“I recognize in human beings a part of divinity and he, God, has taken a human posture to be closer to humans. I have doubts, I have convictions, I don’t have absolute certainty, but it feeds my life and I see signs of alliance, of its presence through nature, through humans. » Faith as the pillar of an embodied humanism through action in the field and a relationship with the other that takes him in his entirety, in his strengths and weaknesses: this is the driving force behind Christian Lucas, a former educator, who created in 1982, in Poligné, near Rennes, the “House of children in the country”, a reception structure for young people with autism or psychosis.
Strong paths
This adventure, he told it in Beyond the Children’s Adventure at Home – An Educator’s Story (1). “She remained unsatisfied and told me that she would like to know the springs that make me believe in life”explains Christian Lucas on the occasion of the publication of Beyond the appearences (2). She ? It is the editor Marie-Anne Divet, member of a collective initiated by Michel Rouger, former great reporter at West Francewhich highlights strong courses.
She did not “confess” Christian Lucas but simply took the time, a lot of time, to bring him to meet himself. “We thus conducted 14 interviews, lasting one to two hours each, between spring 2021 and spring 2022, only by telephone, leaving one or two weeks between each exchange, explains Marie-Anne Divet. We discovered each other. I kinda threw the Catholic religion overboard a long time ago. I knew that Christian was in a religious spirituality that I did not share. But we have commitments in common. »
“I’ve been writing a diary since I was 7”
From parallel paths to the conjunction of points of view, these long hours of maintenance brought them closer together. There was a third guest in this dialogue, illness, pernicious. “Does illness ‘widen’ the way of believing? How does the disease make me take a new look? » His life, Christian Lucas has always passed it through the filter of the pen to put it on paper. “I’ve been writing a diary since I was 7 years old. I have 400 notebooks at home…”
A whole life of which he cannot keep all the trials. Of these thousands of written signs then these tens of hours of maintenance, Beyond the appearences offers a sort of summary of about fifty pages. A substrate of life that Christian Lucas likes to imagine lost in a bag and which would have come out from time to time to read a few lines, a word, a breath. “What have you done with your brother?” How do you let yourself be questioned by others? ». Christian Lucas has no definitive answer, just a few keys to go further.
(1) ABeyond the Children’s Adventure in the Country – An Educator’s Story, by Christian Lucas, Yellow concept editions. 205p, €17. The book is available from the publisher www.yellowconcept.fr
(2) Beyond the appearencesby Christian Lucas, ordinary stories editions, 54 pages, €5.