage of my walk, which I had to reach in order to find a train to Bordeaux. As with the previous stages, I wanted to avoid the worst of the heatwave, and so I left Conques very early, after a last meditation in the abbey church, still empty and, to my great surprise, already open, lit only by the first light of day. The stage is somewhat long, nearly 24 km, with some pleasant shaded stretches but also over-long spells on small tarmacked country roads which, with the heat added, eventually become genuinely wearisome, so that I was very glad to arrive at my destination in the early afternoon.

As I was not taking the train to Bordeaux until the middle of the following afternoon, I was able to visit Decazeville, learn about its history, and discover, in this stricken town, the scars of a bygone age. Through the late afternoon I walked whole streets lined with shops abandoned long ago and dwellings decaying little by little, and shared moments of conversation, in the bars or along the way, with some of the town’s inhabitants. I saw poverty, submerged in a kind of weary melancholy, borne like a fatality from one generation to the next, without any means of escaping it. And yet good humour was readily expressed, and I found there the remnants of a working-class fellowship that was not entirely dead.

I likewise noted the town's efforts to raise itself from the slow shipwreck inflicted upon it by the closure of the mines and the steelworks that had once made its dynamism and vitality, as well as its determination to honour the memory of the modest lives which, for more than a century and a half, until the closure of the last mine in 2001, succeeded one another in this place of terrible toil, as it did the memory of the union struggles that had, in their own time, stirred the whole of France, and some of her greatest writers.

I also discovered that Decazeville, unable to recover its lost industrial prestige, has become one of the great strongholds of street art, where the finest practitioners of that discipline come from far and wide to bring the abandoned walls of a wounded past back into flower with their colours and their imagination.

And I found all of this full of beauty and grandeur. I imagined these dignified and proud men who refused to bend any lower than their exhausting labour already forced them to, asking only to be able to go on enduring and feeding their families, demanding at the very least to be respected, to be regarded as human beings and not as flesh for work. And I wept over all these injustices, those particular ones and all the others that everywhere weigh upon my human brothers. I felt rising up from deep within me the words and the struggles of certain of my ancestors, workers and CGT trade unionists of 1936, such as my paternal great-grandfather, who frightened me a little as a child, because he had grown enormous and looked so formidable, especially when he talked politics with my father, thundering against all those who betrayed the cause of the people.

What would you say today, Grandad Émile, you who were stern and good, faced with the setbacks to “workers’ rights”, as you used to call them, concealing behind your old trade unionist’s words a heart overflowing with such a longing for a better world? You would no doubt weep with me, and, beyond our differences, you who used to chide me because I was, as you put it, nothing but a “runaway hippie who didn’t want to work”, we would be together still, at the bedside of this sick world...

Thus, after the moments of light, contemplation and silence at Conques, I found myself once again at the very heart of human suffering and its memory, as though I already needed to repeat to myself that “the truth is that the world must change”, as the Revelation of Arès, transmitted through Michel Potay, affirms as early as 1974, at the precise moment when the world, with the oil crisis, was beginning to tip into the slow civilisational erosion whose acceleration we now recognise.

Yes, no spiritual awakening is worth anything if it does not contribute, in one way or another, to the betterment of the world and to the common good. It must be said again and again, for today, perhaps more than ever, the temptation is strong to merely preserve one’s own little personal space of self-development, forgetting the fundamental rule of the spiritual life: everything that I receive must be reworked in the fire of my heart, and then given back around me.

It was amid these thoughts and memories that I entered, alone, the following morning, the church of Notre-Dame de Decazeville, a morning when the town still seemed to be digesting its own silence, that particular silence of places which lived too long on the noise of machines to bear, today, anything other than the echo of their absence. Fourteen canvases were waiting for me there, painted by Gustave Moreau between 1862 and 1863, left unattributed for close to a century before it was finally agreed to restore them to their author and list them, in 1965, as heritage worthy of protection. Nothing in the biography of this Symbolist painter, enamoured of Greek mythology and transfigured biblical figures, destined him for this mining town, which he never saw born, nor grow, nor decline.

And yet, standing before this Way of the Cross painted for a pain other than his own, hung upon the walls of a church that a businessman had built for a population he had himself summoned up out of industrial nothingness, I felt that Decazeville, too, had its own fourteen stations, not those of a God-man freely consenting to his Passion, as Christian theology proclaims, but those of a people who had chosen nothing of what was to make, and then unmake, their life.

It is this path, this Way of the Cross of an entire people, that I should now like to walk through with you, station by station, keeping Gustave Moreau’s paintings as a presence simply set at the edge of the text, just as they are set at the edge of this town which almost ignores them, and yet this path seems to tell, more truly than any other, its most intimate history.

I. Jesus is condemned to death — the city is condemned to be born

Élie Decazes, the founder of Decazeville, was a fallen favourite, a statesman whom power had carried to the summit under Louis XVIII before rejecting him brutally, a victim of the intrigues of a court whose rules he had believed he had mastered, and who found in Aveyron coal the means to rebuild a fortune and a position that political disgrace had stripped from him. From this strictly private reconversion, decided in the drawing rooms of Paris and not in the valleys of the Lot, there arose, in under twenty years, an entire industrial conurbation, sprung up almost from nothing, which would soon surpass in productive power coalfields that were, nonetheless, older, such as that of Le Creusot.

Entire generations of workers came from all across Aveyron and beyond to people this new town. Of this place that was to give them their living — and sometimes their death — not one of them had decided anything at all: no one asked them whether they wanted this industry, this name, this dependence upon a man they would never meet. They arrived, driven by the necessity of surviving the upheavals of a society grappling with the Industrial Revolution. The condemnation, this time, does not strike a single man in a courtroom, as in the Gospel. It strikes, by the sole force of a decision taken elsewhere, far away, in a world that was not theirs, an entire people called into being in a town bearing the name of the powerful man who founded it — a name that this people will nonetheless bear even in its civil records, every time it becomes necessary to write: born at Decazeville.

II. Jesus takes up his cross — the weight of the workers’ daily life

In the hardest periods, the wages of the miners and the foundry workers could collapse to a level so low that it sometimes left them scarcely enough to live on — it was always the worker who paid the price of the bad years. The rest tells the essential part of their condition: the workers and their families lived on whatever wage the Company was willing to grant them, they were housed in whatever workers’ dwellings it was willing to let to them, they bought their goods at the company store, which it alone owned and whose prices it alone set, and they had their children treated in the dispensaries it had deigned to fund.

The cross, here, is not a wooden object loaded upon one’s back for a single day of torment: it is an entire architecture of dependence, meticulously organised, in which the wage the Company grants with one hand it takes back with the other in rent and provisions, and which envelops life from birth to death, borne every morning without respite, without any true Sunday of rest, since even rest itself was negotiated under the gaze of that same owner of the premises, the tools and, so to speak, the lives.

III. Jesus falls the first time — the Aubin shootings, 1869

In 1869, fourteen people fell dead beneath the bullets of a company of troops sent to restore an order the strike had just disturbed, deaths among which were numbered women who had come to support their men, and a child of seven, whose presence at the scene of the tragedy says, by itself, how much the workers’ struggle was never a matter reserved to the workers alone, but engaged entire families, down to their most vulnerable flesh.

The first fall in a Way of the Cross is often the most unexpected of all: the fall in which one discovers, with an almost childlike stupor, that the body, already, will not hold out over the distance imposed upon it from the very outset, that the promise of redemption through work runs straight into the starkest violence. Victor Hugo, deeply shaken by this episode, found in it the matter for his Ode à la misère; Émile Zola, some years later, would draw from it part of the underground energy that runs through the whole of Germinal. Literature, here as almost always, arrives after the blood, never before it, as though it needed the proof of the fallen body before it would finally consent to speak.

IV. Jesus meets his mother — what cannot be handed down

A very high proportion of the working-class families of the Decazeville coalfield left behind them, when it came to inheritance, no transmissible legacy whatsoever: no land, no house of their own, no capital of any kind, nothing but the memory of work accomplished and the obligation, for the child, to begin again at exactly the point where the father had begun, without the least material asset to cushion the fresh start.

The meeting between mother and son, in the tradition of the Way of the Cross, is a moment of overwhelming, mutual recognition at the very heart of an announced disaster, a glance exchanged that changes nothing of the outcome but says everything of the love that endures. Here, the meeting is more an absence than a fullness: that of a lineage with nothing to bequeath, save the oral memory of the work itself, gestures learned by imitation rather than inherited as patrimony, and that silent obligation upon whoever remains, never formulated yet always understood, to take up exactly the same cross that the grandfather, and then the father, had already carried before him.

V. Simon of Cyrene helps Jesus carry his cross — working-class solidarity

It is here, I believe, that my own family line resonates with this text, for the connection imposes itself of its own accord: among my forebears I count CGT trade unionists, men who chose, at one moment or another of their existence, to carry for others a burden they had strictly no personal obligation whatsoever to carry. Simon of Cyrene, in the Gospel account, is no enthusiastic volunteer who rushes forward to relieve Christ out of pure, spontaneous charity: he is requisitioned, pulled from the crowd almost against his will, just as any ordinary man might be pulled from his ordinary life and associated, without having sought it, with a suffering that was not his own.

And yet, from this initial, almost forced requisition, there is born a gesture that far exceeds mere circumstantial obligation: that of not leaving a man alone beneath the weight that crushes him, of momentarily making common cause with him. It is exactly this gesture that the strikers of 1886 embodied, in their own way, in the streets of Decazeville, and later some fifteen hundred miners who refused to come back up from the bottom of the pits during the winter of 1961, resolved to prevent their closure, each one becoming, for the other, that unexpected Simon whom nothing obliged to stop.

VI. Veronica wipes the face of Jesus — the face imprinted in literature

Veronica, in the tradition, does not act head-on against the power that condemns: she acts against the forgetting that threatens to erase everything once the body has vanished. She wipes the face of Jesus, simply so that a lasting trace of it might remain, an imprint that nothing could ever again wholly dissolve.

Victor Hugo and Émile Zola each accomplished, in their own way and by means proper to their art, this same gesture for Decazeville: not out of any passing activism nor fleeting sympathy for a cause that would have remained external to them, but because literature, when it is faithful to what it has seen or sensed, retains the imprint of a suffering long after the bodies that truly bore it have vanished from living memory, long after the last direct witnesses have themselves passed away.

VII. Jesus falls the second time — the strike of 1886

During this strike, Watrin, a director detested for the harshness of his management, was thrown from a window by a crowd whose patience had run out; there followed one hundred and eight days of unbroken strike action, a mobilisation that went far beyond the purely local, since Jean Jaurès himself came to support their cause from the national tribune, while figures as various as General Boulanger sought to draw from it a political profit of their own.

The second fall, in the tradition of the Way of the Cross, is always heavier than the first, precisely because one already knows, from experience, the exact weight of the cross, and one falls again despite that knowledge, on account of accumulated exhaustion. But 1886 also marks, for Decazeville, the very first time the town exists for the whole of France as something other than a mere anonymous coalfield among others: from now on it exists as a national cause, as a name pronounced in the National Assembly, as a symbol of a labour movement marching towards its own consciousness, and, even though the strikers had not won their case, that victory will remain part of the history of men’s struggles for their dignity.

VIII. Jesus meets the women of Jerusalem — the women of the mining basin

Accounts of the struggle, even the most sincere and the best documented, readily name the charismatic leaders, the martyrs who fell beneath the bullets, the tribunes who came from the capital to harangue the crowds. They far more rarely name, almost never in fact, the women who ran the household and the domestic economy while the men went down into the mine or toiled in the foundries, the women who queued at the company store, who raised the children alone through the long weeks of unpaid strikes, and who wept for their dead without that intimate grief ever becoming a chapter in its own right within the official history.

Jesus, upon this road, stops precisely for them, addressing them, though nothing obliged him to do so amid the urgency of his own march towards death; I should like my own text to stop likewise, if only for the length of a station, to acknowledge the merit of those whom the official mining history has for so long left out of frame, in the patient shadow of kitchens and evening vigils. One could almost believe, looking at them, that he was already standing there beside them, long before any canvas kept memory of it.

IX. Jesus falls the third time — the underground strike, 1961–1962

That year, some fifteen hundred miners refused to come back up to the surface, and chose to spend Christmas shut away at the bottom of their own pits rather than passively accept the scheduled closure of their tool of work, in a gesture of resistance as desperate as it was profoundly dignified.

This is the third fall on this path, the closest to us in time, and yet already the fall of a battle lost in advance, whose outcome was sealed well before the first miner went down to shut himself in willingly underground: one can resist, with real and well-documented courage, in the dark depths of a mineshaft; one cannot resist indefinitely an economic decision taken in the air-conditioned offices of a distant administration, for whom the Decazeville coalfield had become nothing more than a line on a balance sheet to be cleaned up.

X. Jesus is stripped of his garments — the closure

Then came the stripping itself, methodical and administrative: the pits progressively closed one after another, the blast furnaces and the factories extinguished for good, the town laid bare of what, for more than a century and a half, had constituted its sole and only economic reason for being, its very justification as a town at all.

It is not one man alone who is stripped of his garments before the crowd here, as upon Golgotha, but an entire town of its productive identity. And beneath it, one discovers a social body that no longer quite knows what it is now, once stripped of the very thing for which, precisely, it had been brought into being almost two centuries before, a body more vulnerable still than in the days of the mines and the furnaces, with nothing left to defend, cast into a destitution with no horizon.

XI. Jesus is nailed to the cross — unemployment

In Decazeville, the unemployment rate remains, even today, higher than the national average, the figure obtained from self-reported data collected by Insee in 2022 standing as high as 22 per cent, a figure that presumably includes people in part-time work only, a situation no longer taken into account in France Travail’s unemployment statistics. The consequence is simple: the town, which numbered 15,000 inhabitants in 1930, then 10,000 in 1975, now numbers only around 5,000. Shops are closing, houses stand empty and decay, and the remaining population is growing steadily older.

No one is nailed any longer to the wood of a cross, but entire existences are nailed to a cold statistic, to that same dependence which, a century and a half earlier, had founded the town under the name of a man it had not chosen, and which still holds it today: dependence upon the decision of an investor who does not come, upon a reconversion plan decided in a prefecture or a ministry, upon subsidies that must be solicited rather than earned by work alone. None of this resolves itself through the simple passage of time, for want of some new master of the place, industrial or institutional, willing this time to offer real work rather than a mere name upon a pediment.

XII. Jesus dies on the cross — the wasteland

It was the high street that struck me that day, before I even went into the church: the majority of its shops have pulled down their shutters, some of them so long ago that the decayed state of what remains visible behind the shop window leaves no doubt whatsoever as to how long ago they closed. This is not the first time this sorry spectacle has stopped me in my tracks: I recall an almost identical stupor at Lens, on coming out of the Louvre-Lens museum, and at Pau, during a simple stopover before crossing into Spain.

Decazeville thus joins, upon my own path, a geography wider than itself, that of those French towns where the same deindustrialisation has left the same emptiness, the same high street no longer truly alive. Here as elsewhere, industrial wastelands still dot the urban landscape, town planning remains at the poorly controlled mercy of successive closures rather than subject to any coherent plan, the population declines inexorably year after year. It is before this observation, which no longer even comes as a surprise, so often has it repeated itself from one town to the next, that my own walk comes to a standstill, with not the slightest lyrical escape, without any possibility of a premature flight towards some easy consolation.

For there is nothing to redeem in this particular station, nothing to turn artificially into a premature hope that would betray the truth of the moment. The body is dead; one must consent to leave it dead for as long as is needed, in the full nakedness of that observation, before laying any legitimate claim to anything else.

XIII. Jesus is taken down from the cross — the work of memory begins

One does not raise the dead, whatever strength of desire one brings to it. But one can, failing to resurrect them, at least stop turning one’s gaze away from their body, and that, in itself, is already a genuine beginning, a first step out of denial. The work of memory that has been under way for several years now in Decazeville, in various associative, municipal and artistic forms, is in no way a triumphantly proclaimed resurrection, nor any final settling of accounts with the industrial past: it is simply the precise moment at which an entire community at last consents to look squarely at what has really happened to it, without seeking any longer to dress it up in a façade of optimism, nor to deny it out of modesty or wounded pride.

This work has taken, in Decazeville, a concrete and visitable form: a museum of mining and industrial heritage now brings together the photographs, the tools, the gestures of a vanished trade. La Découverte itself, which was once the largest open-cast coal mine in France, has been restored as a vast promenade space, which you can see in the header photograph of this article, and heritage signage there retraces, step by step, the history of the site for whoever cares to stop. The headframe has been preserved there, the sole survivor of all those that once bristled across the mining basin: twenty-two metres of steel framework raised against the sky, which once allowed the miners to descend to the underground galleries, one hundred and fifty metres below, into a darkness no museum could ever fully restore. To see it still standing, alone, above what was once a chasm of earth and coal and which today shelters a peaceful lake, is already, in its own mute way, a refusal of complete oblivion — the first stone, in short, of this work of memory I have just spoken of.

XIV. Jesus is laid in the tomb — Mur Murs

It was there, on the flank of the lake that today occupies the bottom of La Découverte, a few steps from the still-standing headframe, that the artist Saype came, in 2019, during the first edition of the Mur Murs festival, to paint a monumental fresco directly onto the grass, in biodegradable pigments he makes himself, depicting a child across eighty metres of ground. A drone was needed to see it in its entirety, and it should be understood, looking at the photographs that survive of it, that it was destined to fade away of its own accord within a few weeks, beneath the regrowing grass. A work condemned from its very first day to disappear: perhaps the truest image of all with which to open what follows.

On the wall facing the headframe, another fresco from 2019, this one intended to last, retraces the whole history I have just walked through: the galleries and the tools of the miners, the portrait of the man who cast the last steel of Decazeville in 1987, then the decline of the steel industry, and finally the lake and the vegetation that have reclaimed the site. It was painted by vocational students training in boilermaking at the local secondary school, together with the artist Al Sticking — as though the town had chosen to paint its own story with the hands of those who would inherit its future rather than its past.

What Saype and Al Sticking painted there are but two gestures among sixty-odd others, carried out since the festival’s first edition, across Decazeville and the neighbouring communes, to the point that this entire mining territory has become one of the most singular urban art trails in France, recognised as far away as the United States.

This is in no sense a resurrection in the full meaning of the term: the industrial tomb remains a tomb, and nothing will come to reopen the pits or relight the blast furnaces. But a tomb that one takes care to paint, including with paintings one knows to be perishable, is no longer quite a place of passive oblivion; a community takes back there, upon the very surface of its walls, control of a narrative that had long been confiscated from it by the offices of a Company now gone.

On the wall of the Jean Moulin school there now stands a forest of birches, nearly ten metres high. A first, more modest version had come into being in 2019, painted with the help of close to one hundred and fifty children, but it disappeared, erased by the building’s insulation works. The artist painted a second, larger version, and gave it this title: Still Standing, Now and Forever. The birch, he says, is a pioneer tree, the first to grow back on devastated ground.

That this fresco, too, should have had to die once before being reborn larger still is perhaps the best answer Decazeville could give to its own Way of the Cross: not a resurrection won once and for all, but a renewed choice to keep standing, whether on a wall or on a grassy slope, whatever might otherwise be extinguished, for as long as there remains someone who wants the light to cover over, if only for a while, what the coal had for so long darkened.

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I came out of the church of Notre-Dame without having prayed, at least not in the sense of praying to ask for something one does not have; I had only looked, at length and without haste, at fourteen canvases painted for a Passion other than that of this particular town, and which nonetheless suited it like a garment which, by a singular accident of history, would fit it almost perfectly. These canvases were only recognised, catalogued, and named with any certainty a full century after their silent execution, Gustave Moreau himself having wished to leave them unsigned.

Perhaps Decazeville, too, awaits its own deferred, still incomplete recognition, not that of some official patron saint, nor that of a founder whose statue one might celebrate, but rather that, more modest and probably truer at heart, of a people who bore, without having chosen it, a cross that was not originally their own, and who is beginning today, wall after wall, fresco after fresco, to write its history at last with its own hand.

That afternoon, I took the train towards Bordeaux and Arès, my heart laden with emotion, filled with admiration for these women and men who had, for generations, toiled here to survive and had struggled to the very end with dignity, and full of gratitude, too, for having received this lesson in greatness, which places me under an obligation, I who am their younger brother, a poor man’s son as they were.

It was towards Arès, in the Gironde, that I was heading this time, for a few days’ pilgrimage to the very place where, according to Michel Potay, the risen Jesus appeared to him in 1974 in his body of glory, and dictated to him this sentence, which I find quite radiant: “What their fathers asked Me for on the night when they were cold and hungry, which they did not get from those who used to speak in My Name, I bring to a successful end today, for they did not sin out of envy, they kept their hearts generous.” (The Sign 28:17)

It is, then, of my week spent at Arès that I shall speak to you next, for the final article in this series.

Until then, may the wind of freedom and love blow through your hearts and your minds!

Jérôme Nathanaël

Next article : « Doing and believing » - Neither believing nor not believing: at Arès, only the doing — the lived experience — allows us to judge what surpasses reason.

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World

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Notebooks of life · Travels · 20 min
Approaching the places, the wanderings and the retreats where the earth keeps memory of the human quest.

Series: Le Puy-Arès 2026: an account of an inward journey | Article 3

3 July 2026

Dear readers,

In this article I continue the account of those three weeks, from 8 June to 29 June, spent far from my keyboard, wandering between Le Puy-en-Velay in the Haute-Loire, Decazeville in Aveyron, and then Arès in the Gironde. In the two previous instalments of this series, ‘The breach and the path‘ and ‘The step and grace‘, I shared with you some observations on the quality of human sharing among the walkers of the Camino de Compostela, and my impressions of the inner silence that long-distance walking makes possible. In this one, I should like to share with you the reflections inspired in me by two days spent in Conques, that village in Aveyron renowned for its Romanesque abbey church and its stained glass by Soulages. It is also a major stage for pilgrim-walkers on the Via Podiensis, one of the few that still offers a Christian welcome today, with masses and the liturgy of the hours at the abbey church, and a hostel kept by the Premonstratensian canons.

On Wednesday 17 June, I left the hostel at Golinhac at around six in the morning. I wanted to make the most of the cool air to cover the greater part of the 21 kilometres of the stage before the heat rose and made the walking arduous. The route begins as a gentle climb as far as Espeyrac, rises a little further over six kilometres, then runs along a plateau until it turns into a narrow path descending towards Conques. Towards half past ten, I set off along this path, strewn in places with large stones that make it uncomfortable underfoot, catching sight now and then, far below, of the rooftops of the village at the bottom of the narrow, wooded valley of the Dourdou. And then, quite suddenly, after a last effort of walking, Conques reveals itself at last, nestled in its valley of schist, its abbey church with its spires reaching towards the sky and its medieval bearing still preserved.

Arriving in the middle of the village a little after eleven, I make first for the abbey hostel, situated behind the abbey church, to leave my pack there, since check-in does not begin until three in the afternoon. I now have all the time I need to explore this place I had wished to visit for several years, and which is the very reason I chose this section of the Via Podiensis. Setting out from Le Puy-en-Velay and arriving in Conques to discover this renowned abbey church made immediate sense to me. Being sensitive to Romanesque architecture, whose major buildings are often raised on powerful telluric sites, I had no doubt that I should live through enriching moments here and make discoveries of my own. The stage on to Decazeville, which brought my walk to an end and of which I shall tell you in the next article, then imposed itself by virtue of the presence of a station from which to take a train towards Bordeaux.

And yet, rather than making straight for the abbey church, I preferred first to wander through the streets of the village, to take a meal in a restaurant, and then to settle and rest in the hostel dormitory. I did not wish to rush my discovery of this building that had drawn me towards it, without first being freed of my domestic cares and in a state of complete receptivity, ready to catch the subtlest messages that this magnificent structure might send me.

Late in the afternoon, towards five o’clock, I finally resolve to make my way to the abbey church.

Before even crossing its threshold, I find myself stopped dead, astonished, before the tympanum that crowns its portal: a narrative in stone devoted to the parousia of Christ, that moment when, according to Christian theology, he will return to separate the just from the damned at the Last Judgement.

I picture a twelfth-century pilgrim, walking towards Compostela, hoping for the forgiveness of his sins or the healing of someone dear to him. This vessel of stone impresses him by its stature, and because it holds the relics of Saint Foy, a Christian martyr beheaded at twelve or thirteen years of age at the beginning of the fourth century for refusing to sacrifice to the Roman gods, whose many miracles are recorded in the Book of the Miracles of Saint Foy, written in the eleventh century by the monk Bernard of Angers. Suddenly summoned by this terrible narrative, he finds himself questioning his fate after death, and thus his conduct here below.

Let us examine with him what he discovers. At the centre, a Christ in Majesty, dressed more as an emperor than as a god, sits at the heart of a mandorla composed of seven concentric almond shapes that seem less to enclose him than to trace the expansion of his energy. Nothing moves upon his face: he blesses no one, heals no one, looks at no one in particular, a rare thing in this art, which invites one to pause before going any further.

His right hand is raised, and I follow this arm upwards to see what it points to. High above, a cross stands over the mandorla, borne by two angels who also hold, each of them, a distinct object: a nail, a lance-head, the very instruments of the torment suffered by this body before it became this impassive judge. The throne of the parousia, from which Christ prepares to judge the world, is exactly the instrument on which the world put him to death. This cross, raised like a standard, calls to mind the trophies of antiquity, those posts on which victors hung the weapons of the vanquished foe: Christ does not return only as judge, he returns as victor, and what he has vanquished becomes a mark of glory. On either side, two angels blow into long oliphants, the trumpets of the Last Judgement, and in them I also hear the shofar sounded in synagogues during the month of Elul, which precedes Yom Kippur, a day improperly called the Day of Great Atonement when it is above all the day of great self-examination.

Christ’s right hand, before it is lost towards the sky, also opens onto what stands at its own level, on that same side: a procession advances, led by a woman with joined hands whom I recognise by her simplicity as the Virgin Mary, even before making out, carved on the scroll an angel unfurls above her: Humilitas, Humility, not a title of glory but the virtue of the handmaid who effaces herself before what she serves.

Behind her, Saint Peter holds a key, doubtless that of the gate of Paradise visible further below. Then comes a figure leaning on a long staff, whom I take, without certainty, to be Dadon, the first hermit of the place, then a churchman holding a crozier, an abbot rather than a bishop, from what I know of the history of this site. His hand holds that of a last figure bearing a sceptre carved with a fleur-de-lys: Charlemagne, the legendary emperor whose generosity towards the abbey is matched only by the audacity of including him in this procession of saints. This gesture of the guiding hand I notice only now: it is not his own steps that carry the emperor towards Christ, it is the hand of this churchman. Even the powerful, the stone seems to say, need someone to lead them, and one senses here the power once held by Catholic prelates, who crowned, and at times even commanded, the kings and emperors who had become their armed arm.

Above this group, an angel unfurls a second scroll, Caritas, Charity: a quiet form of justice on the sculptor’s part, reserving for this churchman and for the one he leads the virtue that gives without counting the cost, rather than the sterner humility of the woman who opens the procession.

His left hand, meanwhile, opens onto a wholly different landscape, at this same height. An angel there holds an open book on which a Latin inscription, half effaced, may still be made out: ‘Signatur liber vitae’, ‘the book of life is sealed’. The Apocalypse makes this the evidence in the trial being played out here, each soul judged according to what is written within it, and I recognise in it the echo of what every Jew hopes for during the Days of Awe that separate Rosh Hashanah from Yom Kippur: to be inscribed, then sealed, in that same Book. The same image, in two worlds once wholly apart.

Beside this angel, two others stand on guard, one armed with a sword and shield, the other with a lance, and I think of the cherubim of Genesis, posted at the entrance to the garden of Eden, the flaming sword forever barring the way to the Tree of Life. Here, it is no longer a garden that is being guarded but the very gate of paradise: these angels are holding back, in the most literal sense, the already seething throng of the damned pressing at the frontiers of hell.

I return to Christ, and only then do I notice what is taking place just beneath his feet, perhaps the most intimate scene of the whole tympanum: an archangel holds a two-pan balance, which calls to mind the weighing of souls in the frescoes of ancient Egypt, while a small demon with a sly smile discreetly presses a finger on one pan to tip the scale. This tiny gesture, almost comic amid such solemnity, seems to me the truest possible depiction of our small inner negotiations, that part of ourselves which, at the very moment of assessing itself with sincerity, still seeks to falsify the result. Deceiving oneself is one of the first obstacles, and one of the hardest to overcome, along the spiritual path.

After this weighing, the eye need only follow the slope of the lintel to understand which side gives way to ruin. To Christ’s left, everything comes apart: a shaggy demon armed with a club drives a throng of naked, damned souls towards a monstrous, gaping mouth. Hell is shown here not as a place one enters but as a mouth that digests, which shifts the question from punishment to the more disturbing one of the dissolution of all individual form. It is worth recalling here that the first word for sin in the Hebrew of the Torah, ḥet, denotes an error of direction rather than a codified moral notion: hell, as the consequence of its accumulation, would then be the loss of our true individuality, of our spiritual identity.

Further along, Satan presides with an almost administrative detachment, his feet resting on the belly of a damned soul lying in the flames, surrounded by scenes in which each vice receives its punishment with great precision: the proud man falls from his mount just as he seeks to dominate, the miser remains hanging from his money-bag, the slanderer loses the tongue that had been his weapon, the drunkard endlessly vomits what could never satisfy him. None of these tormented souls is punished by a force outside his own life: each continues, for eternity, the very gesture that undid him. The hell of Conques may not be a sentence so much as the prolongation of the loss of self.

To the right of Christ, on this same register, a partition separates this chaos from a wholly different world, though less sharply than it first appears. A doorkeeper welcomes here the souls who have just escaped what they had, an instant before, come so close to sharing: they are still shown as seized with feeling, holding hands with one another at the gate of paradise. One of them, before fully crossing the threshold, still turns her head towards the other side of the partition, towards that club-bearing demon, who seems almost sorry to see her slip from his grasp.

This last backward glance, at the very moment of salvation, tells us something true about the way we actually leave what has long held us: never in one clean movement, but always with that lingering look we cannot help but trail behind us, the look that killed Lot’s wife, turned back towards Sodom, or that undid Orpheus who, leading Eurydice back from the underworld, could not help turning towards her before reaching the light.

It is only further on, once this threshold is crossed, that disorder gives way to a peace that no longer trembles: beneath small arcades, serving as temporary dwellings, virgins carry their lit lamps, martyrs their palm or their chalice like trophies without pain, prophets their scrolls, which they no longer need to read, apostles their book, which holds no more mystery. At the centre sits the patriarch Abraham, recognisable by his two sons huddled against him, Ishmael and Isaac: his bosom has become the first image of rest after death. Here, at last, nothing moves in disorder, but I do not forget that reaching this point required that one last head turned towards what was being left behind.

I remain a long while without moving, my gaze passing from the face of Christ to his two hands, pointing to what lies above and below our human condition: the heaven from which the trumpets sound that rouse us from our spiritual sleep, and the earth on which we go on repeating our sleepwalking gestures, hurrying as one body in the wrong direction. I sense that this tympanum may tell not two fates but a single movement, split in two: on one side, that in us which knows how to stop, to consider life as a gift and a wonder to be cultivated, and which begins by standing at peace, without any anger, with what it has lived; on the other, that which goes on endlessly wanting, judging, justifying itself, demanding without gratitude or attention to others. Not two categories of human being, but two possible states of each of our instants, the whole tympanum standing as an invitation to discern on which side of the lintel we find ourselves at this precise moment.

My thoughts return then to my modest pilgrim: how did he read this warning, in a world where hope could only be conceived as the expectation of a paradise after death, a reward for servile obedience to an order upheld by nobility allied with the Church, each man confined to the chance of his birth with no hope of change here below? Could he read, carved at eye level, this sentence that already set him before the stakes of his own conduct:

‘O peccatores, transmutetis nisi mores, judicium durum vobis scitote futurum‘,

which means roughly: ‘O sinners, unless you reform your ways, know that judgement will be harsh for you’?

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After the tympanum’s severe and demonstrative admonition, doubtless completed some decades after the main structure of the abbey church, this fearsome tympanum that cast our poor pilgrim into fear and trembling, he now enters the imposing vessel of stone, where he throws himself into supplication and tears, imploring G‑d to forgive him his faults, before perhaps going to confess to a priest, Christ’s representative on earth, empowered to absolve him of his sins.

I too, after this long and attentive contemplation, follow him into the abbey church, and there everything shifts into another dimension. Subscribing neither to the theology of the redemption of sins through Christ’s death on the cross, nor to the power of a priest, as much a sinner as anyone, to wash me of my faults, while tenderly respecting my Christian brothers who find in these certainties the strength to improve themselves and to carry Jesus’s message of love, it is something else that seizes me and touches me to the depths of my being. This nave, so high and so austere, fills me at once with a gentle, serene energy that I sense to be of a high vibratory level.

I wander slowly through the aisles, immersed in a deep inner silence, feeling beneath my feet different qualities of energy according to where I stop. Then I sit, in turn, at various places on the benches arranged there as in any Christian place of worship, facing the centre where, at the crossing of nave and transept, stands the altar reserved for the priests’ use. I spend some time chanting psalms in Hebrew, psalms of praise or thanksgiving, in gratitude for Life, the Wholly Other, the Nameless, who allowed me to arrive here and to discover this place, built long ago by men who were as conscious of telluric and cosmic forces as they were skilled in the architectural proportions that can bring them into resonance. Then I remain there, for a long while, resting in the meditative peace that gradually deepens, as I open myself to the particular vibrations that reign here, beyond any religion, any dogma, any word.

Finally, I decide to take a few dowsing measurements, to verify my intuitions. I discover that the abbey church is very probably aligned with an underground watercourse that runs beneath the nave and another that runs beneath the transept, and that their crossing point lies roughly at the level of the altar, the place of the highest energy, vibrating at around 2,300,000 Bovis units, a very high level. Let us recall that, today, within the framework of this method that I practise, the minimum vibratory level considered healthy for an ordinary person is around 12,000 to 15,000 Bovis. The abbey church of Conques is thus, as I had sensed, an exceptional building, radiating over the whole village, which also explains the importance it took on for the pilgrims of Compostela.

During my two days in Conques, I shall also attend vespers and compline, not out of religious conviction, I think it needless to stress this again, but because I love to hear singing, in these privileged spaces that certain places of worship are, the soft and peaceful chants that accompany the liturgy of the hours, and to share in the faith of others, so diverse among human beings. And, as I write these words, there returns to my memory a text by the young Rainer Maria Rilke, drawn from his Book of Monastic Life, which I give you here in my own translation.

"I have many brothers wearing cassocks
in the south, where laurel grows in cloisters.
I know how humanly they fashion their Madonnas,
and dream, at times, of youthful Titians
through whom God passes in a glow of embers.

Yet however far I bend down into myself:
my God is dark, and like a weave
of a hundred roots that drink in silence.
Only this: that I rise up out of his warmth —
no more do I know, for all my branches
rest deep below and only wave in the wind."

To bring this article on the abbey church of Conques to a close, I have still to tell you about its stained glass, that other work, a contemporary one this time, which Pierre Soulages patiently brought into being there between 1986 and 1994.

The story begins well before the official commission: Soulages, born in Rodez, discovered the abbey church at the age of twelve during a school trip, and never ceased, throughout his life, to recall that it was there, he said, that he had felt his first artistic emotions. It was this childhood imprint that the french Ministry of Culture revived in 1986, when the Delegation for the Plastic Arts and the Directorate of Heritage commissioned him to create the building’s one hundred and four stained-glass windows, a project that would occupy the artist for seven or eight years, until 1994.

To refuse painting, that was Soulages’s first gesture: he wanted no windows that would amount to mere adapted paintings, coloured designs offering, by transparency, an image that could just as well have been painted on canvas. It was in the spirit of Cistercian renunciation that he set his search, referring to the statute issued by the order’s General Chapter in the twelfth century, in the wake of Bernard of Clairvaux’s reform: ‘Vitreae albae fiant, et sine crucibus et picturis‘, ‘let the windows be white, and without cross or images’. Soulages was thus seeking neither a colour nor a biblical story to tell, but a quality of light: he said he had wanted only to serve this architecture as it had come down to us, respecting the purity of its Romanesque lines and proportions, rather than superimposing upon it some reconstructed or dreamed-up Middle Ages.

What remained was to invent, quite concretely, a glass that did not yet exist. Soulages first looked towards alabaster, too thick for the window bays; he toured the glassmakers of Europe and the United States, without finding that translucent, shifting glass he had in mind, a glass that would let light through but not sight, so that nothing, within this enclosed space, might draw the pilgrim’s attention outward. Failing to find it, he decided to invent it himself, and from January 1988 began a collaboration with the CIRVA in Marseille, then with the Toulouse master glazier Jean-Dominique Fleury and the Saint-Gobain glassworks.

The work amounted, in some respects, more to laboratory research than to studio craft: nearly four hundred failed attempts in Marseille, then three hundred more at Saint-Gobain, not counting the trials carried out at Saint-Rambert, close to seven hundred attempts in all, spread over seven years, before arriving at the technique finally adopted. The principle eventually settled upon was to crush molten glass to obtain grains of differing sizes, calibrated and then fused by heat within a single mould: it is this variable granulometry, not a simple ground surface, that allows the translucency of the material to be modulated at will, without ever making it entirely transparent. Set directly into the window openings, without a traditional border, these irregular panels each carry their own unevenness, their patches of greater or lesser density, their very imperfections becoming the signature of each piece within the unity of the whole. The saddle bars, the metal frames that usually support a stained-glass window without ever claiming a place within it, are here fully integrated into the composition: Soulages compared the rhythm of their undulating lines to a breath, a silent melody running through each bay in dialogue with the eleventh-century Romanesque volumes.

Coloured despite itself by the red and ochre sandstone of the stone and by the blue schist of the surrounding landscape, this glass, colourless in itself, composes, hour after hour and season after season, a light that Soulages wanted to carry contemplation, silence, concentration, inwardness, not a further decoration added to the Romanesque building, but a continuing dialogue with it, eight centuries after other hands had carved, on the neighbouring tympanum, a wholly different vision of the relation between stone and light.

Soulages’s stained glass forms, indeed, a striking counterpoint to the iconography of the tympanum: on one side, a Romanesque art that narrates and judges, on the other a contemporary, abstract art that falls silent and simply lets the light do its work, two spiritual regimes within a single building, separated by nine centuries, one cataphatic (which speaks and shows), the other apophatic (which withdraws to make room). Together they transform the abbey church into a prodigious place of inwardness, inviting an exploration of the self according to our own inner fluctuations, ceaselessly drawing our gaze back within, letting us taste only the modulations of light upon our quieted soul, allowing us to escape the distraction that biblical representations would have constituted, so as to leave us open before the Mystery.

Through this sublime work, it seemed to me that Soulages had brought the abbey church into a new dimension, transforming a place inhabited by ancient representations of the divine into a renewed place, enjoying a great upward projection already favoured by the sobriety of Romanesque art, but perhaps even more so by an approach that meets the simplicity of Zen. This work also recalls to us the affirmation that the Wholly Other remains beyond all representation, whether pictorial or conceptual, as it is said in the Decalogue:

Soulages’s stained glass thus opens for us, on the very site where a magnificent tympanum saturates us with images born of theological reflection, onto a spirituality of stripping-away and of the Living’s shifting simplicity.

It is perhaps this contrast, between an ancient spirituality, still full of teaching for anyone who wishes to make of it a path of real progress, and the spirituality yet to be born that these innovative windows suggest, which seem to me to resonate with the wake of the twentieth century’s Words of Life, such as Dialogues with the Angel or The Sign, that will remain for me the most fruitful experience of my stay in Conques.

That is all for today! In the next article, I shall tell you about my discovery of Decazeville, a former mining and steel town now in decline, struggling to find a second wind, whose history genuinely moved me, for among my forebears I count workers and trade unionists, such as my paternal great-grandfather, who was a committed activist in the CGT during the time of the french Popular Front.

Until then, fair winds to you all,

Jérôme Nathanaël

Next article : « Memory and the walls », Decazeville, a stricken mining town, Gustave Moreau's Stations of the Cross, and street art.

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

To continue

Have you known a place where something within you fell silent, shifted, or was illuminated in a particular way? Share this living experience in the comments to invite us into movement.

If you would like to say more about a place that matters to you, a contribution of around a page for the Waymakers section. It will be published under your initials, a pseudonym, or anonymously, as you wish. Other readers will be able to respond to it and enter into dialogue with you.

New here? The Opening page introduces the author, the project, how to take part, contact details and the calendar.

Article disponible en français
Notebooks of life · Travels · 12 min
Approaching the places, the wanderings and the retreats where the earth keeps memory of the human quest.

Series: Le Puy-Arès 2026: an account of an inward journey | Article 2

1 July 2026

Dear readers,

At the end of ‘The breach and the path‘, I promised to return to the spiritual benefits of walking as I experienced them during those ten days on the Via Podiensis. I venture into it today, with the caution the task demands and which I already explained at length in the previous article: to speak of the fruits of an intimate experience is always a perilous exercise, for neither the body nor the inner life lends itself easily to translation into concepts, and what I lived through those kilometres resists, in part, the putting into words I am nonetheless about to attempt.

I remember precisely the moment I felt that something was happening which no longer belonged to the order of mere physical exercise. It was towards the end of the first day, somewhere before Saint-Privat-d’Allier, under a fine rain that could not decide whether to stop or to worsen. My feet already ached a little, I had already covered some twenty kilometres, with a few unpleasant stretches along tarmacked country roads, my pack suddenly felt heavier than at the outset, and yet, quite suddenly, I sensed a kind of calm settling in, an inner release that had no connection with the state of my body.

It is this strange dissociation between the fatigue that persists and the peace that settles in despite it, almost alongside it, that reminded me of what I find on every long walk along a GR trail: walking does not act by suppressing the discomforts of existence, it works a profound change upon what discomfort means.

By the second day, I felt my habitual concerns, my responsibilities, the files left pending in Paris, receding at a speed I no longer knew to be possible, not that I had forgotten them, but they had ceased to be the reference points from which I thought of myself. I had become, quite simply, a walker among other walkers, reduced to elementary concerns, the next fountain, the state of the weather, the distance to the hostel, and this lightening, far from impoverishing me, made me available in a way that is difficult for me to attain in my city life.

There was something here like a shedding of self without a loss of self, a furlough from my own history, a temporary suspension of the multiple identities, professional, social, familial and others, in which, like all of us, I ordinarily hold myself. This happy effacement of my habitual identities was nonetheless nothing like an annihilation or a troubling depersonalisation: it was rather a setting-down, in the sense that one sets down a burden one had been carrying without even being aware of it.

The ego does not die on the path, but it loses, for a time, its function as vigilant guardian, that ever-watchful instance which assesses, compares, protects and, in so doing, separates. This progressive stripping-away joins what the desert traditions, whether the Desert Fathers of Egypt, the Sufis walking towards Mecca across the arid expanses, or Jesus’s forty days in the desert before his public life, have always recounted: the physical trial of privation creates the conditions for an inner freedom that no reasoning, however rigorous, manages to produce on its own.

Before setting out, I was wary of the very idea that long walks might be raised to the rank of a genuine spiritual exercise, fearing I would find in it a rather facile celebration of a gesture that is otherwise so ordinary, so apparently devoid of any symbolic weight. I have practised Buddhist walking meditation, slow and deeply inward, but it is practised over relatively short durations and without a load, whereas this time it was a matter of walking for several days, without any particular demand for attention, but carrying, over long distances, a pack that, even reduced to the bare minimum of equipment, remains far heavier than for a single day’s outing in the high mountains.

I had to revise that judgement within the first few days. There exists an alchemy between mind and body that sedentary life habitually dissociates, shutting each into its own register, the one busy, agitated, turned towards anticipation, the other reduced to a function of transport, almost forgotten so long as it does not fail. There, I was able to recover, step after step, that accord between the rhythm of the walking and the rhythm of reflection: a moment when thought ceases to run ahead of the body or trail behind it, when it matches the step exactly, neither faster nor slower, in a kind of synchrony that produces a mental calm which seated meditation, though practised for years, has rarely given me with such self-evidence.

There is an almost mechanical explanation for this, which I offer without pretending to exhaust its complexity: the deliberate slowness of the step imposes upon the mind a tempo it does not choose but to which it ends by submitting, and this rhythmic constraint, far from being a hindrance, liberates a form of deep thought, less agitated by the rapid associations and anticipatory anxieties that clutter our urban daily life.

I do not claim that all my thoughts, during those ten days, were of this contemplative quality. There were hours when I was confronted with the weariness of walking, when I counted the remaining kilometres, along with fairly banal inner conversations about the rising heat or the aches in my feet. But these moments of more intense presence, when they occurred, had a clarity I have found in no other practice.

This synchrony between step and thought found a further extension in another register, that of solitude itself. There is a difference in nature between imposed isolation, the kind one knows in a city where one can feel dreadfully alone in the midst of the crowd, and chosen solitude, which excludes no one but depends on no one either to feel fully alive. It was the latter I practised on the path, walking alone most of the time, by choice as much as by circumstance, and it was nothing like an ordeal to be overcome: it is a territory I know and have long appreciated, the very one my long-standing meditative practices had already taught me to inhabit without unease, seated, motionless, eyes half closed.

But walking added to this what stillness does not give: its incarnation in movement. The hours spent without exchanging a word, sometimes three or four hours at a stretch along the least frequented sections between two stages, produced an inner silence of the same nature as that of the most austere retreats, traversed this time by the body in motion, by the changing landscape, by the very fatigue that became an object of attention among others rather than a discomfort to be ignored.

Thus, walking alone, for long stretches, through a landscape that renews itself without ever demanding anything from you in return, prolonged within my body what meditative practice had already laid down in my mind, a psychic sobriety, a capacity to find myself fully sufficient unto myself in the absence of any outward gaze to confirm it. If the path taught me nothing fundamentally new on this point, it offered this already acquired sobriety a moving ground on which to exercise itself differently.

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I would not wish, however, to idealise this ten-day walking experience to the point of erasing what was harsh about it. Prolonged walking hurts, in a quite concrete way, and this pain is not a detail one could dispense with while keeping the benefits: it is, I believe, one of their conditions. René Daumal, in his reading of the ascent of summits, saw in it a living metaphor as much as a concrete practice of inner elevation, requiring conscious effort and a form of freely consented suffering as prerequisites to any authentic transformation.

I climbed no summits during those days of walking — the Aubrac plateau, despite its 1,369 metres, remains almost deceptively gentle compared with the Écrins, which I love more — but I found there the same logic on a reduced scale: it was precisely because the body suffered a little, because each stage demanded a real and renewed effort, that the mind consented to let go of its habitual resistances. A discipline too comfortable, I suspect, would not have produced the same effect. There is, in asceticism, whatever tradition carries it, this true intuition that the crossing of a physical threshold opens a corresponding inner threshold, and that, often, one does not go without the other.

But what perhaps unsettled me most was the way my perception of time ceased to function as usual. I do not mean here some ecstasy outside time, nothing so spectacular, but a strange impression of dilation, where a day of walking, six or seven hours during which almost nothing objectively noteworthy occurred, nonetheless seemed to me to contain more lived reality than certain days of my ordinary existence, in which I am sometimes occupied with managing the absurd constraints imposed by the workings of society. It is not, of course, that time was truly dilated, but rather that my attention, freed from its habitual solicitations, screens, notifications, various obligations fragmented into dozens of daily micro-decisions, finally settled upon what was there, before it, with an unaccustomed acuity.

Every stone on the path, every cloud, every greeting exchanged with another walker became a complete event in itself, unattached to what had preceded it and not anxiously projected towards what would follow. This is perhaps, more than anything else, what the contemplative traditions call presence: not an absence of thought, but a thought that ceases to flee the instant in which it finds itself, an attention to the almost nothing that then takes on its true, full dimension.

I have already recounted, in my previous piece, how struck I was by the spontaneity of my exchanges with the other walkers, and I do not wish to return to it in detail. But I must point out that this relational quality constitutes, in my eyes, a spiritual benefit in its own right, an unexpected grace, and not a merely pleasant side effect of walking.

Surveys conducted on the Camino de Santiago indicate that only around four walkers in ten set out for explicitly spiritual reasons, the other motivations falling under sport, tourism or a simple need for a break, and yet, whatever the initial motivations, the dimension of self-transcendence remains what pilgrims most unanimously report as the fruit of the experience. I verified this every evening, in the shared kitchens of the hostels, where strangers spoke of themselves with a frankness that would have been unthinkable in any other social context.

It is not so much that the path makes people better than they are; it is rather that it temporarily strips away the layers of social caution which, in ordinary times, prevent us from showing ourselves as we are. And this reciprocal unveiling, fragile and temporary, seemed to me an authentic experience of communion, in the most stripped-down sense of the term, not the ritual communion of an assembly of believers sharing a single symbol, but the more elementary communion of tired bodies recognising, in other tired bodies, a shared vulnerability, a shared need for rest, cool water and a kind word at the end of the day.

There is a final dimension I cannot pass over in silence, because it questions my own approach as a spiritual seeker. The sociologist Danièle Hervieu-Léger has shown that the contemporary pilgrim most often walks in search of the meaning of his life, or in search of a faith not yet born, of a sacred that no longer needs an altar, rather than being carried by an already firmly established belief, and I recognised myself in this description, which would have been quite inconceivable to a medieval pilgrim walking towards an apostle’s tomb.

Likewise, according to a 2018 Pew Research Center survey, a little over ten per cent of Western Europeans would today define themselves as spiritual without being religious and, although I fully own the inheritance of several traditions, I no doubt belong to this sociologically recent category, which invents, as it goes, the forms of a sacred that no institution any longer marks out. This has evident advantages, a freedom of inquiry, a demand for personal verification that I claim as my own, and an equally real drawback, one I felt on the path itself: the absence of a shared ritual framework obliges each person to reconstruct alone the meaning of what he is going through, which is at once an opportunity and a demanding challenge.

This is perhaps why the stop at Arès, with its more precise anchoring and its particular spiritual memory, came so naturally to close these days of walking: after the fruitful but diffuse wandering of the path, I needed a place that would stand on its own, independently of whatever I projected onto it.

I would be dishonest if I claimed that this state of inner receptivity, of inhabited silence and acute attention, remained intact upon my return. From the very day after my return to Paris, once the boots were put away, I found again the difficulty of preserving, amid the ordinary tumult of an urban life reinvested with its obligations, the quality of presence acquired step by step over those three weeks. The spiritual benefits of walking are not definitive gains one could carry home in one’s luggage like a souvenir; they are states that can quickly fade if one does not take care to sustain them, through short, regular walks, through a renewed vigilance over whatever, in our daily agitation, draws us away from this availability to the real.

What I can say, on the other hand, is that something of the path continues to work within me, quietly, like an imprint: I catch myself, on certain mornings, deliberately slowing my step in my own neighbourhood, paying attention to the contact of my foot on the pavement, a gesture trifling in appearance, but one that reconnects me, for a few seconds, to that quality of attention which the Via Podiensis offered me without my having truly sought it.

In the coming pieces, I shall tell you of the abbey of Conques and its Soulages stained-glass windows, then of Decazeville and its industrial desolation, before finally leading you to Arès and that week of retreat which gave the whole journey its true meaning. But I wanted first to leave you with these few reflections on what the simple act of putting one foot before the other, day after day, can work within us, without dogma, without an obligatory sacred destination, with fidelity to the next step as its sole requirement.

Until next time,

Jérôme Nathanaël

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World

Next article : « The judgement and the light », on the spiritual benefits of walking.

To continue

Have you known a place where something within you fell silent, shifted, or was illuminated in a particular way? Share this living experience in the comments to invite us into movement.

If you would like to say more about a place that matters to you, a contribution of around a page for the Waymakers section. It will be published under your initials, a pseudonym, or anonymously, as you wish. Other readers will be able to respond to it and enter into dialogue with you.

New here? The Opening page introduces the author, the project, how to take part, contact details and the calendar.

Article disponible en français
Notebooks of life · Travels · 11 min
Approaching the places, the wanderings and the retreats where the earth keeps memory of the human quest.

Series: Le Puy-Arès 2026: an account of an inward journey | Article 1

29 June 2026

Dear readers,

Here I am, back at my writing table. I have reopened my laptop, which had lain dormant since the 8th of June, and found the keyboard again in order to write to you. Over these three weeks, I walked for ten days along the Via Podiensis of the Camino de Santiago, waymarked as the GR65, that is to say the 225 kilometres separating Le Puy-en-Velay from Decazeville, passing through Conques and its splendid Romanesque abbey church, before joining the village of Arès in the Gironde, where Michel Potay received, in 1974 and 1977, what became The Revelation of Arès, a prophetic text on French soil.

I had initially intended to publish a few short pieces during my journey, in order to keep in touch with you and not break the rhythm of these Dialogues, but the daily walking, most often solitary save for brief moments, drew me entirely away from that project. Then the time of inward retreat at Arès finished off my resolve to abandon it, and so I decided to wait until my return to the Paris region before sharing with you a few impressions of this period. After three weeks of total disconnection, from current affairs as much as from social media, I feel this afternoon something like an unease at changing garments, at setting aside those of the walker and the man at prayer, confronted with nothing but his own inward solitude and the mystery of the Wholly Other, in order to put on once more those of the author who would wish to say, with words, those poor stammering and clumsy witnesses, what he has gleaned by way of teaching during these moments of life.

For as soon as we leave the language of objects to enter that of ideas or of the inner life, the incommunicable part increases, for want of a shared experience to fill the words used with meaning. One and the same word may then, depending on the person, cover meanings that are wholly contrary, or trigger mental reflexes that render it inaudible when another word would have aroused interest. Draw up the list of words thus rendered unusable, as sources of confusion or misunderstanding, and you find yourself reduced to a language of staggering poverty!

One must therefore take the risk of being misunderstood, or of being stamped with some more or less comfortable label, which will shut you into a dark and narrow room from which it will be difficult to escape. Moreover, in this age of TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, channel-hopping is the order of the day, and a form of house arrest, being confined to one’s assigned category, has become common practice. The temptation to remain silent would thus be great, were it not for the will that drives me, without any desire to shine, to contribute however little towards pointing to horizons of hope and renewal, and towards seeking out spaces for dialogue and spiritual progress.

Happily, this difficulty in communicating a complex thought or subtle feelings without provoking misunderstanding proves to be lessened with those who read me regularly, who grow accustomed to my language and wish to penetrate my thought and my world. So thank you, my dear readers, whom I have made it a habit to picture reading me, in order to encourage myself to continue this work of writing. It is therefore with greater joy and momentum that I now continue this text.

To come to the heart of the matter, I must explain why I chose to walk this section of the Camino de Santiago rather than follow another waymarked trail, as I have done in the past. I might, for instance, have returned to the GR of the Écrins or the Queyras, where the elevation gain and loss can exceed 1,000 metres within a single day, where the passes can rise to 2,900, and which correspond more closely to my love of mountains and high places, rather than choosing this path of modest slopes, with a maximum ascent of 550 metres, culminating at 1,369 metres on the Aubrac plateau.

But I wished to discover this pilgrim way, one of the great constructions of western medieval civilisation, in which the religious and the political did not merely intersect but were intimately interwoven at every stage of its history. Walked from the ninth to the seventeenth century by millions of pilgrims in search of the forgiveness of sins, of graces for the departed, and of some form of direct communication with the divine, the pilgrimage to Compostela then underwent a long decline before being reborn from 1987 onward, the year in which the Council of Europe proclaimed the Camino de Santiago the ‘first European cultural route’. The contemporary pilgrimage, undertaken by millions of walkers whose motivations blend spiritual quest, sporting challenge and self-discovery, thus perpetuates this founding tension between the intimate and the collective, between the inward path and the construction of a civilisational identity.

Walking a section of the Via Podiensis, which links Le Puy-en-Velay to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, one of the two most frequented routes along with the one setting out from Vézelay, thus allowed me to combine meditative and spiritual walking with meeting today’s walker-pilgrims, so as to question them about their motivations and their experiences. I had even planned to conduct a few interviews before abandoning the idea, thinking that spontaneous exchanges would be less formal and more authentic, and above all less intrusive.

And so, each day, whether by chance at a meal stop, near a fountain, or in the evening at the pilgrim hostel, I was able to talk with a good many people, around forty in all, in conversations that were at times long and searching, reaching into personal and intimate matters, and at other times more concise and superficial, but always with a quality of spontaneity and simplicity that stands as one of the strongest observations I made during the journey. I always perceived in those I spoke with, whose differences of culture, sensibility or social standing were quickly apparent, the same need for humanity and authenticity, as though the mere fact of being on this path already created a common bond strong enough to venture sharing and exchange. Affinities of varying strength might reveal themselves, sometimes limiting the depth or the duration of the exchange, but each had dared, each had felt the desire to discover the other.

For the path humbles us and brings each person back to simple things, through which social masks, any wariness, and automatic reserve are softened. The walker has sore feet, he has blisters, he is perhaps tired from the weight of his pack, he will be glad to learn that the hostel is not much further, or that there is a water point nearby where he can refill his flask. And in the evening, each recounts the wonders or the mishaps of the day. People are no longer entirely separate, wary of one another; a slender but real bond connects them.

Of course, I had already experienced this among mountain folks, those one meets at high altitude, but they are a particular type of person. On this path, it was truly a matter of the ordinary man and woman in the street, sometimes even people for whom this was their first experience of walking, those same people I might pass in city streets and see step aside without a word should I address them, or, worse still, who might feel accosted and shoot me a fierce glance in return should I merely look at them on the underground.

Was it because these walkers, men and women alike, were pilgrims on the way to Compostela that something in their hands and their hearts consented to open more readily to another? Was it because they were, sometimes even confusedly, open to questioning, about themselves, about the meaning of their presence in the world, that they found themselves to be more human? I allow myself to believe so, for it seems to me that this kind of questioning, whether formulated consciously or as a mute yearning dressed in the desire to reconnect with nature and escape the stress of cities, renders whoever is stirred by it more available and more permeable to another.

By contrast, clinging to one’s certainties, sometimes even forcing oneself still to believe in them in order to survive, believing in one’s social role, one’s fortune, one’s identity, renders one more readily rigid and distant towards whoever is perceived as different, confining the person within the bottleneck of a fixed ego, anxious to guard its vital space. It is easier to identify with a role and with firmly settled convictions than to consent to espouse the movement of life and its ever-renewed teachings. This is why doctrines, whether religious, political or philosophical, can divide human beings as much as they help them to live, folding them back upon themselves or upon their communal identity.

But when a human being accepts his fragility, when he consents to welcome his questions and his inward contradictions and to walk patiently alongside the unknown and the mystery, when he ceases to feed his fears in order to honour every beauty, every smile, every birdsong, then perhaps he may learn and grow otherwise, perhaps he may recognise in the other his fellow, his companion on the way. Perhaps it is something of this that touches the walkers on the road to Compostela.

For very few of them seemed to me to be walking it as a Christian pilgrimage, perhaps one in ten at most, yet all of them lived it as a pilgrimage of life, a moment in which to draw closer to it, to taste it differently, to step outside the confinements of daily life in order to feel something one intuitively senses as closer to one’s inmost being. Once again, I was able here to gauge just how heavily the sum of constraints generated by our modern societies weighs upon the possibility of truly living, and how much this engenders sufferings and frustrations that isolate people and confine them to a survival far removed from the best of themselves.

But when the individual decides to take a step sideways, when he allows himself to leave his charted road in order to take, if only for a few moments or a few days, a new way, to walk a path inhabited by an inspiring memory, to practise an activity that reconnects him with his creativity, or a little with his essential self, then something occurs. A breach can open in the citadel of habits, of automatisms, of certainties within which he has shut himself away to protect himself and to ward off the atavistic fear of the dangers of a world that forever eludes him, and in which another, his gaze or his acts, may be the worst danger, as Sartre reminded us in the celebrated line spoken by Garcin at the close of No Exit: ‘Hell is other people.’ Through this breach, Life forces its way in, awakens our humanity; it speaks within us through new emotions, startling thoughts, unexpected behaviours.

Thus on the path, this Life circulates more strongly and more swiftly, passing from person to person, as though each encounter mended a little of what has been torn, among men, since the beginning. It reweaves the bond of trust that the first murder, that of Abel by Cain, began to destroy, and which the immense succession of violence, injustice, domination and falsehood filling the centuries has rendered as fragile and tenuous as the memory of our origins, somewhere in the womb of the sacred Earth, sown by Heaven.

It might perhaps be enough for this fragile experience, this opening practised for a moment within the heart and the mind, to take on its full importance in the life of whoever receives it consciously and with gratitude; it might perhaps be enough for him to remember it, to make of it a permanent reminder within his existence and a help in avoiding being too quickly overtaken by the atavistic impulses of fear and withdrawal into oneself, for his journey travelled towards Compostela to become, day by day, a resolute walk towards the star of Love.

For whoever cultivates the memory of his most luminous moments and of instants of complicity with his neighbour, whoever keeps the taste of them so as to remain awake to the beauty of the world, better preserves himself from the brutal shadows of social reality and can begin to spread around him another quality of presence.

And this quality of presence, woven of kindness and openness to Life, restores meaning, a direction and a hope, to every moment and every place in which we are able to embody it. It pushes back a little the tumults and the angers that roll across the surface of the earth, and bears witness that another world is possible, if we begin to build it within ourselves.

So much, then, for a first share of my reflections and experiences lived through during these three weeks. As this section, my Notebooks of life, is not intended to hold long texts or essays, but rather reflections drawn from my personal life, I shall share the rest with you in forthcoming articles. I shall thus speak to you of the spiritual benefits of walking, of the abbey of Conques and Soulages’ stained-glass windows, of Decazeville the blighted, and finally of my week of pilgrimage at Arès, at the site of the Revelation of 1974 and 1977.

Until next time!

Jérôme Nathanaël

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

Next article : « The step and grace », on the spiritual benefits of walking.

To continue

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Living Notebooks · Poems · 6 min
To write as close as possible to what is surfacing, without always seeking to conclude.

Under the boughs of the tree
in the resonance of green and yellow
I listen, motionless,
to the dialogue of birds

Further off
the rumble of vehicles
carries its human freight
from place to place

I stand here
my gaze wide
my breath tranquil
vagrant words passing by

without holding me

All is so simple
for one who renounces within
the vast game of the world

A living, gentle breath
has taken shelter in me
for eternity

© Jérôme Nathanaël - 26 août 2021

Traduit du français par l’auteur.

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© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

In echo

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Notebooks of life · Poems · 6 min
To write as close as possible to what is surfacing, without always seeking to conclude.

I am
of all departures
of all wanderings
everywhere I have known cold
hunger and sorrow
but joy too
immense and full
ember of the infinite I was
beneath the stars

I am the child of trees
and mountains
birdsongs
flutter through my dreams
I know no boundary
I eat the bread of springs
the moon is my inn

I am the Hebrew
radical rupture
the wound of heaven
has bled upon me
its gold and its vertigo
I knock unceasingly
at the door of mysteries
I shall sing tomorrow
Thy Name
in Jerusalem

I am the defiant one
slave they would make me
the thieves of the earth
who beat and kill
since the dawn of time
the number of their iron cage
traced upon my arm
from my very first breath
I burned it mingled
into my ashes
and my blood
never to forget
never to forget

I belong to no law
that tears Life
into tawdry fair-day scraps
for stray dogs
I am woven of Life
the immense Life
that nothing can confine
the bread of free Life
shared in love
Thy Word alone is my viaticum
O Father
Thou who dwellest within me
as within Thine infinities!

I am the poor Sufi
all but delirious
from having turned so long
and I turn and I turn
new axis of the world
my foot in the earth
my hand hooked to heaven
and the Sap flows through me
I am a gilded reliquary
wherein the Eternal dwells

I am the brother of Yechou
I overturn the merchants
of every temple
they nailed him with their dogmas
dragged his cross like a banner
to mark their conquests
but Life is stronger
than death and falsehood

I am the man
of the new world
I glimpse it far away
over there
on the bluish horizon
the tumult and the tears have ceased
human beings are no longer
divided competing
they have laid in common
their talents of light
their possibilities of love
all the sublime of their being

Each one knows his rightful path
none diminishes the other beneath his rule
the entire universe is in jubilation
for the children of Adam speak once more to G‑d
in the cool of the evening

Adochem hou haElokim !°
Adochem hou haElokim !
Adochem hou haElokim !    

Jérôme Nathanaël - 16 mars 2019

° יְהוָה הוּא הָֽאֱלֹהִים - Adochem hou haElokim - “The Eternal is G‑d”, Deut. 4,39

Note: this poem was originally written in French. The translation is my own.

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© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

In echo

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Notebooks of life · Poems · 3 min
To write as close as possible to what is surfacing, without always seeking to conclude.

Excerpt from The Silence of the Hours, journal of a spiritual retreat, August 2021.

Today I knew jubilation, and I danced in the infinity of praise!
O You, the Eternal, spread out over the universe,
You who are Life and Love and Presence poured forth in abundance,
I who am but an infinitesimal speck of dust in Your world below,
once more I entered this vessel of stone, a beggar in Your house,
built in Your Name by those men of faith to seek You and sing You,

I the wandering Jew, brother to all men,
the hassid° inhabited by all memories, all tongues, all signs invented by those who seek You from generation to generation,
I inhabited by Your Fire, companion to all those who desire You here below, descended from Heaven, invited by us to inaugurate the great Feast of joy,
a little Franciscan, a little Sufi, a little Buddhist, a little anarchist — but anarchist of love and peace,

and I sang, I sang, I sang…

“Hoïdou l’Adoïnoï ki toïv, ki le’oïlom ‘hasdoï! ( Give thanks to the Eternal, for He is good, for His Love endures for ever! )
Give thanks to the G-d of the heavenly powers, for His Love endures for ever!
Give thanks to the Lord of lords, for His Love endures for ever!
He alone has wrought great wonders, for His Love endures for ever! ...”

I sang this psalm of praise of King David, drunk with that Hebrew which is the language of my soul,
the tongue that healed me like a purifying unguent, the one that alone can open me to the most intimate part of myself…

"Hoïdou l'Adoïnoï ki toïv", and my voice carries my body to one side, as though swept by the exhalation of the song…
"ki le'oïlom 'hasdoï", the voice answers me like an echo and there I am leaning the other way,
the frail skiff of my body ebbs and flows upon the wave,
and the movement amplifies little by little with the phrases
that turn without end and resound through the nave…

I am weightless, perhaps as angels are, all heaviness dissolved,
I am a pure smoke rising in praise,
a dust of infinity within His Infinite Love…

“Halleluya, halleluya, halleluya!”

° hassid: a pious Jew, in reference to Hasidic Judaism, a mystical movement founded in eighteenth-century Poland by the Baal Shem Tov. Centred on the direct and fervent relationship of the individual with the divine, it stood in opposition to the rigid tradition of rabbinic Judaism and constituted a spiritual response to the misery of the persecuted Jewish communities of Eastern Europe. The Hasidim express their communion with G-d above all through song and dance.

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

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In echo

If this text brings forth in you an image, a memory, a silence, a piece of music, or a few lines, you may set them down in the comments so as to enrich our shared imagination or reflection.

And if you wish to go further, send me a contribution of roughly one page for the Waymakers section. It will be published under your initials, a pseudonym, or anonymously, as you prefer. Other readers will be able to respond and dialogue with you.

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Notebooks of life · Poems · 4 min
To write as close as possible to what is surfacing, without always seeking to conclude.

14 April 2026

Today is Yom HaShoah, the day on which the Jewish people remembers, once again, the annihilation of the Jewish communities of Europe between 1933 and 1945, and of the six million of their brothers and sisters who perished in the Nazi extermination camps. Without forgetting the millions more mown down by the Einsatzgruppen, as the historians revealed in the decades that followed, and, more than anyone, through the tireless, courageous, and meticulous work of Father Patrick Desbois — blessed be he.

As every year, my heart weeps first for the Jewish dead, then for the incalculable number of victims of the massacres and genocides perpetrated since the dawn of humanity. The bloods of Abel have not ceased to cry out from the earth, and humanity has still not learned: destruction and killing continue their cruel work a few hours by air from the desk at which I write these lines.

And so I remembered this poem, written during a silent retreat some years ago. It seemed to me that, alongside the more discursive text published today on this same subject, “The bloods of Abel cry out from the ground“, it might bear witness in another way — more intimate, more inward — to what passes through me on this day; and so I share it with you below.

May we each contribute, with our talents and our means, to the day when this seemingly endless chain of hatred is transformed into a thread of blazing light opening onto the Day — the Day of the Return to Eden.

Jérôme Nathanaël

Excerpt from The Silence of the Hours, a journal of a spiritual retreat, August 2021.

Kaddish

I heard rushing towards me,
like enormous tireless waves,
— how long still?
the rumour of battles in Africa or elsewhere,
for an acre of land and an illusory power,
so much blood spilt,
the weeping of the poor who have nowhere left to go
while others, poorer still,
pay dearly for their instant
of spinning through the sky.

I saw the vacant, stricken eyes of those
swollen with drugs,
with bad medicine or with alcohol,
who stagger like angry shadows,
somnambulists upon a land
they no longer recognise.

O my Father, make of me a consoler,
that I might take this world in my arms and cherish it,
as Your Second Son did in the land of Palestine!

Kaddish° for Your World in flames!
eviscerated by the voracity and madness of men!
Kaddish for the hungry children, kaddish for the beaten children,
kaddish for the enslaved children, violated, murdered!
Kaddish! kaddish!
Yéhé sheméh rabbo mevorakh! May Your Great Name be blessed!

Kaddish for the mothers who weep,
kaddish for the mothers who cry out, for the mothers in mourning!
Kaddish!
Yéhé sheméh rabbo mevorakh! May Your Great Name be blessed!

Kaddish for Your daughters and Your sons who have lost hope,
kaddish for those who no longer see Your path — may they return to You!
Kaddish! Yéhé sheméh rabbo mevorakh! May Your Great Name be blessed!

August 2021

° kaddish, in Hebrew קדיש qaddish, sanctification, is one of the central pieces of Jewish liturgy whose theme is the glorification and sanctification of the Divine Name, with reference to one of the eschatological visions of Ezekiel. Several versions exist, the best known being that of the mourners, though the kaddish contains no allusion to the dead or to their resurrection.

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

In echo

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And if you wish to go further, send me a contribution of roughly one page for the Waymakers section. It will be published under your initials, a pseudonym, or anonymously, as you prefer. Other readers will be able to respond and dialogue with you.

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Notebooks of life · Abecedary · 6 min
To clarify the words that orient the inner life.

Discipline: the word discipline comes from the Latin disciplina, born of discipulus, the student — one who receives — itself derived from discere, to learn, and from an Indo-European root dek-, which carries the idea of grasping with consent, of welcoming what is offered. Before it was ever a constraint, discipline was a posture: that of one who accepts being taught — not by an external master, but by the very reality of what one is. In this original and often forgotten sense, to discipline oneself is to become one’s own disciple.

I. The confusion worth untangling

It is old and stubborn. For a long time, discipline was draped in the rags of mortification, punitive rigor, and aggressive self-control. Contemporary performance culture has only deepened this misunderstanding by converting discipline into an optimization tool: timed morning routines, productivity journals, thirty-day challenges posted on social media as so many proofs of a willpower worth displaying. What we call discipline in this sense is often nothing more than tyranny exercised upon oneself, whose only measure is efficiency and whose only horizon is the visible result.

II. Seeing oneself in order to change

Spiritual discipline rests on an entirely different inner economy. It does not arise from the desire to achieve a result aligned with external demands, but from a will to develop one’s essential nature. To do so, it first requires learning to see oneself as one truly is, without distorting that vision through positive or negative self-judgment. Just an honest and patient observation of one’s own inner movements and behaviors, like a researcher recording data before drawing conclusions. Only then can deliberate work begin — a purposeful transformation aimed at accessing the fullness of one’s spiritual dimension, made of adjustments and flexibility, slowly moving toward the goal.

We observe in order to change; and this path of change inevitably includes advances and setbacks, periods of clarity and others of opacity — all of which are integral to the process, and not signs of failure. Discipline asks not for heroism, but for faithfulness: returning, again and again, to that lucid gaze upon oneself and upon the course one has chosen, and resuming one’s walk with courage after having fallen. Thus the meditator ceaselessly brings his attention back to his breath after the mind has wandered.

III. What the traditions say

The great wisdom traditions have formalized this intuition in a remarkably convergent way. In the Hindu tradition, the term abhyāsa — regular practice, constancy in effort — is inseparable from vairāgya, detachment from the practical and social fruits of action. The Bhagavad Gītā offers one of the most luminous images imaginable on this subject: that of a chariot driven by a coachman, pulled by spirited horses, carrying an archer who knows where he is going. The body is the chariot, the senses and passions are the horses, the mind is the reins, the discriminating intellect is the coachman — and the conscious passenger, the archer, is the Self who observes and chooses.

Discipline consists precisely in this: that the coachman holds the reins with quiet firmness, not to immobilize the horses, but so that they may move together toward a destination freely chosen by the archer. The Christian contemplative traditions, Sufi or Buddhist, speak of the same reality under different names — askesis, mujāhada, bhāvanā — but all insist on the same sequence: observe, assess honestly, correct without self-flagellation, and resume.

What distinguishes this discipline from mere performance discipline is also the celebration of small victories — a word to be understood in its sober, almost silent sense: acknowledging that an inner space has slightly expanded, that a reaction was delayed by a second, that an old fear was faced without fleeing. This recognition is not complacency; it is the fuel of constancy.

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IV. The paradoxical freedom

The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman named our era liquid modernity: a society in which forms dissolve before they can solidify, where commitments evaporate, where identity itself becomes a flux endlessly reconfigured under the pressure of algorithms and contradictory demands. In this context, spiritual discipline is not a reactionary resistance to change — it is precisely the opposite: it is the capacity to choose one’s change rather than be subject to it, to remain in contact with oneself through movement, to distinguish authentic evolution from mere adaptation to the ambient noise.

Paradoxically, it is within the society of immediacy and dispersion that discipline reveals its deepest nature: a form of freedom. The musician who runs their scales every morning is not a slave to his instrument: he is freeing himself from awkwardness so that something greater can speak through him. Discipline as a return to oneself is not a withdrawal; it is the founding act of all authentic presence in the world.

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

And you?

I invite you to share in the comments your own experience of this notion — not as an abstract idea, but as a lived reality, at times luminous, at times difficult. A situation, an encounter, a stage of life, a nuance, a question: anything that may deepen our common conversation has its place here.
And if you wish to express yourself on a word that carries weight in your thinking, send me a contribution of roughly one page for the Waymakers section. It will be published under your initials, a pseudonym, or anonymously, as you prefer. Other readers will be able to respond and dialogue with you.

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Notebooks of life · Abecedary · 6 min
To clarify the words that orient the inner life.

Pride : Old English knew a word, prūd, to describe someone valiant, capable, excellent — someone who stood out. At its origin, there was something right about it: the desire to reach toward the best in oneself, to refuse complacency. But in forging the word pride from this root — through Old French prud and ultimately Late Latin prōde, meaning advantageous, beneficial — the language recorded a silent shift: from rightful self-regard to excessive self-estimation, from aspiration to enclosure. For it takes very little for the feeling of being excellent to turn into the certainty of being superior, and for what sought to be an elevation to become a citadel.

I. Untangling the confusion

Pride suffers from a singular paradox: it is one of the most universally recognized flaws, and yet one of those that each person most readily spots in others and most rarely in themselves. That is because it knows how to dress itself in the garments of dignity, competence, even vocation. One must therefore first distinguish what it is not: pride is neither the legitimate satisfaction of work accomplished, nor confidence in one’s own abilities, nor the healthy self-regard that refuses humiliation. These states can coexist with openness and self-questioning. Pride, by contrast, is distinguished by its fundamental impermeability — that conviction, rarely conscious, of having already reached a sufficient vantage point on oneself and on the world. The proud person has become so full of himself that no space remains to receive anything new: no lesson from experience, no sincere gaze from another, no surprise from reality. And we only learn where we do not yet know.

II. Immobility at the heart of the path

For those engaged in a process of inner transformation, pride is not an obstacle among others: it is the one that renders all the others invisible. The proud person who enters this path without having recognized or measured their pride risks building a particularly solid illusion of progress. Depending on their temperament, they will accumulate esoteric knowledge, metaphysical reflections, or mystical experiences, perfecting the surface of their practice while remaining immobile in depth — their pursuit will remain merely intellectual. For this path demands precisely what pride forbids: opening oneself to something greater than oneself, making room for what exceeds us, and beginning, concretely, by opening oneself to the other. Let us have compassion for the proud person: the citadel they inhabit was often built as an urgent response to a visceral fear — fear of not being enough, fear of powerlessness, fear of being ordinary. Their deeper self suffers from this immobility, which gradually deprives them of life and of the enrichment it offers — until the moment when a bereavement, a failure, a rupture, an accident comes to shake the entire construction, and offers them, in the very collapse, the rare opportunity to find themselves again.

III. What the traditions say

The great spiritual traditions of humanity agree on one point: pride is the primary obstacle — the one that precedes and engenders all the others. In the Christian tradition, it stands at the head of the seven deadly sins — superbia — not as a mere moral failing, but as a fundamental refusal to acknowledge one’s own condition and one’s dependence on what surpasses it. In the Islamic tradition, kibr — arrogance — is described as the veil that separates the heart from G-d and from other beings. In Greek philosophy, hubris designates that excess by which a person believes themselves the equal of the gods, inevitably calling forth nemesis, the return of reality. The Jewish tradition, for its part, has coined for the opposite movement a word of remarkable precision: bitul — literally the annulment of self, or more exactly the bracketing of one’s own sufficiency — designates that inner act by which one consents to empty oneself of certainties in order to become capable of receiving what exceeds our ordinary measure. Everywhere, the same deep intuition: pride does not merely hinder inner progress — it renders it structurally impossible, closing precisely the doors through which light enters. One begins to receive only after having first lightened oneself of one’s sufficiency, having practiced, however clumsily, something that resembles bitul — that consent to not already know everything.

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IV. A difficult lucidity in the age of the performing ego

Our era makes the recognition of one’s own pride particularly difficult. Digital platforms have transformed each individual into a personal brand to be permanently optimized, performance cultures reward displayed certainty over hesitant honesty, and the algorithm consecrates those who speak loudly rather than those who are still searching. In this context, pride no longer resembles an archaic flaw: it resembles a survival strategy, even a virtue. Self-questioning reads as weakness, the admission of ignorance as a confession of failure — and the inner citadel ends up being mistaken for solidity. This cultural inversion makes the recognition of one’s own pride both more difficult and more precious: for those who manage to observe it in themselves, without defending against it or being crushed by it, have already begun to loosen its grip — and that first movement, however discreet, may be the most courageous of all.

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

And you?

I invite you to share in the comments your own experience of this notion — not as an abstract idea, but as a lived reality, at times luminous, at times difficult. A situation, an encounter, a stage of life, a nuance, a question: anything that may deepen our common conversation has its place here.
And if you wish to express yourself on a word that carries weight in your thinking, send me a contribution of roughly one page for the Waymakers section. It will be published under your initials, a pseudonym, or anonymously, as you prefer. Other readers will be able to respond and dialogue with you.

New here? The Opening page introduces the author, the project, how to take part, contact details, and the agenda.

Article disponible en français
Notebooks of life · Abecedary · 8 min
To clarify the words that orient the inner life.

Anger: unlike the French word colère — which arrived late in the French language, displacing the older ire and the Greek-derived cholè (kholê), bile, the humor the Ancients held responsible for fits of fury and irritability — the English word anger carries a strikingly different physical intuition. It descends from the Old Norse angr, meaning grief and affliction, and traces back through Proto-Germanic roots to the Latin angere: to choke, to strangle, to squeeze. To be angry, in this etymological lineage, is not to overflow and burn outward, but to be gripped from within — constricted, tightened, unable to breathe freely. The same root gives us anguish, anxiety, and angina, that strangling sensation in the chest. That is no coincidence: in every one of these words, the body remembers what the mind so easily forgets — that beneath the fire of anger, there is nearly always a form of suffocation.

I. Untangling the confusion

Anger occupies a peculiar place of ambivalence in our culture: we condemn it in intimate relationships and glorify it in the political arena. We treat it as a character flaw, then summon it as proof of commitment or strength. This confusion rests on a fundamental distinction that everyday language tends to flatten: the difference between anger as a signal — an immediate response to a real injustice, a call of conscience in the face of what should not be — and anger as a settled state, a permanent residence that colors every perception with suspicion and hostility. The first can be a life force, an energy that protects what is precious and mobilizes what is right. The second is a prison: it robs us of the ability to be present to ourselves, creates a chronic inner agitation that prevents any genuine reflection, and ultimately blocks access to the very solutions it claims to be calling for.

​There is also a more subtle form of anger, less dramatic but equally insidious: that simmering irritability born of slow accumulation — frustrations, silent disappointments, the persistent feeling of not being seen, recognized, or valued for what one truly is or gives. Often, this anger does not express itself — or expresses itself sideways, directed at substitute targets, with a disproportionality that baffles those around as much as the one experiencing it. It gnaws, it hardens, it gradually shuts the door on gratitude and wonder, turning reality into a permanent adversary rather than a territory to inhabit. Recognizing it for what it is — not a shameful character flaw, but an alarm signal that deserves to be heard — is already the beginning of liberation.

​II. A signal worth decoding

For anyone sincerely engaged in a path of inner transformation, anger deserves to be looked at squarely rather than denied, suppressed, or simply discharged onto others. It functions, in reality, as an inner compass of remarkable precision: it points exactly to where an unspoken expectation has run up against the world’s resistance, where a personal boundary has been crossed without being named, where something we hold deeply dear feels threatened or violated. It reveals what has not yet found its way to peace, what still awaits acknowledgment, compassionate reception, patient accompaniment toward a renewed relationship with reality.

​Those who agree to observe anger with clear-sightedness — without rushing to judgment, without shame — often discover something unexpected. At the heart of this anger: an inner child, one who still demands that the world, other people, and circumstances respond to his desires, and who has not yet fully crossed the threshold of acceptance and limitation. This encounter is not a humiliation — it is, on the contrary, an opening. The decisive question is therefore not “How do I kill this anger?” but “What kind of fire is this, and where can I channel it?” Anger can thus become one of the most valuable tools of self-knowledge — provided one consents to moving through it from the inside rather than projecting it outward, or burying it in a silence that festers. Learning to distinguish between anger that protects something genuinely worth protecting and anger that defends an illusion we have grown attached to is one of the most delicate and most fruitful labors of the inner life.

​III. What the traditions tell us

The great spiritual traditions agree on one fundamental point: anger is one of the forces most capable of pulling human beings away from themselves — while also recognizing, in certain of its forms, a dignity of its own that would be reductive to ignore.

​In the Hebrew tradition, uncontrolled anger is associated with the momentary eclipse of tselem Elohim — the divine image nestled at the heart of the human being. The Talmud draws a radical conclusion from this: “In the eyes of one who loses his temper, even the Divine Presence loses its importance” (Nedarim 22b). Elsewhere, it states that one who is completely governed by rage should be regarded “as an idolater” (Shabbat 105b), for he has substituted the fire of his ego for the light of that which transcends him.

​In Christianity, the tradition distinguished early on between ira ordinata — righteous anger, which rises in the face of injustice and whose evangelical icon is Christ driving the merchants from the Temple — and ira inordinata, which corrodes the soul and poisons relationships. Thomas Aquinas himself, however, did not condemn all anger: that which responds to a real injustice and seeks a just remedy can be the expression of an authentic love of the good — it is its excess and its duration that corrupt it, until it crystallizes into resentment and becomes, in the moral tradition, “hatred of one’s neighbor.”

​In Sufism, mastery of anger (ghadab) is one of the central disciplines of the purification of the heart (tazkiyat al-nafs). Sufi masters distinguish between the impulsive ego (nafs ammâra, the soul that commands toward evil) and the progressively pacified soul (nafs mutma’inna, the soul at rest): working through anger is precisely one of the necessary passages in this inner ascension — not to smother the fire, for the fire of spiritual ardor is precious, but to transmute it into an impulse toward God, a force of transformation rather than destruction.

​In Vedantic thought and yoga, anger (krodha) is counted among the forces that agitate the mind and obscure deep consciousness. The Bhagavad Gītā devotes to it one of its most penetrating analyses: “From desire springs anger; from anger arises delusion; from delusion, the loss of memory; from the loss of memory, the ruin of intelligence — and from the ruin of intelligence, the loss of self” (II.62–63). This chain that Krishna describes to Arjuna on the battlefield is not a martial metaphor: it is a precise map of what happens internally, within seconds, in any human being swept away by anger.

​Finally, in Buddhism, anger (dosa in Pali, dvesha in Sanskrit) is counted among the three primary poisons of the mind, alongside greed and delusion, because it veils the deep nature of reality and breaks the continuity of mindful presence. It does not only wound those at whom it is directed — it burns first the one who carries it. The Buddhist path does not advocate brutal suppression — which would only drive anger deeper underground — but its gradual transformation through mindfulness, compassion (karuṇā), and the contemplation of the interdependence of all beings: understanding that the other I am blaming is, like me, caught in the same current of suffering and ignorance, gradually disarms the mechanism of anger at its very root.

​Everywhere, the same deep intuition: the fire of anger can illuminate or consume — and that is the only real choice we are given when facing it.

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​IV. Anger in an age of noise

Our era maintains a deeply complex relationship with anger. It is saturated with it: social media amplifies it, monetizes it, makes it the primary fuel of political engagement and public discourse. Anger circulates there at the speed of light, aggregates, coalesces, and takes on proportions that those who sparked it can no longer control. It ends up forming a permanent background noise — the soundtrack of an era that confuses outrage with depth of thought. Yet this collective anger can carry genuine dignity when it is born of a sharp awareness of injustice and directed with clarity toward right action. But the moment it is no longer tempered by patience, self-examination, and discernment, it almost invariably degenerates into pure reactivity — and becomes, to borrow the Buddhist metaphor, one of the poisons that burns those who ingest it as surely as those it is aimed at.

​Recovering a just relationship with anger — neither repression nor explosion, neither glorification nor shame — is one of the most demanding and most necessary spiritual practices of our time. It requires developing the capacity to pause within the space of a single heartbeat, before the automatic reaction sweeps everything away: that space which the traditions call, each in its own vocabulary, discernment, presence, mindfulness, hishtavvut (equanimity) or sabr (active patience). Within that space, there is only one question truly worth asking: what is this anger telling me about what I care about — and what is the most honest response I can bring to it?

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

And you?

I invite you to share in the comments your own experience of this notion — not as an abstract idea, but as a lived reality, at times luminous, at times difficult. A situation, an encounter, a stage of life, a nuance, a question: anything that may deepen our common conversation has its place here.
And if you wish to express yourself on a word that carries weight in your thinking, send me a contribution of roughly one page for the Waymakers section. It will be published under your initials, a pseudonym, or anonymously, as you prefer. Other readers will be able to respond and dialogue with you.

New here? The Opening page introduces the author, the project, how to take part, contact details, and the agenda.

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Notebooks of life · Abecedary · 8 min
To clarify the words that orient the inner life.

The word “gratitude” comes from the Latin “gratus,” meaning “pleasant,” “precious,” or “worthy of being welcomed with joy.” The same root gave us grace and gratuity. At its core, to feel gratitude is to recognize that what is given to us has value — and that this value comes from somewhere beyond ourselves.

I. Untangling the confusion

Gratitude suffers from a persistent misunderstanding. It is too often reduced to a social nicety—a well-mannered thank you or a social obligation toward someone who has done us a favor. The word “thanks” comes from a different root. The French word “merci” derives from the Latin “merces,” meaning “wages” or “reward.” This etymology reveals our ordinary relationship with gratitude. We instinctively experience gratitude as a debt to be honored, a gesture of reciprocity within the great commerce of human relations. Yet, authentic gratitude is of an entirely different nature. It is not necessarily directed toward an identifiable person, nor does it settle any account. It is an inner state, a way of inhabiting the world by recognizing that life gives us infinitely more than we could ever demand from it. As Montaigne, one of the first to introduce the word into French in the 16th century, observed, it requires a lucidity of the heart: seeing what is without taking it for granted.

II. A quality that must be cultivated

Although gratitude may arise spontaneously within us, it does not take root without effort, especially in our societies saturated with stimulation where attention is constantly captured, dispersed, and exhausted. Like any worthy inner quality, gratitude is acquired through patiently reorienting one’s gaze. This effort begins with a simple decision: to observe the world differently and rediscover what we once knew naturally as children—to marvel at what seems insignificant, to hear the song of a bird, to sense the quality of light at a particular hour, and to receive an unexpected smile as a token of love from life itself. This retraining of attention is not an escape from the difficult reality of the world. On the contrary, it is a way to avoid being overwhelmed by it while keeping an awareness of the gifts bestowed upon us alive, especially in times of hardship. Indeed, for those who sincerely work on themselves, even difficult situations can become an occasion for gratitude. They confront us with our limits, reveal our hidden resources, and help us grow in ways that ease alone would keep us asleep.

III. What the traditions tell us

The great spiritual traditions agree on this point: gratitude is not just another pleasant feeling — it is an essential attitude toward existence, inseparable from spiritual life itself. In Judaism, gratitude lies at the heart of daily prayer. The blessings, or berakhot, that believers are invited to recite a hundred times a day are moments of conscious gratitude for the gifts of creation, from the greatest to the most infinitesimal. In Christianity, the Eucharist—whose name derives from the Greek eucharistia, meaning “beautiful grace” or “beautiful thanks”—places gratitude at the center of the act of faith. Giving thanks is not a secondary gesture; it is the primary spiritual act. In Islam, the concept of shukr, thankfulness toward God, is one of the cardinal virtues. The Quran promises, “If you are grateful, I will surely increase My favors upon you” (14:7), recalling an essential aspect of gratitude: gratitude does not deplete what it receives; it amplifies it. In Buddhism, gratitude naturally flows from mindfulness. Perceiving the interdependence of all beings means recognizing that nothing we are was built alone and that this debt to life can only be repaid through loving attention to our surroundings. In Hinduism, the Bhagavad Gita teaches that those who receive the gifts of creation without offering anything in return live like thieves. Thus, gratitude is a sacred duty, not a sentimental option. The same profound intuition is found everywhere: gratitude is the gesture by which human beings step out of the illusion of self-sufficiency.

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IV. A countercultural virtue in an age of lack

Our era has a paradoxical relationship with gratitude. It is spoken of at length—the word has colonized social media, personal development journals, and wellness applications—yet its genuine practice is becoming more difficult. Authentic gratitude requires satisfaction with what one has, if only momentarily. However, the entire architecture of our economy rests upon permanent dissatisfaction: wanting more, possessing more, and being more visible. In this context, to reclaim gratitude is a countercultural choice, almost radical. It means measuring the richness of one’s life not by what it lacks but by what it already contains that is precious. Lao Tzu sensed this in the Tao Te Ching: “There is no greater misfortune than never knowing contentment” (Ch. 46). When authentic gratitude truly takes hold, it does not close in on itself; it compels in the strongest sense of the word. It urges us to share this state of awakening and help those around us open to the beauty of life in turn. After all, one cannot remain grateful long without wishing to contribute to the circulation of what has been given.

In this sense, gratitude naturally extends humility, the first entry in this Abécédaire. Humility clears the inner space of self-sufficiency, and gratitude fills it with a gentle, steady light. Together, they form the foundation of any authentic spiritual life: open hands and a heart that knows how to say thank you.

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

And you?

I invite you to share in the comments your own experience of this notion — not as an abstract idea, but as a lived reality, at times luminous, at times difficult. A situation, an encounter, a stage of life, a nuance, a question: anything that may deepen our common conversation has its place here.
And if you wish to express yourself on a word that carries weight in your thinking, send me a contribution of roughly one page for the Waymakers section. It will be published under your initials, a pseudonym, or anonymously, as you prefer. Other readers will be able to respond and dialogue with you.

New here? The Opening page introduces the author, the project, how to take part, contact details, and the agenda.

To Patrick T.

Sometimes, a simple word left in a comment can shift things. Recently, a reader suggested that I write shorter, more accessible texts to clarify the concepts I use in my articles without defining them every time. I am sincerely grateful, and I dedicate this new section—the Abecedary —which inaugurates its first entry today.

On a regular basis, you will find a notion, an etymology, a journey through traditions, and a question to prompt your response — because your voice, as much as mine, gives life to these Dialogues.

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Notebooks of life · Abecedary · 6 min
To clarify the words that orient the inner life.

The word “humility” comes from the Latin “humus,” meaning “earth.” The same root gave us “humanity.” At heart, to be humble is to accept being of the earth. It is not to flatten oneself upon it and remain a prisoner of one’s own heaviness. Rather, it is to sink living roots into it—roots capable of bearing what does not entirely belong to us: the magnificence of the Living.

I. Untangling the confusion

Humility has an undeserved reputation, forged over centuries of confusion between two radically different realities: humility, which is chosen freely from within, and humiliation, which is imposed from without and aims to diminish and deny the dignity of others. This confusion breeds mistrust, particularly in our performance-driven societies, where self-assertion is obligatory for any form of success. In truth, humility is neither self-deprecation nor resignation. It does not diminish those who cultivate it; rather, it frees them from illusions about themselves and liberates them from the paralyzing demands of excessive self-regard. We encounter false modesty far more often than authentic humility. False modesty takes secret pride in its supposed restraint and compares itself endlessly to others to confirm that it has “more.” Authentic humility is a quality of being rather than having. It escapes the vicious cycle of comparison that takes hold of us from childhood.

II. A prerequisite for all progress

For those sincerely engaged in inner transformation, humility is not just another virtue; it is the foundation for all the others. It is the fertile ground — humus — in which the finest qualities can take root and grow. Humble people are ready to learn. They acknowledge their shortcomings without shame, examine their inner workings with clarity, and create a space within themselves that is free of pretensions and artifice. This space is open to receiving the lessons that life offers. Humility makes us aware of our limits and how slowly we progress. It naturally makes us more attentive to others, less quick to judge them for their weaknesses, and more devoted to finding common ground. However, humility is a fragile quality. At the first victory over ourselves, pride lurks at our threshold, ready to lead us back to old certainties or new pretensions. This is why humility requires gentle, constant vigilance—less a frontal struggle than a patient return to our rightful place.

III. What the traditions tell us

The great spiritual traditions of humanity agree on this fundamental point: humility is not a weakness disguised as a virtue; rather, it is the condition of all authentic inner growth. In Christianity, humility is the “soil in which the other virtues flourish.” In Buddhism, humility protects against vanity, which hardens the mind and closes the path to awakening. In Sufism, humility is one of the stations (maqâmât) on the journey toward God. In the Hebrew tradition, humility is inseparable from returning to our true essence (teshuvah). It is not shame for what one has done wrong, but rather, it is reconciliation with who one truly is—a return to oneself in one’s spiritual dimension. This virtue carries the same deep intuition everywhere: one can only truly begin to receive after having first cleared some space within oneself, after having opened and emptied one’s hands.

IV. A subversive virtue in an age of noise

In our time, humility is particularly difficult to practice. Social media rewards egos that put themselves on display, and algorithms amplify certainties rather than encourage questioning. Public debate increasingly resembles an arena where protagonists clash to dominate rather than understand. Yet it is precisely in this noise and competition that humility reveals its full subversive value. Rediscovering humility means refusing to be reduced to this spectacle and choosing to measure one’s worth by one’s capacity to be enriched by every encounter and to freely contribute to the circulation of Life’s riches, not by prestige or visibility. By lightening ourselves of ourselves a little, our capacity to receive extends far beyond our illusory limits, and the gift of self enlarges us.

This is what makes humility the first condition of all authentic dialogue. One can only truly dialogue by accepting to be traversed by another’s words—sometimes unsettling, sometimes displacing, but never unchanged. Those who arrive with their hands full of certainties cannot receive anything, but those who arrive with open hands can hear everything and transform the exchange into a genuine encounter. This is the premise of these Dialogues, which is why humility is not just another subject here; it is also the secret method.

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

And you?

I invite you to share in the comments your own experience of this notion — not as an abstract idea, but as a lived reality, at times luminous, at times difficult. A situation, an encounter, a stage of life, a nuance, a question: anything that may deepen our common conversation has its place here.
And if you wish to express yourself on a word that carries weight in your thinking, send me a contribution of roughly one page for the Waymakers section. It will be published under your initials, a pseudonym, or anonymously, as you prefer. Other readers will be able to respond and dialogue with you.

New here? The Opening page introduces the author, the project, how to take part, contact details, and the agenda.

Article disponible en français
Notebooks of life · Texts · 15 min
To write as close as possible to what is surfacing, without always seeking to conclude.

One of my correspondents recently suggested that I clarify my identity and state where I am writing from, so as not to risk being suspected of insincerity and to remove any ambiguity regarding my commitments as an author.

His remark surprised me at first: I thought that all my writings, here, in these Dialogues of the New World or on my artist website jeronath.net (french only) were sufficient to paint a clear picture of my motivations, my loyalties, and my heritage.

However, upon reflection, I understand the reader’s need to quickly situate the writer, especially in an era when what has become commonly referred to as “conflicts of interest” are multiplying, and when everyone, often despite themselves, is looking for simple reference points: a box, a label, a shelf in the mental library. I therefore thank my interlocutor for inviting me to clarify my “position”—if that word still has any meaning when one refuses to reduce one’s inner life to partisan alignment.

Preliminary remarks: no conflicts of interest

I will begin with some preliminary remarks and aim to be as clear as possible. Overall, I have no doctrinal, institutional, or commercial conflicts of interest. As a therapist, I do not represent any brand, certified method, or official school. As a spiritual seeker, I am not an ambassador for any movement, authorized line, or established religion. I am not affiliated with any political party or ideological structure. As an artist, I do not belong to any school, nor do I claim to belong to any defined aesthetic movement.

What characterizes me is a real freedom from the things that usually classify individuals. This does not mean an absence of heritage or a fantasy of self-creation: I know what I owe to encounters, texts, traditions, and influences—and I do not intend to hide these debts. I simply refuse to confuse gratitude with alignment, and filiation with obedience.

Nomadic Jewish heritage: the Name and ethics

Regarding the spiritual aspect—which is the living heart of this publication—I often summarize my heritage in this paragraph, already present on the “Opening” page:

“A nomadic Jew, brother to all men, a Hasid imbued with all memories, all languages, all signs invented by those who seek the Truth from generation to generation, companion to all those who want to establish the reign of Love, Justice, and Peace here on earth, whether they are believers or not, and who want to end the time of domination and lies, a little Franciscan, a little Sufi, a little Buddhist, a little anarchist, but an anarchist of Love.”

This statement presents me as a “nomadic Jew,” and I indeed claim this formative heritage of the Jewish tradition and its unique spiritual and symbolic significance.

The biblical G-d has a name, the Tetragrammaton, which, according to tradition, is not pronounced. In reading and prayer, it is replaced by another designation. This substitution is not merely a ritual detail; it signals something essential: a pronounceable name is merely a human construct, a linguistic crutch, and a mental category that cannot fully capture what it designates. It reminds us that the divine cannot be confined to our concepts and that any theology, when it claims to conclude, risks betraying what it believes it serves.

In the Jewish tradition, the primary concern is not to impose a doctrine, but rather to embody an ethical imperative. A famous passage from Deuteronomy expresses this idea with radical sobriety: “This commandment that I prescribe to you today is not extraordinary; it is not far away. It is very near you; the Word is in your mouth and in your heart to fulfill it. See, I have set before you today Life and Good, death and evil.” Further on, it says: “I call heaven and earth to witness against you today: I have set before you Life and death, blessing and curse. Choose Life, so that you and your descendants may live.”

These words are addressed to a people in transition: the Hebrews in the desert, who had left Egypt—that matrix of social and spiritual strangulation—and were walking toward the Promised Land, whose image concentrates a symbolism of remarkable density. We see humanity in the process of transformation: slow, contested, vulnerable, but called to become capable of a more just society. The emphasis is not on the obligation to “believe rightly,” but on the freedom to choose—and on the responsibility to answer for the consequences, including the collective consequences, of that choice.

I fully identify with this dynamic of constantly questioning sacred writings — not to dissolve their power, but to preserve their purpose. I view them as inquiries about our freedom and our ability to take on human responsibility rather than as definitive answers. All too often, humans have tried to reduce the Words of Life to fixed dogmas—metaphysical slogans that one must adhere to in order to guarantee hypothetical salvation after death.

However, at its core, Jewish tradition speaks first and foremost of a life to be lived here and now—on a land of which we are the prudent and grateful beneficiaries, in a society to which we are accountable, and in a freedom that honors the creature called to participate in a creation whose mysteries are beyond its comprehension.

Brotherhood: openness, protection, hope

The above statement goes on to specify that I consider myself the “brother of all human beings.” This disposition does not require any common affiliation—be it religion, “race,” nation, political party, opinion, or social class—nor any other determining factor that would obligate me to exclude part of humanity from my circle of consideration. This attitude is unconditional and a primary choice that translates into complete openness to encounter, sharing, and discussion.

However, this openness is not naivety. It presupposes, at the very least, that the other person will behave respectfully, — that they will not seek to eliminate me, intimidate me, deny my right to exist, or eradicate part of humanity. When I encounter such a desire for domination or destruction, the other person remains my brother in principle, but I must protect myself and distance myself from them: my brotherhood can no longer be actively exercised in close proximity, even if it remains internally as a fundamental orientation.

For me, this is where a fine line is drawn: maintaining brotherhood without sacrificing integrity and rejecting hatred without consenting to domination. If I withdraw, it is not a definitive condemnation. Rather, it is accompanied by a willingness to forgive and a hopeful expectation of change—not as an excuse granted in advance, but as fidelity to the idea that no one is reduced to their worst actions and that humans are capable of turning back to life.

Being a Hasid: attachment, joy, sanctification

As I wrote in the above passage, I am a “Hasid imbued with all the memories, all the languages, and all the signs invented by those who seek the Truth from generation to generation.” In the Hasidism that emerged in the 18th century around the Baal Shem Tov, a Hasid is, in the deepest sense, a man of attachment. He seeks to remain connected to G-d (devekut) at the heart of ordinary life. He makes prayer, joy, and trust a way of inhabiting every moment.

For a Hasid, his entire existence becomes glorification, from the simplest material acts—eating, working, and sleeping—to loving one’s neighbor, studying, and spiritual inquiry. The orientation of the heart is as important as scholarship. Everything can become sanctification, gratitude, and remembrance. This is not an escape from the world but a way of passing through it without losing sight of what is essential.

I humbly strive to be that Hasid, seeking to improve every day, to reach my best, and to become as worthy as possible of having been created “in the image and likeness” of G-d, as Genesis says. Not out of perfectionism, but out of response—responding to the call of Life, the responsibility of conscience, and the possibility of loving more, lying less, and serving better.

Everything that touches the long chain of humans—men and women—who have sought to return to Truth and Goodness since the dawn of time touches and concerns me. Their memories and legacies; the words with which they expressed their hopes and quests; and the symbols that structured their inner lives—every fragment of these riches is a treasure. I receive them as nourishment, as seeds, and sometimes as luminous wounds. When I discover them, they resonate within me as if an ancient part of my being recognizes a word already sensed.

I have always had long, silent conversations with some of them. They are among my greatest debts and most moving expressions of gratitude. This is why I am the “companion to all those who want to establish the reign of Love, Justice, and Peace here on earth, whether they are believers or not.”

Towards a society free from domination

Finally, I am deeply convinced that it is possible to put an end to “the time of domination and lies” and to transform our societies profoundly so that everyone can live in true freedom and fulfill their innermost essence.

It seems to me that each person is the repository of spiritual gifts, unique abilities and riches, as well as a unique life mission; and it is their responsibility to develop and fulfill them, for their own joy, balance, and happiness—but also as a contribution to humanity as a whole, as a gift to the common good.

However, I believe that this metamorphosis can only happen on one condition: that a growing number of human beings agree to actively engage in such a process, remaining open-minded, without clinging to doctrine, and without trying to impose their path on others. It is at this price—and perhaps only at this price—that a new society will become viable: a society of sharing, cooperation, co-responsibility, and co-decision, where we will learn to make room for plurality without renouncing high standards, and for freedom without sinking into indifference.

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Influences: Francis of Assisi, Sufism, anarchism of Love

Now, I would like to say a few words about the last part of the above quote: “A little Franciscan, a little Sufi, a little Buddhist, a little anarchist—but an anarchist of Love.” These words sum up many of the encounters, texts, traditions, and influences that have enriched—and sometimes saved—my journey, even if certain experiences are not included.

When I was seventeen, the Poor Clare sisters of a small monastery rescued me from a period of extreme poverty and loneliness. They introduced me to Francis of Assisi and housed and fed me in their guesthouse for several weeks. Even today, I vividly remember their psalms, their songs, and the gentleness of Sister Monique, who welcomed me. I sometimes think back on it with emotion that moves me to tears.

Francis of Assisi’s figure, his love for all beings, his Canticle of the Creatures, and his oft-repeated prayer—”Lord, make me an instrument of your peace; where there is hatred, let me sow love”—accompany and uplift me when the darkness of the world seems too heavy to bear. However, let me be clear: I have not adopted the idea of redemption from sin through Jesus Christ incarnate. I believe, perhaps more radically, that it is not up to G-d to “make me” an instrument of peace but rather up to me to become one through conscious improvement, patience, and inner rectification.

Later, I recognized in Sufism—both in reading Rumi and in my familiarity with some of his teachings—a particularly accurate, lively, and internal expression of the spiritual momentum carried by Muslim revelation, far removed from the strict caricatures and murderous excesses of radical Islamism. I am not unaware, however, of the difficulties posed by the founding text itself: like many ancient writings, it contains layers, tensions, and passages that are difficult, sometimes contradictory, requiring demanding hermeneutics, careful contextualization, and ethical maturity; without this, certain fragments can be exploited by minds in search of aggressive identity, revenge, or domination. But this is a whole subject in itself, which would require specific and more extensive treatment.

As for the anarchist movement, if I call myself an “anarchist,” it is in the sense of an anarchism of Love. I believe that the time of leaders—in the sense of vertical, sacralized, and irresponsible domination—should be considered over. Human history too often bears witness to immense massacres driven by systems of power in which a few exploit fear, fragility, and the need for consolation, and in exchange obtain the renunciation of freedom by others—that is, ultimately, the possibility of deploying their own human riches.

But I believe just as strongly that a free society will never arise from violence, civil war, or chaos. It can only arise from patience and perseverance: from human groups of a manageable size, brought together in communities where dialogue becomes possible, where co-decision-making is truly feasible, and where brotherly love is not a vague sentiment but a force for social cohesion, an art of relationship, a discipline of listening, and a fidelity to the dignity of each individual.

My “Words of Life”: foundational readings

Finally, I would like to say a few words about my foundational readings, which I call my “Words of Life.” As you may have gathered, my study of the Torah remains central to my approach. I am fortunate to read it in Hebrew, which allows me to perceive its richness and layers of meaning that translations cannot convey.

However, it is not the only one. I also read the Quran, unfortunately through translations. I own several translations and use websites, lexicons, and books to shed light on passages that intrigue me. I also draw on the work of Muslim thinkers whose contextualization and interpretation of the text allows for a more accurate understanding.

The Gospels—both canonical and certain apocryphal ones, such as the Gospel of Thomas—are also among my sources of reflection. Depending on the period, I also read translations of the Peshitta and the Hebrew version of the Gospel of Matthew. This version was preserved in certain Jewish circles that had to defend themselves against Christian accusations in theological discussions over the centuries. This climate is attested to by the Barcelona Disputation, as reported by Nahmanides.

In the East, I began studying Sanskrit in my early years under the formative influence of René Daumal, an author enamored with the absolute who, at the end of his short life, was a student of Gurdjieff. Life’s twists and turns forced me to abandon this study, but I never stopped reading and working on the great texts of Hinduism—the Vedas, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Upanishads—nor did I lose interest in the tradition as a whole, including its musical culture, which has fascinated me for a long time.

I also discovered Zen Buddhism and Theravāda Buddhism at a very young age—often presented as one of the closest, in terms of its sources, to the ancient teachings of Buddha. I was introduced to their meditative practices, and over the years, other forms of meditation naturally became part of this foundation. I regularly read the Pāli canon, as well as works from these two traditions.

Similarly, part of my life has been devoted to the study of Taoism. I have immersed myself in the Tao Te Ching as well as the texts of Lie Tzu and Chuang Tzu—to name but two pillars—whose paradoxical sobriety and sharp insight still offer a valuable counterbalance to our mental rigidity.

Regarding more recent spiritual influences, I consider two works to be of great importance: Dialogues with the Angel, transmitted by Gitta Mallasz, and Revelation of Arès, sometimes called “The Sign,” transmitted by Michel Potay. The first invites us to deeply reconsider our relationships with ourselves, the invisible, and how we act and conduct ourselves in human affairs. The second, while continuing in the Abrahamic tradition, seems to me to offer a powerful lever to free us from certain superstitions—both religious and political—and place us in a dynamic of personal transformation, inseparable from an active effort to re-spiritualize our era.

I realize how bold such a statement may be, but I make it with conviction: If humanity does not close itself off, if it does not betray the spirit in favor of labels, then this text, the Revelation of Arès, could be recognized in a few decades or centuries as one of those books that permanently shift consciousness and ethics. It would be on par with the great Scriptures that have structured our history. I sincerely hope it will not lead to a retreat into identity politics or close-mindedness, which would negate precisely what is rebellious and innovative about it.

Closing remarks: invitation to dialogue

There you have it: I believe I have responded faithfully and honestly—as much as is possible in a text that was not intended to be lengthy or autobiographical—to my correspondent’s invitation. I hope that these few clarifications will enable each of my readers to better understand the author who expresses himself here, in these Dialogues, and who invites them to exchange with him on human destinies, spiritual life, and what we do, together, with our share of responsibility for the future.

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

In echo

If this text brings forth in you an image, a memory, a silence, a piece of music, or a few lines, you may set them down in the comments so as to enrich our shared imagination or reflection.

And if you wish to go further, send me a contribution of roughly one page for the Waymakers section. It will be published under your initials, a pseudonym, or anonymously, as you prefer. Other readers will be able to respond and dialogue with you.

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Notebooks of life · Current glances · 5 min
To read current events as a mirror of our spiritual and collective states.

This morning, while doing some background research, I came across a study released in July 2025 by INSEE, France’s national statistics agency, based on 2023 tax data. It shows that 9.8 million people in France — about 15.4% of the population — now live below the poverty line, set at €1,288 ($1,390) per month for a single adult. That’s the highest rate since the data series began in 1996. In just one year, another 650,000 people have fallen into poverty.

The study paints a stark picture: the bottom 20% of French households share just 8.5% of the national income, while the top 20% control 40% — 4.5 times more. This gap has been widening steadily since 2017, and only the wealthy have seen their incomes continue to rise. France, the world’s seventh-largest economy, is quietly slipping into a level of hardship that can no longer be dismissed as marginal: one in six people can no longer meet basic needs. The growing crowds in discount grocery chains tell the story more vividly than statistics ever could.

A global system running out of steam

While France’s decline has accelerated recently, it’s part of a much broader and longer trend. Across many nations, the poor are getting poorer and the gap between rich and poor keeps widening. The reality is that our global economic model no longer meets people’s fundamental needs. Western societies, long convinced of their progress, are generating deeper and deeper injustices. These divides push entire segments of the population into identity withdrawal — a reflex of self-protection in the face of abandonment — or into simmering anger looking for an outlet.

This growing fragmentation is already fueling multiple forms of violence. Confronted with it, institutions tend to oscillate between denial and increasing control and surveillance. But these strategies won’t hold forever. The explosion of discontent can’t be suppressed indefinitely, even by force. The crisis we face is no longer only social or political — it’s spiritual.

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The spiritual call we can’t ignore

Faced with the limits of both political and religious institutions, a genuine spiritual awakening has become essential. We need to restore meaning to our shared existence and reawaken hope for a more humane world. This isn’t about escaping inward or seeking a comforting spirituality. It’s about something more radical: realizing that we are one humanity. Real social peace requires broad participation in collective life — and fairer distribution of wealth can only happen if we recognize love not as a vague sentiment, but as a living force for rebuilding our relationships and shared decisions.

That kind of love isn’t abstract. It’s revealed in the simple ability to see others not as rivals or threats, but as fellow travelers in the same mystery of life. It demands that we move beyond the consumer-driven, materialistic mindset shaping our imagination — to rediscover generosity, chosen simplicity, and mutual dependence. The great spiritual traditions of the world — Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Jewish, and others — all teach the same truth in their own way: personal fulfillment cannot come at the expense of the common good.

Choosing daily engagement, rebuilding dialogue

If humanity hopes to preserve a livable future, we have to understand this: a self-centered pursuit of happiness, restricted to oneself and one’s family, is no longer sustainable. True fulfillment — even at a spiritual level — can’t come from apathy or indifference to our shared fate. Outrage alone won’t help. What’s needed now is a daily commitment to being, in every situation, a force for constructive dialogue — a bearer of peace and compassion.

That means cultivating the ability to listen without judging, to seek understanding, and to act on what unites us rather than what divides. It also means breaking free from self-centered reflexes to open ourselves to the unknown — without prejudice, without expectation — willing to question our assumptions. In practice, it can start small: reaching out to a lonely neighbor, rejecting nonstop competition at work, creating spaces for connection where isolation reigns, supporting local grassroot initiatives.

Above all, we must urgently reopen dialogue — with ourselves, to face our personal responsibility; with others, to rediscover what’s possible; and with humanity’s timeless texts, to restore a sense of meaning. That threefold dialogue may be a narrow path — but it’s a bright one. It could still save us from the worst and lead us toward a more livable, more joyful future.

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

In echo

What recent event seems to you to reveal, beyond itself, a human or spiritual question worthy of deeper examination? Share your reading in the comments so as to invite us all into reflection.

And if you wish to express yourself on a current event, send me a contribution of roughly one page for the Waymakers section. It will be published under your initials, a pseudonym, or anonymously, as you prefer. Other readers will be able to respond and dialogue with you.

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Notebooks of life · Texts · 6 min
To write as close as possible to what is surfacing, without always seeking to conclude.

Our Christian friends, both Catholic and Orthodox, are currently living through the season of Lent, which extends over forty days before the feast of Easter and is marked by dietary restrictions of varying strictness depending on the tradition. This gives us occasion to reflect on the relationship between fasting, renunciation and the spiritual life. Must one truly suppress the body’s needs in order to gain access to the spiritual dimension? Is spiritual development not, first and foremost, an opening of our limited being towards a larger dimension, and a transformation of the self?

Fasting and health

Today, fasting in its many varied forms has become fashionable among those those seeking to regain a healthier way of life, practised as a means of eliminating toxins accumulated in the body and thereby renewing one’s vitality. Some favour periods of complete fasting — a week, for instance — and attend retreats or specialist establishments for this purpose, in order to benefit from appropriate supervision. Others prefer intermittent fasting every other day, or a more moderate form such as skipping one meal a day to give the digestive system sixteen hours of rest. Finally, veganism, the complete abstention from animal-derived products, may also be understood within this same concern.

Yet if fasting and its variants are genuine tools for improving our health when practised with intelligence and moderation, they are also age-old practices found in every religion in the world, regarded as means of loosening the excessive grip of material life and fostering spiritual elevation.

Fasting in the religions

In Catholicism, the rigours of Lenten fasting, observed in memory of the forty days Jesus spent in the desert between his baptism and his public ministry, have gradually given way to simple counsel of frugality and a recommendation to fast only on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. Yet the season remains marked by a concern for self-improvement and spiritual progress, expressed through recollection and prayer, introspection and self-examination, and a deepening of care for others.

In the Orthodox Church there are four fasts, lasting from fifteen days to more than a month: the Nativity Fast, the Great Lent preceding Pascha, the Apostles’ Fast following Pentecost, and the Dormition Fast in August. These are characterised by dietary restrictions close to veganism and serve as times of preparation and deepening of faith in relation to the corresponding feasts.

In the Muslim Ramadan, forty days during which a dry fast is observed from sunrise to sunset, one finds the same notion of detachment from bodily appetites in order to concentrate on deepening one’s faith, the betterment of oneself, and the strengthening of bonds with others. The various days of dry fasting observed in Judaism, the most celebrated of which is Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, likewise place emphasis on these same dimensions.

In Hinduism, the practice of fasting is deeply present and can range from mild privation to the most extreme renunciation. The choice of days and manner of fasting depends upon community, family or individual. It is a moral and spiritual act whose purpose is to purify body and mind and to attract the benevolent grace of the divinities. Two fasts are more generally observed: Ekadashi, occurring roughly twice a month on the eleventh day of each waxing and waning moon, and the fast associated with the celebrations in honour of Shiva at the beginning of the year.

According to tradition, the Buddha long practised the regime of strict austerity and fasting prevalent in his time without attaining enlightenment. Having abandoned this practice and turned his full attention to meditation, he reached liberation from suffering and nirvana. Complete fasting is therefore not a widespread practice within Buddhism. Yet one finds intermittent fasting in the tradition, notably the suppression of the evening meal in Theravada Buddhism, reputed to be close to the original teaching. This restriction, here too, serves to reduce the hold of physical appetites by fostering detachment and concentration on meditative practice.

Renunciation as extreme form

All traditions thus recommend dietary restrictions of greater or lesser severity, intended to foster spiritual progress by moderating the appetites of the body. These take the form either of periodic restrictions to reinforce introspection and practice when linked to feast days, as in the monotheistic traditions and Hinduism, or of a dietary regime bound up with a spiritual discipline, as in Buddhism.

Yet in every religion one also encounters the more extreme figure of the ascetic, who renounces entirely the goods and pleasures of the world. Well known is the eremitic tradition of early Christianity, in which Anthony, Hilarion and many others withdrew into the desert to live in solitude, practising poverty, fasting and prayer.

India holds a long tradition of sādhus, in Sanskrit “good men”, who likewise renounce society and travel the roads, sustained by the offerings of the faithful, in order to devote themselves to the attainment of moksha: liberation from illusion (māyā), the cessation of the cycle of rebirths, and union with cosmic consciousness.

A means among others for spiritual development

From the moderation of bodily appetites to a complete renunciation of material life, human beings seem always to have perceived our bodily incarnation as an obstacle to spiritual development.

This has at times given rise to excessive practices that resemble more an anticipation of death than a path favouring the life of the integral human being, realising his spiritual potentials within his earthly reality. But in its most reasonable forms, practising periodic dietary restrictions, in one form or another, has the advantage of loosening our identification with our bodily and material needs and allowing us to learn to meet them with measure and without excess.

When we examine the traditions, we find the same will to master the other dimensions of the human being, perceived here and there as a pitfall in the quest for truth and ultimate spiritual realisation, on account of their disordered functioning.

Thus, through the use of prayer, contemplation or orison, the emotional dimension of the human being, capable of negative emotions such as jealousy or hatred, sorrow or fear, is reoriented towards nobler emotions such as devotion and love of one’s neighbour. The practice of meditation, or the development of metaphysical reflection, makes it possible to attune the human mind to fields of consciousness that are broader and less bound to matter.

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Attaining the integral life

In reality, the human being has no need to exchange his material life and renounce its various dimensions in exchange for a hypothetical discovery of truth or access to higher levels of consciousness.

The task is, on the contrary, to succeed in being more fully present here and now, to ourselves and to the world, so as to become aware of the dysfunctions within our various dimensions or centres and to work at reorienting their capacities towards the positive uses for which they are adapted, in order to harmonise their functioning.

By thus liberating his potentials in their most sublime aspects, the human being becomes capable, on this very basis, of accessing, within this life, the integral life and the awakening of his spiritual dimensions: unconditional love and universal intelligence.

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

In echo

If this text brings forth in you an image, a memory, a silence, a piece of music, or a few lines, you may set them down in the comments so as to enrich our shared imagination or reflection.

And if you wish to go further, send me a contribution of roughly one page for the Waymakers section. It will be published under your initials, a pseudonym, or anonymously, as you prefer. Other readers will be able to respond and dialogue with you.

New here? The Opening page introduces the author, the project, how to take part, contact details, and the agenda.

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Notebooks of live · Current glances · 7 min
To write as close as possible to what is surfacing, without always seeking to conclude.

One recent evening, a friend sent me this message: “I’m watching Arte Thema, a really interesting french program about the Warsaw ghetto and those in Poland between 1939 and 1945. It’s terrifying. Yet it doesn’t take long to think of another ghetto, about 2,500 miles from Paris. History repeats itself and humans have short memories.”

While the war between Israel and Hamas has dominated the headlines for many days now, he was obviously referring to the Gaza Strip as a new Warsaw ghetto where history would repeat itself. A few years ago, during an Israeli military operation in that territory, another person had used this same comparison in our conversation. The “Gaza equals new Warsaw” shortcut is actually common in certain far-left circles.

So here I am, through this brief message from my friend, thrown into the heart of this Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I’ve been deeply concerned about it for many years and have explored its root causes. I’ve studied its timeline and know the region well, having had contacts on both sides. And I’ve seen that there are people who desperately want peace, but others—whom I believe are growing in number—who will do everything to make it impossible.

In a future article, I’ll offer some perspective to shed light on this century-long tragedy and my thoughts on its latest heartbreaking developments. Here I’ll only note that the current war was triggered by the October 7 massacre, carried out by Hamas armed militias—1,400 Israeli civilians murdered in particularly brutal ways according to international observers. Hamas, which is a military wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, seized power in Gaza during the 2006 legislative elections. It first waged a civil war against Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah, then caused the deaths of thousands more Israelis by carrying out suicide bombings over the past 20 years.

I don’t believe that the disproportionate retaliation ordered by the Netanyahu government will succeed in eliminating Hamas or enabling the emergence of partners capable of lasting peace negotiations. But I’m convinced that the trauma and grief experienced on both sides could have long been avoided if this conflict weren’t being exploited for political purposes by powerful people who benefit from it and indoctrinate their peoples.

As Paul Valéry said, “War is the massacre of people who don’t know each other, for the benefit of people who know each other and don’t massacre each other.” This latest explosion of violence will only push peace prospects even further away and will only bring a temporary ceasefire—after how many deaths, injuries, and shattered families?

But today, I want only to highlight the moral inversion that this equivalence between the Warsaw ghetto and Gaza creates, in my view. It deeply shocked and troubled me coming from a close friend whom I can’t imagine carelessly sorting humanity into good guys and bad guys. On the contrary, I know him to be thoughtful and open to the complexity of historical situations and human motivations, more interested in understanding than judging. So I’m troubled by the disturbing ease with which the word ghetto gets used to describe a certainly tragic situation but bears absolutely no resemblance to the profound weight of meaning and history it carries.

And I think it’s important to remember that a factual and accurate reading of current events, knowledge of the past, and respect for the memory of a people—6 million of whom were gassed in camps and 2.2 million shot during the Holocaust—should be enough to have the intellectual honesty to reject this comparison. Because it implies a particularly vile suggestion, and this is where this guilty inversion lies: if Gaza is a new Warsaw ghetto, then who are the new Nazis? Who are the new Jews?

Can we equate the thousands of Jews locked in the Warsaw ghetto with Gazans who could, until recently, after sometimes lengthy security checks designed to identify potential terrorists, go work in Israel? On one side, people were being starved and marked for death, according to the extermination plan decided by the Nazis at the Wannsee Conference. On the other are Palestinians whose annihilation the Israelis have never planned.

Can we dare compare a territory that has received billions from the European Union and the United States since 2007 with a ghetto where Jews were completely abandoned by everyone? On one side, vast sums were largely used to ensure the lavish lifestyle of Hamas leaders, purchase weapons for October 7, and buy all the rockets and bombs fired at Israel for over 15 years. Yet Gazans were kept in poverty, and their children were educated to hate. On the other side, human beings were condemned to epidemics, starvation and despair, and their children risked death trying to escape and bring back whatever meager food they could find.

How can anyone honestly find a similarity between a society whose residents mostly support Hamas—which declares in its charter its refusal to accept Israel’s existence, which will therefore never accept peace and will continue attacks and assaults—and this Jewish people who went up in smoke, even though they had no hostile intentions toward the Germans?

I deeply respect the intellectual rigor and profound humanity of Albert Camus, the resistance fighter and activist who always showed moderation and judgment during World War II and the Algerian war. In early 1944, in issue 17 of Poésie 44, Pierre Seghers’ magazine, he emphasized the importance of carefully weighing and choosing the words we use.

In an article titled “On a Philosophy of Expression,” reviewing a book by philosopher Brice Parain, he writes: “Parain’s central idea is one of honesty: the critique of language cannot ignore the fact that our words commit us and that we must be faithful to them. To misname an object is to add to the world’s misfortune. And precisely the great human misery that long haunted Parain and inspired such moving passages in his work is the lie.”

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Yes, words commit us, words carry weight, and choosing them poorly means risking dishonesty and making the world even harder to understand and live in. It means introducing toxins into our shared narrative that will sooner or later add to our collective suffering and keep pushing back the prospect of a better and more just society.

Misnaming the elements of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians of Gaza means adding even more hatred and revenge to this terrible tragedy, means dishonoring some today and others tomorrow. Instead, we urgently need to try patiently untangling the many knots of this century-old history and hearing the stories of both sides, to honor them and try to bridge the gap between them.

And especially here in France, allowing this lie to seep into people’s minds means fueling division within an increasingly fractured population on countless issues, means adding chaos to the progressive breakdown of the social fabric, by further encouraging blind anti-Semitism that no longer even tries to hide.

So let’s be vigilant about our use of language and careful to favor what encourages dialogue and mutual understanding rather than division and conflict !

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

In echo

If this text brings forth in you an image, a memory, a silence, a piece of music, or a few lines, you may set them down in the comments so as to enrich our shared imagination or reflection.

And if you wish to go further, send me a contribution of roughly one page for the Waymakers section. It will be published under your initials, a pseudonym, or anonymously, as you prefer. Other readers will be able to respond and dialogue with you.

New here? The Opening page introduces the author, the project, how to take part, contact details, and the agenda.

Article disponible en français
Notebooks of life · Texts · 6 min
To write as close as possible to what is surfacing, without always seeking to conclude.

Today I'd like to share with you an experience I had a few days ago. I can still feel the traces of what went through me then, the precious memories of intense, inspiring moments, carried by a fuller, lighter breath. Kenneth White, the great Scottish poet who died in August 2023, would no doubt have spoken of a breach in "the world of the open", a brief and sudden passage into a more vivid consciousness.

One morning, I open my shutters to discover that it had snowed overnight. The sidewalks are covered with a white carpet hardened by the cold, the passers-by are bundled up and walking slowly, and the sky is clear and cloudless. Without hesitation, I decide to change my program and visit the nearby park to take advantage of this unexpected event, so rare in the Paris region!

Outside, vehicles are moving slowly, few and far between, their tires screeching on the black ice. A few kids are throwing snowballs at each other, laughing, oblivious to the icy breeze that has fallen over the city. After a few cautious steps, I reach the park entrance. The gate is closed! Perhaps some elected official didn't want the students from the neighboring high school to risk slipping and falling? Fortunately, there's another park a few blocks away that's almost never closed!

I lengthen my stride a bit, anxious to find out if the snow there is not too heavily trampled! A few hundred meters further and my wait is rewarded as I enter a less maintained and wilder area that seems to have been visited by very few people. Over large areas, the snow is indeed pristine white, as if in a place removed from the world.

I make my way to the top of the park, the quietest part, where the incessant noise from the busy street below is somewhat muted. A little further on, where the path becomes flatter, I suddenly enter another world, as if projected into another dimension.

The path in front of me leads into a Jura° wood that has been taken over by whiteness. The snow has followed the contours of every branch, covering even the smallest twig in the dense network of copses. Is it a light wind that moves it? Everything seems to swing with a delicate vibration, like a diffuse, living energy. And yet everything is still, and suddenly almost silent, yet there, with a density that doesn't weigh me down, but resonates within me. A tiny crack in me has given way, allowing a breath of eternity to slip through. I'm in the middle of a solitude full of presence, free from all the worries of the world.

...

I can't estimate how long this state of bliss lasts, a few moments at most, before the usual parade of thoughts resumes on the mental screen, which for a few seconds still seem foreign to me. But soon I'm caught up in this uninterrupted flow, the experience gradually diluted by the sequence of words it inspires.

Is it my contemplative attitude that has half-opened the narrow cell of the ego, allowing my being to expand into the vastness and perceive the undivided life that inhabits the universe, felt here in this moment out of time ?

Words, which are the tools of our reflection, struggle to describe what goes beyond our usual points of reference, the first of which is the representation we have of our identity, which is primarily identified with our bodily vehicle and its limits. So it's very difficult to express, in a language based on the separation of discourse instances, perceptions that escape, even briefly, from our ordinary state of consciousness.

However, human history bears witness to the plasticity of consciousness and the possibility of its expansion, whether in spiritual traditions or in the writings of mystics or poets. We need only mention the names of Adi Shankara in Hinduism, Rabbi Akiva in Judaism, Master Eckhart in Christianity, and Mansur al-Hallaj in Islam to recall stories of powerful spiritual experiences that transcend ordinary consciousness and rise to states of immersion in the Oneness of Life.

These states of non-separation from the infinity of the living are rare, and those who have experienced them describe them in different ways, according to the concepts and words of their spiritual tradition. But they are always accompanied by great inner peace and hyper acuity of consciousness.

° Jura : the Jura Mountains are a sub-alpine mountian range, a short distance north of the Western Alps and mainly demarcate a long part of the French–Swiss border.

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We can't pretend to have voluntary, rapid access to these exceptional states that free us from daily constraints and automatic functioning. They are either involuntary and occasional, or the result of a long process of self-improvement, and are therefore of greater duration and intensity.

But if we multiply the moments of self-remembrance by frequently turning our attention to the observation of our body, our emotions and our thoughts, the result will be to strengthen our presence to ourselves. We can help ourselves by programming them into our smartphone, for example.

As we continue this practice, we'll gradually find it easier to resist external stimuli that pull us out of ourselves and trigger our automatic reactions of stress, tension, or worry.

With discipline and patience, we'll learn to maintain a calm, serene space within ourselves to which we can easily return to recharge our batteries and compensate for the difficulties we encounter in our lives.

It's this intimate space, more awake and more sensitive, that is available to receive in full all the small, simple marvels that everyday life can offer us and that we often don't pay attention to.

Carried away by the attraction of the outside world, because of the fragility of our self-presence, it's the negative and painful aspects that take over and fill our field of consciousness.

By turning our attention inward, we can redevelop our capacity for wonder and gratitude, which we were naturally capable of as young children!

And rediscover the sources of joy !

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

In echo

If this text brings forth in you an image, a memory, a silence, a piece of music, or a few lines, you may set them down in the comments so as to enrich our shared imagination or reflection.

And if you wish to go further, send me a contribution of roughly one page for the Waymakers section. It will be published under your initials, a pseudonym, or anonymously, as you prefer. Other readers will be able to respond and dialogue with you.

New here? The Opening page introduces the author, the project, how to take part, contact details, and the agenda.