Sr Marie Claire Denys Horvath report English

The monastery of Saint Claire at Ronchamp

THE DIVINE BREATH

Sacred breath and music was the theme of our 2020 interreligious meeting, which this year was a very small gathering because of the pandemic.

The theme of breath took us to the East. During three short hours, we savored suras from the Qur’ān sung and commented on by the Imam of Belfort, and the Kaddish, a central element of Jewish liturgy whose opening words, yitgadal t'yitkadash, were inspired by Ezekiel 38:23. This chant, whose theme is the glorification and sanctification of the divine name, took us back to the roots of the Lord’s Prayer, which was sung in Aramaic by our Iraqi friends.

The highlight of the meeting was a text by the Chinese sage Zhuang Zhou on the Great Breath that animates nature and humanity, a text that Thomas Merton included in his book The Way of Chuang Tzu. Madame Louise Shao and her son introduced us to the deep resonances of Chinese music and signaled a wider openness to the presence of various religious traditions in our region.

The pandemic prevented us from including in our program the chanting of sutras by our Buddhist friends with whom we have been in contact throughout the year. We hope we will be able to have the pleasure of welcoming them to our interreligious gathering next year.

For us Christians, the theme of Breath refers to the mystery of the Holy Spirit and to dialogue with the great spiritual traditions of Asia, which are the special areas of my own theological and spiritual research.

In these moments of confinement, which for some people can serve as a kind of retreat, attending to the often unnoticed dynamics of our breath allows us to deepen our awareness of prayer as a call to abandon ourselves totally to God so that we may be reborn and live unceasingly in the Holy Spirit, the Breath of God.

Prayer expressed through this beautiful and simple form of meditation can connect us to the very mystery of Jesus, the Beloved Son, and to the unceasing mystery of his surrender to the Father in the Divine Breath.

Sister Marie-Claire-Denys HORVATH is a Hungarian Poor Clare nun living since 2014 in the new Monastery of St. Clare in Ronchamp, France. Responsible for the new foundation of the Poor Clares in Hungary from 1996 to 2002, she collaborated in the publication of the writings of Fr. Pierre de Béthune in Hungarian. After a Master's thesis on the pneumato-logical approach to religious pluralism in the works of Amos Yong, she continued her theological studies at the University of Strasbourg. Her principal area of study and research is the pneumatological dimension of monastic interreligious dialogue.