“Suddenly I realized that the Catholic Church had been around for 2000 years and that it was my anchor”
Marc has always preferred a life that is materially austere, yet rich in possibilities. Rooted in the French countryside of Cantal since 2012, he still travels around France to perform shadow puppet shows whom he has worked for 17 years, sometimes with the help of his wife, Sophie, and their five children, ages 12 to 17.
After the birth of their second child, the couple —engineers by training but passionate about theater— decided to break with consumer habits and live off their dreams: live shows.
Forget career plans and ledgers to track savings; for them, life would be art, inventiveness, road trips… and struggling to pay the bills at the end of the month. They created their traveling family theater company in 2007 and traveled around France for three years in a caravan. They enjoyed togetherness as a couple and their family life was joyful and colorful.
Nomads «out of the box»
And where was God in all this? It was 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 social circle, until he was 30 years old. “My religious practice was full of formalism,” he recalls. “But I didn’t realize it until much later: I didn’t know we could have a relationship [con Dios]”.
When he met Sophie in 2001, he let everything go, so he didn’t think about getting married in the Church. “We went to the mayor” for a civil wedding “after the birth of our third child, a form of formalize our family structure“, remember.
It was the arrival of the twins in 2010 that sounded the death knell of a carefree and wandering life. Marc was exhausted and felt the need to gather his strength and take a step back. He heard about the Murat Priorynot far from Saint-Flour (Cantal), where a community of Brothers of Saint John resides:
“I wasn’t particularly looking for spirituality, I just needed to recover in peace and quiet… Once there, it was out of sheer courtesy that I chose to attend the services.”
a peaceful certainty
So what happened during this short stay?
“Nothing spectacular,” he admits. “It was a combination of events that 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. I, Protestant, felt at homeI was sure that from then on I had to live my faith on a daily basis, no matter what my family thought.”
His determination surprised his wife, who had previously been quite indifferent to spirituality. She didn’t get in the way. Three months later, she agreed to go to Mass at Murat, and fragments of prayers she had recited as a child resurfaced.
“For her it was more intense than for me: she cried profusely and suddenly felt God’s love for her.”
Looking back, Marc recognizes that his pre-conversion way of life was very close to Christian values, so there was more continuity than break. Even so, this revival translated concretely into important decisions: marriage in the Church, baptism of children, return to regular religious practice.
“And then, he structured our family, which was a little bit lacking in framework. Under the pretext of trusting in life, we thought we were the captains of the ship. We let ourselves go, but without a guide. Today we know that there is an incomparable guide to whom we try to listen: Christ”.
