Episode 07 Weekend at Baden-Baden (continued 2)
Part 3/3
The Roman-Irish bath at Friedrichsbad, on Sunday mornings.
Seniors 14 and over were surprised by their parents’ invitation. They could see that between the arrival of Friday night and the breakfast of Sunday morning, a formidable atmosphere had been created between their parents. They were happy about it, but to interfere in this group was to take a place as an adult, to do like the others and they still did not feel capable of it.
The hot air bath
On Sundays the entrance is mixed. They all met in the shower room and then entered the large hot-air bathroom. The few elderly men present were surprised at the arrival of this group of women rather exuberant but they did not react and they closed their eyelids.
All lay on the burning wooden beds and silence returned.
The high white tiled walls, the mosaics on the ceiling, the stained glass windows just under the ceiling, and the bare decor recreate the atmosphere of Roman baths. The steam was falling but we couldn’t see where it was coming from. The floor tiles were burning and it was imperative to walk with sandals.
The alignment of the bare bodies on the square of white sheet thrown on the brown slats of the beds could seem a little macabre but everything invited to relax and automatically you closed your eyelids. For twenty minutes, it is thus necessary to lie in moist air at 54° C.
This silence, this perspiration sheltered from the thick walls of the room are conducive to refocusing on yourself, to an abandonment that grows as your body marries the warmth of the place.
The steam bath
They then moved to the smaller bottom room where the heat is at 68°C. Sweat flows normally, effortlessly, the heart is much less stressed than in a sauna.
In small groups, they passed under other showers and entered the thermal steam bath at 48°C. On the left, high up, a large niche in the white tile wall shows a large metal coil as if sunk into a cave. A stream flows over it to disappear behind the wall.
The evocation of the thermal spring is powerful and by meditating, everyone tries to enjoy the benefits of this pleasant steam.
The round central swimming pool
Carine signaled to the group not to linger in this room to enjoy more of the various pools of water at increasingly low temperatures. She took them through a first rectangular pool where the water is more than 30 degrees to lead them directly to the central round swimming pool. They marveled!
Tall columns in ancient shapes support the glass dome that rises light and filters the light that bathes the basin. The round swimming pool is surrounded on its entire perimeter by half a dozen marble steps.
At each step, the clear and fresh water of its 22 degrees takes a little more your body to plunge it into an unparalleled delight.
After a few strokes, they sat on the steps to wait for the rest of the group. It was much better than the Amadeus Basin but it is true that here came emperors, princes and princesses even if it was doubtful that they knew men and women together the same and joyful atmosphere.
Anke and her girls are doing the show
Upon reviewing, they noted the presence of the teenagers and their somewhat confused looks resonated with the adults. There was no discomfort, just the perception of a difference.
When people outside their group realized that they were too many and had left, Anke took back her girls captain’s stripes! She gracefully climbed the stairs to settle in front of the back room where there is a small basin behind and below. In the wall on this side of the room, a narrow door communicates with another room more withdrawn where in a basin, water intermittently springs like a spring.
Anke took possession of the space between two great pillars and seen from the swimming pool, she paraded on a Greek stage like a goddess of mythology.
His dance expressed prayer attitudes celebrating the love and metamorphosis of the woman, sensual, detached, severe, violent. Her gestures were faster and smoother than Laurie’s and showed more intense dance practice. Anke mixed purely oriental and very sought after attitudes with the grace of the priestesses of Bali, a Shiva dancer, she took more classical attitudes that she jerked more and more in rock movement, swing. Then she went into her tedious dance.
Pierre dreamt, remembered Laurie’s dance, the first night at Amadeus. These two women had an explosive power in their group that no man possessed!
She began a very successful belly dance and then she fell into the contortions of a snake, rising up against a column, rolling on the ground. Lying at the edge of the basin, the dance teacher came to provoke her audience by making various leg movements that allowed her to see and review the smallest details of her sex. Audience She turned her back and on her knees her convulsive contortions highlighted the formidable appeal of her falling kidneys which in no way masked her sex.
She came to rest and simply turned her head, in a terribly naughty air, she called with her fingertip her beloved accomplices: Laurie, Françoise but not stopping there, she made imperious signs for Werner’s daughter and Sepp’s two daughters to join them. Standing, she put them behind her in a semi-circle and invited them to follow her movements. The game of artistic provocation took over and all followed the increasingly daring poses of their instructor.
The erotic show of the teachers of their club’s future love school.
The crowd was overwhelmed, how far would she take them? How far would they, the public, let themselves be carried away by these more than disturbing dancers?
In the immense space of their decor, the imperfection of the synchronization of movements went almost unnoticed. Other people from outside their group had arrived and very quickly the word circulated in the spa and all came silently to line up around the swimming pool facing the improvised scene. Everyone knew that turning this world-renowned spa into a depraved night club or a typical German couples club could end in a general expulsion of the participants.
Except that the rules of procedure should certainly not provide for such a perfectly organized show and with such grace of ancient goddesses. All were stunned, bewitched by admiration and the show fit exactly with the setting of the place. Indeed, at a time not so long ago when these baths were reserved for the European aristocracy, who could doubt that countesses, princesses or simply actresses of theaters, ballet dancers, had not been paid to ensure such an erotic spectacle before a row of kings, princes or wealthy industrialists, bankers and their wives or mistresses?
The atmosphere of intimacy was no longer appropriate, and Anke had to draw her audience into a wider adherence than mere voyeurism.
She broke the silence of their dances and clapped her hands, mimicked a witty gypsy dance waving her blonde hair over her shoulders and then invited other women from outside their group to take to the stage. They lined up by the waist. The steps were more pronounced, the caresses went all over the body, the hair mingled tenderly and the applause punctuated a frantic ban. While asking the others not to stop, she went down into the pool to meet the men. She felt that she was looking with her hand to see if the excitement made them bandage. She didn’t touch men, but looked for her answer in their eyes.
The audience also stared at the man under Anke’s thumb, and their laughter inevitably caused some redness in the man, thus placed under the microscope. She lives in the hustle and bustle of the women left in the pool, that most didn’t want to leave it at that. She asked them, imitating to get their hands on the sex of their spouses themselves to give the answer. The frenzy became widespread.
Anke to close this sequence of cabaret and music hall invited all the women to come on the stage between the two columns. They formed three lines one behind the other and they embarked on an imitation of the French-cancan by raising their legs. They looked little at men, carried away that they were in their movements and laughing stared at their pleasures, throwing complicit looks at each other. After a while, the first line split in two and went back, the second line coming to the front of the stage.
A final ban finished the show. But the women were struggling to leave the stage to join their husbands on the marble steps of the pool.
Anke understood that women had found themselves in a brotherly company as old as humanity.
Of course, it was no longer the witch-dance around last night’s campfire in the clearing and under the stars. But in this majestic Greco-Roman setting, this grandiose scene can also host orgies, bacchanals worthy of the art of living of the most flourishing ancient civilizations in which, the matriarchate is also celebrated by this exaltation of the all female life, the eternal feminine from which everything comes according to the words of the poets.
She did not need Dominique to remember the Celtic women, Gallic women who alone decided in their assemblies whether men would go to war or not, she did not need to discourse on the dependency at home to which men had condemned them to defend the power of the males. Today the women had found themselves and in their provocations in front of their husbands, there was indeed a small air of revenge.
Beautiful, they were not just for the dark pleasure of a single man who had since lost his ardor as a young lover. Beautiful, they were always beautiful at forty years, fifty or sixty and more, and between them, had no qualms to show themselves under the face of the woman who was tested, always faithful to her first nature as a lover.
Laurie, as a good lieutenant, came to the rescue of her captain of girls.
The psychologist understood the same thing as Anke.
She interviewed some women of different ages in German, French or English depending on the origin of the people present: had they already danced naked on stage, in front of so many men that they could see banding? How did they feel after those dances? Were they less ill after these special physical therapy exercises? Had they lost weight? Would they have sex this afternoon or as soon as they leave the baths or even as soon as they return to the changing rooms?
The answers were spontaneous, cheerful, fresh and sincere. One admitted that she had never felt so beautiful and naked in front of men and that it was a pity that a man did not come to take her right away as she felt ready to welcome her. She received their applause and whistling admirers.
Laurie thanked them all and said that the show was over, that another Sunday morning he might resume.
The Celtic custom of the winter solstice and the presentation of young girls.
They scattered in the different basins. Werner and Sepp picked up their daughters from their mothers’ arms and the group applauded them one last time all. Anke congratulated the teenage girls who looked down at the other teenagers and in the midst of all those naked men.
Frantz invited the group to settle in the room at the back, behind the small door of the back room of the central swimming pool.
All once in the water, he told the girls about a Celtic custom.
At the time of the winter solstice, there was a party where the young girls of the village, when they were old enough to get married, danced under a light white diaphanous veil in the middle of a clearing, barefoot on the snow. The secret charms of these girls were thus exposed under the gaze of the whole village. Men would thus be able to choose their wives differently than on a sexual impulse born of the lust of a female body that they sought at all costs to know. The warriors also knew what spoils they had to protect in their village and the women would not have any misconceptions about the charms of a so-called rival.
The girl who was more beautiful than another, all of them had seen her dancing in front of them and all of them once on this occasion had admitted the merit of her charms, the claims to the rank she could hold in their clan. In addition, by being able to dance naked on the snow, they demonstrated to all their perfect health necessary for their next maternity.
Frantz added that he saw in this custom the recognition of a social role equal to man: he paraded in his warrior dress, the latter also triumphed in his warrior dress because, did he specify, what dress other than his nudity suited the woman when she went to war to assert her natural rights?
What were we doing in social cultures where women were cast into the shadow of men? Frantz asked her audience: wasn’t this a hypocritical way to protect women? By barring women from revealing themselves, didn’t men want to convince their rivals or enemies of the pointless pretense to come and take their wives as spoils of war?
Convince them of the madness to provoke war for women whose faces they had never seen, whose charms they had no assurance of, taking the senseless risk of being killed for women older and uglier than they thought? War would then no longer have as its sole purpose that material wealth so quickly destroyed or revolted by others?
Frantz assured that he could understand those peoples who force women to cover up and not show up in order to protect public peace, but did this prevent them from being spoils of war, from being systematically raped as they were in Bosnia, Africa, Asia whenever there is a conflict?
Frantz preferred the example of these Celtic girls.
He recalled that Julius Caesar, in his chronicles of the Gaul War, had written that he admired these young Germanic women fighting naked in the front row of the army. This disturbed her legions because at the slightest stroke of the sword, these young women were killed, wounded, disfigured, in any case unfit to be raped or taken into slavery. Likewise, at the slightest hesitation of the legionnaires contemplating a female body, it was these young women who killed the Roman soldiers.
Good understanding in these Celtic villages, inner peace, cohesion, collective strength rested on the innocence and purity of the young virgins who were the treasure of the clan and its pledges of prosperity through the noble descendants that these unveiled bodies promised and before which men had to respect the natural order of humanity.
The word virgin made the young girls blush and they confessed that after this show and in front of all these naked men, they no longer felt virgins. Laurie explained to them that succeeding in the first time in being happy in love was not given to all young girls, that there was usually a disappointment between a love of adolescence and a love of young woman and that it was better to prepare these moments with a good knowledge of her sexuality, accepting all the possibilities of her body and knowing how to use them.
She looked at the boys to tell them that it also applied to them. Moreover, she questioned them to find out if they had really paid attention to the details of others’ nudity. As a good naturist, Laurie received from the teenagers the obvious answer: in front of so many naked bodies, none had had time to linger over one of them and their memory had engraved no so-called obscene details. They had experienced nudity in the natural world and were not embarrassed by anything. They thanked Laurie for this lesson.
The Lesson of Things for Teens
Sepp, who had crossed the pedagogue’s eye, came to complain that we had not taken much care of the teenagers. He asked them to say, because it was a fundamental point in the culture of men, beyond any naturist preoccupation, which of Anke, Laurie and Françoise had the most beautiful pair of buttocks. Obviously embarrassed, they dare not open their mouths. Dominique took them apart so that they whispered the answer in his ear. Without taking too much account of the answers, she said that they could not make up their minds.
According to what they had just said, their innocent but already naturist eyes had prohibited themselves from looking at such places!
The pool in this small room removed was reserved for them. There were not many of them and there were no strangers to their groups. The parents of the two boys and three girls were accompanied by Laurie and Dan, Françoise and Pierre, Anke and Frantz. Patrick and Carine had returned to the steam bath.
The intimacy of the place convinced Dominique to push the lesson to the end for the good of his son and that of Barbara. She asked for a lesson in things. By taking the initiative, she was actually protecting her child because she was entitled to wonder what sauce he would be eaten if Anke and Laurie got involved and rushed over him!
Dominique, a professor of letters, had obviously also read Malinowski’s book on the sexual life of the wild men of the Trobriand Islands. She knew the basic principles of this education to sexual freedom, certainly framed by numerous and precise rites, magic.
Her takeaway was based on a few obvious principles: teenagers are educated among themselves, without the direct intervention of parents. Young girls can accompany their fathers everywhere and attend meetings between men, to get to know the men better. Young boys didn’t have that right. Then the children would watch their parents’ romantic debates in their hut. The only thing forbidden for them was to talk about it elsewhere. Discretion was firmly imposed in exchange for free access to sexual romantic debates by parents or adults. Finally, the teenagers had to live together in a communal house in the center of the village, only to leave it once they had chosen to form a solid couple for the rest of their human lives. The young couple would then move to a hut where an elderly woman lived alone to help with domestic chores in exchange for the layout of the place until their marriage.
In short, private or public sexual debate is part of sex education and of the romantic approach for as long as discretion is necessary.
For Dominique, the sex education of adolescents in their group, had to follow these principles of the Trobriand Islands! Indeed, from 1936 onwards Freud had finally recognized, thanks to his friend Malinowski, the superiority of the matriarchate in the organization of a human social group!
She asked the three young women to stand on the edge of the pelvis, on their knees, and to stretch their buttocks by digging their kidneys. Staying in the pelvis, she went to straighten their outfits and check that they all took the same slight distance of the thighs so as to give a glimpse of the sex.
Sepp had insisted on it because it was part, according to him, of the image of the ass that pleases a man and his two daughters had shown more earlier.
For reasons of equality, all three were carried out. Werner asked Sepp to show the boys how to kiss a woman’s buttocks since he was the specialist. He crossed the basin and demonstrated. The boys were asked to repeat the lesson with the encouragement of their mothers and then they gave their new answer in Dominique’s ear. She calmed everyone’s impatience by stating that the Trojan War would not take place, that the boys had chosen perfectly and that they were already great connoisseurs of women, including her son. She gave the verdict to Barbara’s ear and then to Gérard’s. Barbara passed it on to Werner and the men applauded the choice of their sons. Finally Dominique, flattered, confessed the verdict: they had each preferred the buttocks of their mothers!
Everyone laughed and applauded. Laurie pointed out to them that they would not go very far with the buttocks of their moms, that on the other hand with hers, there were possibilities without mentioning those of Anke or Françoise… but Dominique who had apparently studied thoroughly the taboo of incest and not only at Freud, concluded that a modern mother could also take care of certain things rather than leaving it to young girls not always very well raised or clean! This corresponds to the rite of the game of war on the Trobriand Islands.
This time, there was no difference. The common and intense moment they had just experienced had brought them together. They were one group. The teenagers understood that adults could allow each other to share some intimacy. Adults understood that teenagers had to give themselves their learning time to achieve this sharing. Everyone understood that this agreement is based on absolute discretion.
First they had to amass desires, dreams, certainties, desires, needs capable of going through their whole life before they could share them. Adults were only there to arouse real and human desires, to show modestly the possible paths of sharing, in no case they had the right to decide the moment and the form of this sharing. Everyone understood that. The looks and words of Werner, Barbara, Sepp, Sandra, Gérard and Dominique with their children sealed this pact.
The water was about 25 degrees, the intermittent turbulence caused by its arrival gave the impression of being directly connected to the thermal spring. They kept quiet, closed their eyelids, let their bodies float.
The poet’s sentimental dreams
Peter observed them. He didn’t say anything, he didn’t do anything. The beautiful cohesion of their group had allowed Anke to break free and be a leader with breathtaking charms. One moment he was jealous of her while he was so clumsy in his contacts with others.
He would have liked from time to time to get rid of his burden, no longer be able to talk about the missing beings, to tell so many stories about the Egyptians, the hermetic work, the approach to the Buddha, the bases of an economic and social political revolution, the joys and mysteries of life after the death of the body.
He would have preferred to sow the good mood, provoke the spirits. He had long been able to live with the weight of revelations that weighed on his conscience. Little by little he had discovered those that allowed him to live. The knowledge of his non-being now helped him to endure without any more aggression the fact of being born a poet, continual traveler between heaven and earth, voyeur of souls.
He liked Frantz’s story. He imagined the scene of this celebration in a Celtic village under the snow. He sometimes took the gamble of having to choose between living in the time of Upper Egypt, in the time of the Celts, of Greece in the sixth century BC, in a Lamaist temple in Tibet, in the time of Jesus.
He smiled knowing that after the death of his body, all these experiences would be recognized again and that his curiosity as a human was only a way to establish the schedule of his first activities when he was back home. Now, he had to admit that he had never felt better than after all these readings, these works that had enabled him to know the mysteries of these civilizations that he had attached to his pilgrim stick on his way to his identity forever. Never had he been happier than after these meetings at Amadeus, than here and now after this expansion of their group to teenagers, a clear sign of a greater chance of sustainability of their company and which was well worth a few kisses on a few buttocks! He looked at those girls and boys. When the time comes, they will be present to share the mystery that he would revive. He thought of his own children and closed his eyes too. He had to cling firmly to the edges of the basin as the floating of his body and the turbulence pushed him away from the edge!
On Sunday afternoon, the spiritual meeting.
After lunch, when the teenagers had returned to their group, several asked for mercy! They needed a break, a nap. Laurie offered them some sophrology exercises and then she let them fall asleep for half an hour. They woke up and could not find their ardor at work.
Werner reassured them that this morning’s demonstration at the Friedrichsbad’s swimming pool was conclusive. He had observed the people outside their group and the enthusiasm they had shown to follow Anke’s program. The communicative joy of women, their captivating beauty, their culture, their faith in life were worth all the speeches, all the simulations of management. Joking, he asked Sandra to simply inquire about the possibility of renting all the thermal baths to be able to organize their public evenings… having taken care to remove the plaque: “Roman-Irish bath” to replace it with the abbreviation ” orgie new age antiquo-europea! “
Leaving already was not possible, staying there to chat was unseemly after all these highlights of their weekend and moreover they were not hungry, as if they had fed themselves during the night of the mountain air. This available time called for a brilliant conclusion, a moment that would fill them up until next time, a moment that would raise them to the limits that they had talked so much about and that they had interviewed, heard in the early hours of that day. Before the band had too much of a vision of what they wanted to do, Pierre walked out of the room with Frantz. Anke and Laurie understood that these two had a proposal to make to them and they made the group wait.
Pierre and Frantz felt the same need to live a last, more spiritual encounter, but they disagreed on the form.
Frantz still had in his pockets some esoteric texts to read and offered to think about the elaboration of an initiatory rite of chivalry.
The celebration of their communion.
Peter convinced him that the time was in fact ripe for the celebration of their communion.
Rather than discussing an initiatory rite, it was better for the group to feel the mystery and that of the transmutation of the divine body under the species of bread and wine to lend itself more to the celebration of their communion. Peter assured Frantz that he was speaking of the rite of the celebration of this mystery as practiced by the high priests of Upper Egypt as part of the sanctification of the process of resurrection to life that all persons must accomplish during their lifetime, a celebration that Jesus reintroduced. Like last night and Anke’s account, there was no longer the rite of Dionysus, or the sacrifice of the goat to eat his flesh and drink his blood, as there was among the raging bacchanals.
They went into the kitchen to fill a basket with pieces of bread and poured into a large ice cup the half bottle of white wine they found in the fridge. They took a white cloth and came back among the group.
Sitting in circles on the ground, Peter taught them to pray, to seek in them that strength capable of speaking to the presence that lives in them and that is the same as that which lives in others. They prayed for them, then for another person whom they had to choose in their secret, then for one person from the group, finally for their children. Peter then spoke and returned to the one who lives in us:
Father, our father who lives in us
you created us in heaven in your image
come to this earth, we sanctify your name
and let us strengthen through your love, our faith to share it according to your will
with those of our brothers who have trouble finding their way home, near you.
give us our daily bread
forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us
do not let us succumb to discouragement and show you to us in the life expectancy of our neighbor so that we may already celebrate here the joy of being with you today and forever.
Peter took the prayer more slowly and all repeated, then he continued:
i give thanks to our fathers
who had calculated the year when our land would again change its center of gravity and survived this cataclysm
i give thanks to those who survived according to the divine laws of our universe as it was given to us and who were able to recognize the power of our creator without ever departing from it in anger or doubt to lead humanity on new shores
i give thanks to those who have understood that the disarray of the universe and our cataclysms are not an aberration of the creator but the marks of his will that we are always listening to him, that the life of our humanity passes through his permanent listening, in the movements of our mountains, the tremors of our lands, the thrills of our souls, the races of the stars that we observe and that transcribe to us day after day the cosmic and divine laws
i thank the descendants of the survivors for choosing the banks of this river where the peoples of three continents meet in the promise of a fertile land constantly renewed and a life blessed by divinity
I give thanks to these descendants of the survivors for recreating their center of life listening to the Father, in the middle of the desert where the purity of the sky clears the way of the stars, in the middle of the desert whose sand preserves for millennia the work of the initiates and on the edge of the river, a unique predestined place where the power of the universe marries to its creator and the promise of fertile terrestrial life
we bear witness to this faith, which is secure and faithful in the knowledge of God and of the universe that he gave us, to this faith that saw them settle there to manifest forever the fundamental knowledge from which man derives his reasons for surviving the death of his body, as well as the knowledge of the cosmic and divine laws that strengthen his soul
we give thanks to you, builders of the three temples of Heliopolis, Memphis and Thebes, who have reconstructed the mystery of our creator’s Great Work and allowed to keep open the path of our return near him as you kept track of it in the Golden Circle of the double house of life of Dendérah
I give thanks to our creator and kneel before him beside the priests of Heliopolis to affirm the mystery of creation that divided the origin and that one day everything will return to the origin
i give thanks to you, you who exists and who was created to live in us, to hear the creator’s verb and to live with him when our body will be nothing but dust
I give thanks to you who governs my earthly existence, you, my Lord, for having revealed to me and ostensibly leading my steps towards our Father. That by the grace of my words that transmit the message of the Word that I have received, you may bear witness to the presence of the Lord that is in you!
thanks to you, O my Lord, to unfailingly answer my prayer and to support me on the path of my passion until the revelation of the fullest uniqueness between my soul, the Word that is in each of us and you that leads us to the Father.
Thanks to you for the unshakable faith that you have given me and which commits me to free me from my body, to free me from this world so that you may deign to invest me totally, to incorporate yourself into me in your infinite love like that of the Father and to bring back to life the one who lived in this mortal body in the service of your eternal presence because that is your power, to you who always returns to the Father as soon as our body dies, to you who always comes into us from the birth of the first breath of our body, to you the Christ, the Lord makes flesh of man to guide us,
Christ the Son of God is man to allow us through His words to address ourselves directly to our Lord and through Him to God,
Christ who always resurrects from death and helps us to resurrect eternal life before the breath of our earthly body dies.
Thus we will go beyond the universal ternary dimension; humanity will no longer be equal to four, seven will no longer be the number of gold that reconciles man and his creator; we will be one and one; we will make two, you our Father and we your sons united in your uniqueness and your love, your whole sons gathered here below by Christ.
Non nobis, Domine, non nobis sed nomini tuo da gloriam
Lord that, to save us, thou hast also made men perceptible, and that lives among us…
We, your entire sons filled with the Word and the consciousness of their Lord to celebrate this trinity Father Lord and Word, Father Son and Holy Spirit who through Christ is your most faithful image for the eyes of our humanity and in which you receive us as your children.
I give thanks to the men, women and children who, since the origin of humanity, have been able to revive this indestructible bond between our earthly existence and the eternal presence of the Creator.
We give thanks to them for having traveled this path which made, O our Lord, that you were incarnated in them and that you ostensibly broke the laws of their dead to confirm the promise of our resurrection.
Peter took the basket of bread and the cup of wine
As we have learned from those in whom you have incarnated, O our Lord, the presence of God in each of us, you who leads us to Christ among our brethren, we celebrate the cult of our passion that leads us to your incarnation in us and saves us from perdition on this earth
i bless this bread and wine, fruits of the earth and heaven.
Father, through the work of your sons, you give them to us to nourish our bodies. Now that they are going to be consumed to strengthen us, I ask you to associate them with the mystery of our life that must be consumed before returning home to you.
In memory of the men-christ in the service of your work who guided the people of the survivors and who in memory of your mercy celebrated in your name the cult of death and resurrection, in memory of Jesus who reintroduced this rite in our hearts, I present to you this bread and wine, fruit of the work of men, that they become the body and blood of your presence which fortifies the life that you have given us for the eternity of centuries and centuries.
The others replied: Amen!
Peter lifted the basket and the cup higher, the others had instinctively kneeled.
As our masters taught us in the light and life of God, this is the body, this is the blood of God who lives in us and will live beyond our death as it lived before our birth. This is the body and blood of Christ who always rises from the dead.
All of you who believe and hope, blessed are you waiting. Take and eat, may this body and blood make you fellowship even more closely with the risen man who lives in you!
Peter presented the basket to everyone and Frantz passed by to present the cup and wipe his edge after each participant had drunk. The contemplation was profound. After a long time of silence, Pierre continued:
We have joined together to strengthen ourselves in the presence of the Lord, and we are more ready to open ourselves to Christ who lives among us so that he may incarnate himself in us and make us hear the Word that lets us go to the Father.
Let’s give ourselves the kiss of peace…
When you wish, we can celebrate this communion again and I will teach you to lead each one in your turn these prayers and this offering to the glory of the mysteries of our life…
We will resume our work in a fortnight, let’s go home now and work on our means of success!
The end of the weekend
All agreed to end their weekend in this way.
Before packing up, they paid Frantz the agreed price for the meals, Evelyne’s salary. They searched for the children, and before leaving, they vowed to meet again in two weeks.
A few had planned holiday departures that they were going to change tomorrow. They rushed into the cars as if to be at home faster, calm to undertake this delightful work of assimilation, of digestion of each of these wonderful events that upset their lives.
Before the lead car ran off, several of them got out of their vehicles to ask Laurie if she had her audio cassette. She showed it to them by holding her hand above the car, her arm came out of the window and the motorcade ran…
The daughters of Pierre and Françoise recounted during the journey their encounter with the God of Mummelsee, this patriarch with a long white beard and a golden trident with whom he throws lightning on the bad guys or weaves rainbows on the good guys. They were impressed.
Françoise and Pierre looked at each other. They promised themselves that one day, they too would listen to the voices of the afterlife, they would celebrate communion with God who lives in them… it was the least of things for poet daughters!