Status Updates From Invasion 14

The man who has suffered much is like he who knows many languages, and is able to understand all men.

"For me what is necessary, for my neighbour the rest."

...the Abbé Sennevilliers had thereby effected this strange conversion - an evangelist all the more persuasive for never having intended to evangelize.

And Decraemer, witnessing this battle [between the abbé and his desires], this veritable struggle for sanctity, came to wonder if the celibacy of the priest were not a good thing after all, if it were not precisely this ultimate sacrifice that allowed him to devote an unemployed need for affection to all mankind.

Daniel envied him [the abbé], considered him enormously rich, rich with a religion, a support, a faith, happy because he did not seek happiness for himself but in the happiness of others - the only place one can find it.

Grief, trial, suffering less easily allow for universal indifference. On the contrary, they engender rebellion, assertion and resistance, conflict.

A great idea, whatever it may be - a religion or an art or a grand purified love - elevates the soul. To raise itself up, the spirit will make use of almost anything as a foundation.

For this crushing of spirits, this regime of tyranny stimulated love and longing for France…Patriotism became a mystique. A tricolour ribbon brought tears to the eyes. People calmly performed acts of heroism of which they had would have been incapable before the war.

You were right, before… Morality cannot be built on oneself, on the consciousness of one’s own human dignity, on pride… Pride bends.

One does not live in the midst of ugliness and skepticism, without losing one’s own assurance of an ideal, a noble mission.

For these unfortunates, the church instinctively became a place of refuge. It is above all in times of trial that man is a religious animal.