Completely flat after the birth of his fifth child, Marc took refuge in a priory for five days to perk up. There, one thing is obvious to him: he will only fully become what he is called to be within the Catholic Church.
Marc has always preferred the discomfort of a sober life, rich in all possibilities, to paths that have been mapped out. Rooted since 2012 in Cantal, he continues at 57, to roam the roads of France to present to the public Chinese shadow shows that he has been building for 17 years. Sometimes with the help of his wife, Sophie, and their five children aged 17 to 12.
Passionate about theatre, this couple of engineers made the choice, after the birth of their second, to break with the injunctions of consumer society and live their dreams: live performance. To hell with career plans and savings accounts, for them, it would be art, resourcefulness, peregrinations… and end of the month ric-rac! In 2007, a traveling family theater troupe was born and traveled around France for three years, in a trailer. The couple is united, the family life of five joyful and colorful.
Nomads outside the frameworks
And God in all this? He is there, in the background, a discreet shadow among the others. Marc grew up in a Protestant family, while regularly attending the Catholic Church, within the SUF (Unitary Scouts of France) or through his relational circle, until his thirties. “My practice was all about formalism,” he recalls. But I didn’t measure it until much later: I didn’t know we could be in a relationship…” When he met Sophie in 2001, he dropped everything, so there was no question of marriage in the Church. : “We still passed in front of the mayor, after the birth of the third, a way of formalizing our family building…”
It was the arrival of twins in 2010 that sounded the death knell for those years of wandering around and being carefree. Marc is feeling slack: he is exhausted and feels the need to regain his strength and gain height. He heard about the Priory of Murat, not far from Saint-Flour (Cantal), where there is a community of Brothers of Saint-Jean: “I was not particularly in search on the spiritual level, I just needed to calm myself down… Once on instead, it was purely out of politeness that I chose to attend the offices. »
A peaceful certainty
So what happens during this short stopover? “Nothing spectacular,” he admits. A conjunction of facts which, put end to end, opened my heart. The quality of the welcome and the presence of the religious, their sense of service, the readings they recommended to me. Suddenly, I realized that the Catholic Church was 2,000 years old and that it was my anchor. Me, the parpaillot, I felt at home, certain that I should now live my faith on a daily basis, whatever my family thinks. »
His determination surprises his wife, until then quite indifferent to spirituality. She lets it go. Three months later, Sophie agrees to go to mass in Murat: then come to the surface snippets of prayers recited in childhood. “For her, it was more sensitive than for me: she wept bitterly and suddenly felt all of God’s love for her. »
A posteriori Marc recognizes that their way of life prior to their conversion joined in so many points with Christian values that there was more continuity than rupture. Even if this rebirth was translated concretely by important decisions: marriage to the Church, baptism of children, return to practice. “And then, it structured our family, which lacked a bit of a framework. Under the pretext of confidence in life, we took ourselves for the captains of the ship. We let ourselves be carried away, but without a guide. Today, we know that there is one, incomparable, to whom we strive to listen: Christ. »
Stranded in a monastery after a burnout, he emerges as a Christian and changes his life!