A look back at the Terre d’Espérance festival

Dominique, one of our Ambassadors, attended most of the conferences and shares with us some of the new ideas that inspired him.

Hope in a world suffering from despair, presented by Bruno-Marie DUFFE, priest of the diocese of Lyon, Vatican secretary for integral human development from 2017 to 2021. During a meeting in the Amazon, he met an Indian who said, “You talk a lot, but we start our meetings by listening to the silence of the forest”. Asked “And what do you hear?”, he replied “the sound of the wind in the branches, the cries of the animals, the breathing of the people present…”. On this subject, several speakers stressed the importance of silence, and the fact that to pray is to listen a great deal. The speaker ended by inviting us to keep “the course of good hope”!

Getting involved in the community gave the floor to Christians who are politically committed to environmental issues, thus countering the usual apoliticism in our churches… and inviting us to get our hands a little dirtier!

Committing to life (s’engager dans la vie) gave the floor to two couples who spoke about their experience of reconciling personal life, faith and ecological commitment, particularly with the involvement of their children. One of them came from the Christian eco-hamlet of Goshen, and the other from the “Struggle and Contemplation” (Lutte et Contemplation) collective, and lives in a monastery. One of the couples insisted on the importance of not limiting oneself to concrete questions, such as the carbon footprint, but of also seeking to deepen the community’s faith in order to move away from apoliticism, without creating divisions within the group. The other couple shared their experience of frugality, living in a small lorry and doing odd jobs. Silence reappeared in their discourse when they talked about the “spaces of silence”, where they go into town in a group and sit somewhere in silence with a few placards beside them. It was an occasion that struck a chord with my ‘jonassic’ sensibilities!

Robustness or performance, a presentation by Olivier HAMANT, a researcher in biology and biophysics at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Lyon. This was the presentation that struck me most of the day. His key idea is that for two centuries our society has been focused on performance, but it is now clear that this has been at the expense of robustness, as we are seeing with the environmental crisis. There are huge fluctuations in the environment and in world politics, which will force us to find robust solutions. For example, today’s globalised economy is high-performing, but very fragile (due to the actions of Trump and covid).

As an example of under-performing robustness, he cited our body, whose enzyme function is optimal at an internal temperature of 40°, which means we can fight off infections… but with a lot of fatigue. The rest of the time, our body lives at 37° with a degraded enzymatic function… but very restful. Another example: recreating meanders in a river that has been traced in a straight line limits flooding. He insisted on the importance of the peripheries in society to produce change… pointing out that in the flights of starlings, it is the birds on the edge of the cloud that guide its movement, a fine parable! He argued in favour of a cooperative school, pointing out the shortcomings of giving priority to individual performance, particularly in the current situation where we need to pull together. On a large scale, performance puts the economy first, then social issues, then the environment, whereas robustness requires the opposite. He underlined the current bias in media reporting: “a falling tree makes more noise than a growing forest”!

What Christian posture in this world ? (Quelle posture chrétienne dans ce monde ?) provided a cross-section of Catholics and Protestants on the gift of Christianity to the world: hope. With William CLAPIER, Catholic theologian and writer, Laudato Si’ movement and Benoit INGELAERE, prior of the ecumenical communion of Caulmont, pastor. Alas, my many notes can hardly be summarised, given the intimate nature of the testimonies.