Contraction
1 week ago
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
The Pressure Is The Same
Louis "Lev" Gillett was born in 1893 in Saint-Marcellin (Isère, France). After studies of philosophy in Paris, he was mobilised during the First World War, taken prisoner in 1914 and spent three years in captivity, where he was attracted by the spirit and the spirituality of the Russian prisoners. He studied mathematics and psychology in Geneva and joined the Benedictines of Clairvaux in 1919. Attracted by Eastern Christianity, he became acquainted with Metropolitan Andriy Sheptytsky of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in Galicia and pronounced his final vows in 1925 at the Studite monastery of Univ Lavra in Galicia.
Disappointed by the attitude of the Roman Catholic Church towards Orthodoxy, Gillet was received in the Orthodox Church in Paris in May 1928 and, in November 1928, he became rector of the parish of Sainte-Geneviève-de-Paris, the first French-speaking Orthodox parish. In 1938 he left Paris to settle in London, within the framework of the Fellowship of Saint Alban and Saint Sergius, an ecumenical organization dedicated to the bringing together of the Anglican and Orthodox churches. He remained in England until his death in 1980, going on many journeys abroad, in particular to France, Switzerland and Lebanon, where he took part in the spiritual revival of Antiochian Orthodoxy.
The Pressure Is The Same
Sinner...or the saint
of holding the way things lay...
the sinner steals things
of course, or commits
fraud, or otherwise does ill
and the saint holds things,
holds the way things lay,
even though pressure builds on
them both just alike,
the swell of God's heat.
September 28, 2011 8:41 PM
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
i like how you have placed these two side by side, under the same constraints, and responding differently.... yet, perhaps more alike than either one might like...
ReplyDeletei always like how you work with simple ingredients and make complex and though provoking pieces
Harlequin, I think my poetic style celebrates relations, that the heart of it all is found in expressions of duality, trinity, and quaternity. There is really not much that can said of unity. This is not unity's fault. It is the nature of language to be at least dual and relational.
ReplyDeleteYou might think of this poem as mainly dual but really God's heat points out the triune nature of the poem. As well in life there is the hidden third sometimes revealed. And in the deep there may be a crucifixion lurking.
your post are always interesting and informative for me.. like it!
ReplyDeleteJJRod'z
christopher
ReplyDeletethanks for the triune...the hidden third. lovely.