Benoît Billot: “The seventh day is made for humans to experience a new side of their life”

This Sunday morning, I saw them enter the chapel, upright, relaxed and happy to share their great vacation moments with others. I guess, through their words, that some went to the end of the world to find an expatriate child, or had a good time with their family in their vacation home, or even rented a cottage and spent their days on the beach. or in water games…

Others surprise me: they have experienced another adventure: mountain races where the savagery and beauty immobilize you in amazement. Discovery courses where you enter new worlds that upset your usual patterns. Retreats in the abbey, where you gently lay down your arms, letting yourself be carried away in the joy of a sacred Presence, etc.

“Go to you! »

It is probable that this was not always the case, and that it happened to each of us to go through the summer rather like a time burned by the sun, the speed, an all-consuming passion, therefore an escape from oneself in excesses of all kinds. But, time having done its work, happy are those who have spent their summer in the presence to themselves, attentive to the inner resonances that events had in them; with, even if it is foreign to them, the word of God to Abraham: “Go to you! » These have fully lived these great moments which transformed them without letting them devitalize little by little into good memories, by locking them up in archives of photos or videos.

A day made for humans

The Bible inaugurates human history with this fabulous first chapter of Genesis where all the elements of our cosmos appear successively. And us, the sixth day. The second chapter follows, where it is written: “On the seventh day, God put an end to his work of creation. He rested from all his activity on the seventh day. God blessed the seventh day and made it holy. »

A holy day? This seventh day is made for humans to experience a new side of their life. A blessed day, which Judaism calls the Sabbath, a word which means truce, rest, absence of work. Day made so that man does not work 7/7, is not obsessed with his work, so that he can sleep, pray, regain real contact with his family and with himself. In short, that he finds himself; the divine breath actively collaborates in it. Can we not say that we can live our holidays in a sabbatical spirit?

Our true stature

This level of consciousness responds to an essential aspiration of every human being: to listen within oneself to the voice of the divine depth, which vibrates in every being. She shouts, sometimes in the desert of indifference, the need not to let herself be locked up. It reminds us that we are greater than our social status, our possessions, our knowledge, our ideas, our companionships and, of course… our mistakes.

She tirelessly invites man to look beyond borders. To take care of our mother earth, in the knowledge of what she suffers and of all that we owe her. To keep a keen awareness of the peoples of the planet, in their infinite potentialities and their terrible miseries. To constantly remember our divine origin and to give thanks to it.

Voice that calls to widen, to deepen, to find our true stature. The man who obeys him enters little by little into what could be called a permanent Sabbath: that of the infinite expansion of his consciousness, accompanied by that deep peace which is divine blessing. This is where he becomes an indispensable player in this world.

Benoit billot is Benedictine, monk in the city at the priory of Saint-Benoît d’Étiolles, in Essonne. Adept of zazen, he founded the House of Tobias. He notably published Lights in the ordinary days and the fruitful energy of the sacraments (Mediaspaul).

Benoît Billot: “The seventh day is made for humans to experience a new side of their life”