François Cheng, poet of divine harmony

It’s a long journey of life that led François Cheng from his native China to France, from the Chinese language to the French language. His latest book, A long road to unite myself with French singing (Albin Michel), is the quasi testamentary testimony. Of course, it is above all about the path of poetic creation, which is at the very origin of his vocation. “It was at the age of 15 that singing woke up in me, he writes. I opened up to poetry and entered, as if breaking into the path of creation. »

A long journey for someone who only had access to French poems through translations and who only published his first book of poems in Racine’s language at the age of 60. His election to the French Academy in 2002 would crown this patient and admirable ascent.

Meeting with Francis of Assisi

There are many turns, meanders, in this long existence, but unity and harmony clearly prevail, by the author’s own admission. “We’re going somewhere” he says. Everything converges in a single path, that of singing, which is first of all that of the tao, in other words of the breath. The trinity of breaths, one should say, since yin and yang bind the breath of the “median void”, without which there would be neither fecundity nor movement.

Life is the unique adventure, “sublime and tragic” at the same time, it engenders itself ad infinitum, always animated by a rhythmic breath which propagates both in matter and in the spirit, because there is no separation between the two for Chinese thought. Open life, which always begins again… François Cheng recounts that one September morning, while still a high school student, he heard a call, in a pine wood, which said to him: “Sing and you will be saved, and everything will be saved. »

It was still necessary to wait for salvation to be really within reach of the soul of the young poet. At the age of 32, his discovery of Assisi (Italy) marked the decisive turning point in his spiritual life. He was then, he says, quite confused. This trip was a shock that committed him definitively. His ideas suddenly took shape in a being he met, beyond the centuries: Francis of Assisi, whom he calls “the Great Living”.

The Great Living “is the one who goes before Life, without prejudice and without restriction, with disarming courage and astonishing generosity. » For him, “everything is interaction, everything is an opportunity for a possible transformation”. His humility, his austerity bring him into a “invigorating emptiness”, writes François Cheng in Assisi, an unexpected encounter (Albin Michel), “a bit like the Creator who forces himself to stand back so that creatures can fully live”.

In the same way, the poet, from this revelation, will endeavor to live in the image of the saint, whose name he will take for his baptism, in 1969. He tells us that he hears his voice whisper in his ear: “Be full of wonder and gratitude, for something has happened. » And François Cheng feels, like the Great Living, an ardent desire to savor all the gifts of the earth, “because every gift, in essence, contains its promise of infinite flavor”. Francis of Assisi then becomes for him a true traveling companion, the friend of the crucial encounter. Through him, he joins the “Christian Way” which quite naturally extends the path of the breath.

Turned to Christ

The “Christic way” is the incarnated way. It is fully stated in the Gospel: “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. » In an exhilarating continuity, without any break, she pursues the impetus of life and creation contained in the way of the tao. A face now embodies it, that of Christ, God made man. In him are found all human suffering. On the Cross, love triumphs over evil and death. François Cheng is full of admiration and gratitude for this absolute love. “No one can go further” than Christ. It is therefore towards him that the poet is now turned. He went towards “the absolute of life”, he writes in Five meditations on death (Albin Michel). “With him, death changes nature and dimension: it becomes the opening through which passes the infinite breath of transfiguration. »

Christ will be evoked in poems, but he will not appear directly, as if the poet wanted above all to remain in this sacred breath that the soul feels deep within itself. It is still a ternary vision that Cheng explores: there is the body, the spirit, but also the soul, anima, the breath, in the order of the heart as Pascal explains it in his Thoughts. It is the energy that pushes man on this upward path, the path of holiness. “It is she who, patiently absorbing all the gifts and trials of body and mind, is the authentic fruit preserving intact what makes each one unique. »

Meditations, calligraphy and poems

From then on, the spiritual life of the Christian François Cheng, merging with his life as a poet, is in the image of what he said of François d’Assise: “By renting, he plunges headlong into infinity, into the Open. » Whether in his meditations on the soul, death, beauty, in his calligraphy or in his poems, Cheng is, above all other profession of faith, a cantor of divine harmony. It resonates with the tiny as with the infinitely large.

He knows that everything is connected, in this immense adventure of creation, close in this to the great intuitions of Teilhard de Chardin. “In the Open, all things reveal themselves as presences. » And everything makes sense. The poetic ideal is in the communion and harmony felt as a continuous process, in the capture and translation into quasi-musical language of the “uninterrupted song” who “deaf from the earth, joins the great rhythm of the eternal current that moves the stars” (Five meditations on death).

Quest for being, quest for harmony thus animate François Cheng, who essentially and carnally proclaims himself a poet, close to the mystics, in the very movement of the tao, in the way of love of Christ.

To read : A long road to unite myself with French singing, by François Cheng, Albin Michel, €17.90.
Notebook of the Herne Cheng. €33. With a contribution by Gérard Bocholier on the spirituality of the writer: “François Cheng, the way of Christ”.

François Cheng, poet of divine harmony