Book: Jean Prod’hom walks between two men of faith

The book lives up to its title. It is both a biographical story and a personal quest, an essay and a poetic meditation; free from any attachment to a defined genre, it itself seems “A garden without a fence”. Since his first work, “Tessons” (Éditions d’autre part, 2014), Jean Prod’hom has accustomed us to an originality of form which is confirmed here. By crossing the destinies of two men of faith, one the founder of the so-called Darbyst Church, the other a heterodox pastor, the Vaudois writer (born in Lausanne in 1955) questions our way of being in the world. Is it possible to conceive of a human community that binds without confining? Can we dream of a house that would have many windows and “almost no walls”?

Both were born at the beginning of the 19th century.^e century. John Nelson Darby is a scion of the Anglo-Irish merchant bourgeoisie who, after breaking with the Anglican Church, founded the Assembly of Brothers (whose cults edified the young Jean Prod’hom until the age of 15 years). For his part, Alexis Muston is a Vaudois from the Piedmontese valleys that he had to flee, then becoming pastor of the Reformed Church in Drôme and living the exile of one who feels “at home everywhere without being at home anywhere “. Two opposing destinies. We will discover how the first, to preserve the purity of his religious community, made it an “exclusion machine” and a fortress against an always threatening outside world. And how the second, conversely, took circuitous paths thanks to which the world preserved for him the freshness of dew. With Alexis Muston, a “garden without fences” seems possible.

This remarkable book can be read as a praise of the detour or the out-of-the-way path. Its prose is clear, dense, clear and precise, yet vaporous reveries emanate from it. Like those who invite themselves when, lying in the grass and looking up to the sky, we watch the “wonderful clouds” pass by (Baudelaire).

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