We need a little levity. For some, it is the time of year that makes walking difficult: the cold and the darkness weigh heavily. For others, it is rather the social and political climate that is dragging them down: the signs of hope are too timid to excite us.
To achieve the rebirth of spring, one must accept inevitable losses. We must not delude ourselves: to act as if nothing is changing in us and around us is to condemn ourselves to inertia. And what is static comes to die.
Moving forward requires grieving. There are many of them in January. The transition from one year to the next requires us to leave behind memories of time spent moving forward. For lovers of the white season, there is the mourning of winter which has not yet arrived, and which will not come, at least as we once knew it. With the swearing in of new political leaders, there is also the end of a world marked by a familiar ecosystem.
In mourning
There are also people who leave us. Last Sunday, we learned of the death of Kim Yaroshevskaya. With her character of Franfreluche, she was part of the beginnings of the life of Generation X. For many of us, it is a part of our childhood that is in mourning.
She was the ambassador of lightness in a world characterized by gravity: she lived on the other side of the “Iron Curtain” under the leaden cover of the Stalinist regime. Her life is a wonderful story in which she played boldly. A Russian orphan, she emigrated to Quebec in 1933, at the age of ten. Trained at the École des Beaux-Arts de Montréal, her artistic career reveals the value of these refugees who enrich the social and cultural fabric of our country.
Beyond his roles in the theater, it is his character of Franfreluche created in 1954 and played for around fifteen years which will survive him. I have a vivid memory, as a child, of rushing to finish supper to listen to Franfreluche at 5:30 p.m. The large book behind which we could see the tip of his head suggested that we were about to enter into a grandiose story. This is indeed what was happening.
She literally dove into the book. Now the characters lying on the paper stood up to communicate with her. She asked them questions and entered their world. She gave flesh to the characters. She talked about how she was breathing. Beyond the anecdotes and details, she transmitted a breath that animated her. She leaves a great legacy.
Week of the Word
-Tomorrow begins the Week of the Word in the Church. The Bible is a compendium of stories that have been passed down orally from one generation to another for centuries. By telling the story, the storyteller leads us to see the scene, to smell the smells, to feel the proximity of the characters. By choosing and adapting the words, he adds a figurative register and allows us to project ourselves into the story. It is eminently valuable for discovering or rediscovering texts that we are used to listening to distractedly or misunderstanding.
The challenge is great: each generation must appropriate the stories and find their own way of telling the biblical texts which mainly belong to the narrative genre. To do this, we must avoid the trap of simplification and agree to real work of interpretation. The heritage of wisdom contained in the Bible is also transmitted… by telling stories! Have a nice week!
This week…
Listened again with pleasure a story by Fred Pellerin. And I also thought of our local storytellers: Dominique Breau, Cédric Landry and Anne Godin. Through intrigue and wonder, their stories address existential themes: fear, anger, love, truth. And their characters help us structure our personalities by embodying all human complexity.
Free a Bible as a gift on the occasion of a baptism. It is a gift to give to children, young and old, to tell them Bible stories. They don’t understand everything. But the mysterious does not always have to be understood in order to nourish. And what is mysterious today will become clearer later.
Participated at the inaugural conference of the Louis-Mailloux year prepared and given by Clarence LeBreton. By bringing archival documents to life, he told a story of struggle and bravery. It has the ability to awaken our courage to face violent winds. Really, telling stories is not as harmless as it might seem.
Écrit on the Word of God. For Christians, the Word is first of all a person: the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. This does not prevent Christianity, like other monotheistic religions, from having books which contain the content of revelation. To find out more, free virtual activities are offered as part of “Word Week” and are available on the site: diocesebathurst.com.
Reviewed in my head the illustrious Viola Léger came to tell the story of the miraculous fishing to the children of catechism. The little faces of these children, smeared with sleep on a Sunday morning, woke up with each sentence. At the end of the story, there was as much light on the faces rounded like suns as on the large stone wall lit by the morning star.
