At the heart of an admirable and incredible creation, only love allows men to understand it and understand themselves. Priest-dean of the city of Lille, Father Benoist de Sinety suggests that during the year that begins, everyone tries every day to love more.
Since school we have known that the panther, even pink, hisses, that the snake hisses even over our heads, that the donkey brays even when it is in the lead, or that a duck quacks without necessarily thinking of harm. The way of designating the cry of animals or the noises they make is as inventive as there are species. We will thus distinguish the jay that cajoles from the swallow that chirps and even, even more subtle, the goose that cackles from the gander that chatters…
This nature that never ceases to surprise
Animal language is fascinating. It awakens a thousand hypotheses, the wildest fantasies. One of the areas of research on which Artificial Intelligence (AI) is focused today is precisely to decipher these sounds in order, an absolute dream, to be able to enter into dialogue with these living things which surround us and which we sometimes manage to draw up, to domesticate for some even. Conservation associations are alarmed: what will happen to wild species the day man manages to intrude into their private lives? Will we have the wisdom not to use this advance for our own purposes? Regardless, the song of the whales continues to hypnotize us.
Especially since every day new discoveries call into question principles that we thought were insurmountable. On death for example: if it is recognized that savannah elephants experience grief when a loved one dies, researchers report between 2022 and 2023 having discovered practices previously unobserved. For example, different herds of wild Asian elephants “dragged their dead babies to irrigation ditches in the northern Bengal region and buried them there. In all five cases, researchers found the baby elephants’ legs sticking out of the ground, their heads, trunks and backs covered in earth,” reports the National Geographic (06/4/2024). “This behavior does not appear in other non-human species,” the article continues before adding that this is the first evidence of complete burial in the animal world. Vertigo in front of this nature which never ceases to take on the jaded gaze that man since the Renaissance has cast on it.
Living among the living
At the heart of Christian history, a man emerged like a UFO in an established and required stable landscape: Francis, in Assisi, was this “other Christ” as his contemporaries called him with fascination. Where many allowed themselves to be fascinated by the shine of gold and the shimmer of fabrics, he sought to live the radical dependence on Providence alone and to have no other god than the one announced by the Gospel. Living among the living, he spoke with men as with beasts, looked fraternally at the howling wolf and sang in unison about Christ present among the birds.
We are placed at the heart of an admirable and incredible creation.
Many present the year 2025 to us as a time of challenges, struggles, pain and risks. They are not wrong. It appears, if we stick to the press headlines and the elements of language distilled here and there, as if it were a matter of keeping us in respect. Let it not be so. We are placed at the heart of an admirable and incredible creation where the register of possibilities is enriched every day by human genius combined with the infinity of life which never stops flowing without ever drying up.
It is love alone that saves
All these languages, all these words, all these cries have within them a magnificent capacity for creation if we seek to give them as a common grammar the love which Jesus invites us to never renounce. It is love that allows men to understand each other, it is love that also allows them to take care of the living things that come alive around them, from the peacock that bawls to the seal that bleats (yes! ) and the blatering ram. It is love alone that allows the believer to manifest the presence of Christ in the world because it is love alone that saves. Couldn’t the year that begins be, for each of us, the time we give ourselves to try to love more every day? Not perfectly, absolutely, but just more… Loving the world around us, those who inhabit it and in a particular way our neighbor sometimes so dissimilar in appearance, but so intimate in this life that he receives like us unconditionally and without reservation.
