Vigils Reading – Office for Vocations
A reading from
FRANCOIS MAURIAC
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It sometimes happens that I feel all the nearer to a believer, to someone
devout, the further away the person is from my own Church. This is a paradox
only in appearance. Faced with a Muslim or a Jew, if they are devout, I know in
advance, even before they have spoken a word, what it is that separates me from
them. The abyss that lies between us is, in a way, familiar to me. It could
contain nothing to surprise me. But what is unfamiliar to me, and what I love to
discover, is this word of adoration which I suddenly recognize, this prayer which
could have sprung from my own heart, this love of the Father who is in heaven,
and sometimes, even among certain Jews, this attraction to Christ.
I remember, one day, finding myself at table beside a young Jewish
woman, and we spoke of these problems; she told me that she could not believe
in the divinity of Christ; and suddenly her voice changed and she said in a
moving tone, ‘But I love him’.
On the all too rare occasions when I am privileged to meet a true Israelite
or a Muslim who is a mystic, I think of all the many rooms that are in the
Father’s House. And what I feel as regards a son of Israel, or a son of the
Prophet, I feel still more, needless to say, with Christians who belong to
different confessions but who live in Christ, with those of my separated brethren
who have a living faith.
I feel it again, with certain souls who belong to no definite confession and
who live, as Simone Weil lived, on the borders of the Church; and the light
which comes across to them and which those souls refract, perhaps because it
does not find expression in traditional forms, is all the more enlightening to me.
Grace here appears in its natural state, outside all the means which are its usual
channel to us. It is rather like discovering that strangers know and love a secret
place in the forest which was the objective of our solitary walks. We wonder how
they came there by paths unknown to us.