Dear Paul,
I do not know you. Or very little. To me you were only separated from Peter. In Confiteor as the dome of St. Peter in Rome. Peter, I easily imagined. A tough, sentimental, not nerd. A little too loose. But faith deep in the body. But you? The coloring pages of the catechism still showed you face against the ground, blinded by the light ... not easy to know in these conditions.
is a marriage at the age of 20 years, I've met. Your words struck me stupor. "It is good for man not to touch a woman" ... "This is not the woman who has her body but the man" The woman must be submissive to her husband ".... This letter to the Corinthians has made me the moment a Corinthian. But not those who were converted by listening to you. Rather those who Acrocorinth, majestic hill from where you discover both the mountains of the Peloponnese and the Saronic Gulf Sea was the place where "all is order and beauty" but also, and above all, pleasure. Yes, dear Paul, I confess I laugh at your words, on the sunny slopes of the citadel of Corinth, and I still laughed at the Acropolis as the Sophists were laughing, cynical and other philosophers when they speak of a crucified God. Had it been otherwise in the city of Priapus shamelessly paraded triumphantly at crossings, Kouroi graceful as Egyptian tomb engravings which have been given all the sudden movement, a powerful torso Zeus Poseidon appears with his arm outstretched to submit the universe, the quintessence of beauty unsurpassed manly?
They took you for a visionary. I saw you more as a disciple of late, a legalistic Jew, a Pharisee, that his conversion had not recovered from devastating his dogmatic initial stiffness. You were for me the continuation of the ferocity of the biblical text to which the woman is a virtual object from the rib of man - the only true masterpiece of God - hence its lower and her servant.
Sometimes you randomly heard again Sunday readings, I spoke and pointed out to you that between you and Genesis, there was the Gospel. Maybe it was you missed it? Maybe you do not know that Jesus had broken the odious stoning the adulterous woman? He had talked to the Samaritan woman with multiple lovers? He had told Mary that she was right not to prefer, like her sister Martha household and kitchen to the spiritual and intellectual life?
Yes, between the Bible and terrifying us, yal'Evangile, and it breathes a different air, otherwise soft and fragrant, in other women. Is he once said that man is superior to woman? Jesus hangs around there are no men but also women? And do not judge it does Mary Magdalene, whose body had received so many hugs, worthy not only to follow but to see him when she weeps at the tomb empty, and being gently called by him, so she turns around and recognize in what she thought was the gardener at the cemetery's "Rabbi "his" Rabboni, "his master, his master dear? Was he not himself designed by a woman without a husband? From a woman who, if Joseph had not taken to wife despite her condition, might, too, the stoning?
is heard, sometimes long, that we want to hear. I have long ignored the rest of the text heard in 20 years "And the man has no body but his wife" or "man and sacrificed himself for his wife." Somewhat forgotten as the "go and sin no more" addressed to Mary Magdalene and the Samaritan woman. ...
especially this long lingering prejudice your recurring antifeminism prevented me to hear one of the finest speeches about love that was never held. Yours. On the word of Christ, laconic, precise but elliptical, "Love ye one another as I have loved you," you write, in the wonderful pages, the need for each of us to crucify the flesh as He was to take his place as the Spirit who makes us righteous.
Finally one day, not so long ago, in Rome, I read the Letter to the Romans. You say that the crucified body of Christ has made you die with the law. What earlier, the sinful passions, aroused by the law, acting in your body to make you bear fruit for death. You are free from the law, having died to what we inhibited, and thus you could provide a new service, that of the Spirit, instead of the old service, the letter of the law. And you add as the clearest: "I was alive, but when the commandment came, sin became alive for me and it was my death, because sin has seized the opportunity and the command he seduced me."
Whether Acrocorinth on the Acropolis or Rome I laugh more, if not joy at having finally understood. Included
the law, heard of your mouth during the marriage, or at the time "was alive" made sin for me alive and it caused my death, seizing in my revolt, the opportunity to seduce me.
Included only the mysterious and incomprehensible saving virtue of the communion of Christ's death may lift the veil so that "the Spirit who gives life in Christ liberates us from sin and destroy human flesh" and that "the requirements of the law is fulfilled in us who no longer live under the influence of the flesh but of the mind, freeing us at the same time of slavery and fear."
Included, as you write it in the second Letter to the Corinthians, "The Spirit does not give a wisdom that only wants to convince power held in a hidden wisdom "because" nobody knows what is in God except the Spirit of God and this comes to us only if we see the gift of God. The man who has his strengths as a man can not grasp what is of the Spirit of God. "
Yes, dear Paul, when you say later in this same letter "my conscience does not reproach me, but this does not mean that I'm just" show you the path of humility that some and yet you deny, if you read well, explodes in every sentence, and is the only essential but Key m'exige love that nothing that does not hurt, forgiving all, you speak so well.
It is with this key that I've reviewed, this time through. Under the harsh formulas appear the delicacy of the matter. The young man who can not resist his beautiful wife too, advise you to make love, since he can marry her. A young widow of tortured solitude, you say that loyalty is not to be kept beyond death. Similarly the "old" who runs the community is not required to be "eunuch for the glory of God "but may be married, being held to be faithful and know how to obey her children ....
the impossible, so there is no obligation. But whoever wants to follow Christ, regardless of his situation, he is asked to crucify the flesh in order to love righteousness. And then, only then, once the Spirit has revealed to him the meaning of the world and the divine will, he can understand the meaning of your words:
Then only the second woman may feel. Only then did she understand that it is not fulfilling its sole will, the only satisfaction of his needs, the only obedience to its own reasoning should guide it in a love life, marriage, family, if she does not want to live and support his children hitch a furious hydra two heads eventually smashed against a wall and then another, and as a measure of the violence of desire of one, then another, making children frightened spectators an inevitable separation.
Only then can man feel "first" without becoming a despot, and see beyond the privilege of one who decides whether or arbitrator, burdens imposed upon it. So he was never to abandon the pregnant woman he does not want to assume the child yet born of his own desire, then it will not separate a woman even sweet and good to get another younger or more exciting or richer that allows him to indulge his passions tyrannical
So like the other one will always feel compared to the second child in the plan of creation that they decided not to comply never be sacrificed to their power struggles.
So yes, the fruits of the Spirit that you speak so much: joy, gentleness, peace will reign in their relationship, their families, in their society.
No, dear Paul, you are not the "abortion terrorist" by Michel Onfray camped [1] , who thinks only of pleasure and prohibit enslave women, the father of the distant infibulation, the inventor of the chastity belt, the accomplice in the stoning.
If you read without prejudice, you will discover tender, when you talk to your followers - dare I say "breast"? - Little contemptuous of women as you compare your pain to those proselytizing of childbirth, dedicated, tireless, courageous and patient.
Dear Paul, I do not know how to finish this letter. Is there a salutation that is worth living for a Saint Apostle of eternity, from a recent and fervent disciple, but still mired in the flesh and the material she admires both the order and beauty ?
Without doubt this is still unpublished. So I can only say thank you. Thanks for your letters read and reread, sardonic laughter I moved to laugh with joy, and without any stop Being at Corinthian I'm also a little timidly, became Roman.
--------------------
--------------------
[1] Cf "bogie wogie in the evening prayer" article by the same author on "Treaty of atheology "by Michel Onfray in political freedom No
