Cecilia Dutter: Riding the Winds of Life

Across her body of work, Cécilia Dutter demonstrates an astonishing breadth. A novelist of Lame de fond, crowned by the Charles Oulmont prize of the Fondation de France, and of L’Amoureuse. Le roman de Marie-Madeleine, an essayist of Flannery O’Connor, Dieu et les gallinacés and of Aimer d’un cœur de femme, author in 2019 of the intimate narrative La loi du père, published by Cerf. For this literary season she publishes Laisse la vie respirer en toi, a profoundly intimate and powerful essay demonstrating how our existence no longer leaves us time to catch our breath – in this world that has lost its meaning, and thus its spirituality – our breath. Yet we must not forget that at the center of this work shines the luminous figure of Etty Hillesum. Cécilia dedicated to her Etty Hillesum, une voix dans la nuit at Robert Laffont in 2010, directed in 2013 Un cœur universel. Regards croisés sur Etty Hillesum at Salvator, and received for Vivre libre avec Etty Hillesum the Louis-Marin prize from the Association des Écrivains combattants. The young Jewish thinker, who wrote under Nazi terror, returns to this tutelary figure even as she moves alongside Rilke, for she who, deepest in the horror of Nazism, dared to let the “Life breathe in her,” shows us so much about the human part within divine work through these unforgettable words: Je vais t’aider, mon Dieu, à ne pas t’éteindre en moi.

Ruah, Pneuma, Spiritus, Cécilia Dutter reveals to us, across all traditions, the place where physiology and mysticism converge. Each breath we take draws the outside world in and returns it to the world, and it is this continuous back-and-forth that dispels the illusion of a self shut up within itself, for every living being breathes air that is lent to it. And if we return to where every human breath begins, in the womb of our mother. From the very first pages the author – who confesses her pain at the loss of a child in the early months of gestation – restores to motherhood the power that our era teaches us to overlook. Here is what we, men, do not have the luck to discern: bearing a child is to welcome the Other at the heart of oneself, and this experience makes women, initiates. Stunning pages, where the author invites us to discover microchimérisme. Did you know that behind this scholarly term scientists have found that fetal cells were detected in the mother for more than thirty years after birth? This means that each of us harbors traces of our mother and surely of our grandmother, traces of love, but also of traumas. This silent migration, is it not the transmission of the Breath of Life from generation to generation.

Let’s talk about these children whom society nudges us to place somewhere. And thus, coming from South Korea, the vogue of no kids spreads to France up to the SNCF trains, where a class is barred, as I have experienced, even in some hotels. Cécilia Dutter is right to speak out, for this exclusion is insidious violence. But let us not delude ourselves, for in Tokyo, some bars already exclude those over forty, and certain Korean shops are now attempting to exclude seniors. But what is this society in which the exclusion of the little ones threatens to reach the elderly tomorrow, all in the name of adult comfort?

At the forefront of violence against childhood lies maltreatment, which Cécilia Dutter speaks of from experience. A girl, a witness and victim of family brutality, she grew up in fear of a despot father with unpredictable temper, a past recounted in 2019 in La loi du père, an intimate narrative published by Le Cerf. She returns to it with a modesty that is deeply moving. Again, very beautiful pages where we discover that the frightened child sought refuge with the Heavenly Father, and this early faith carried the woman along a long road of reconstruction and then of forgiveness. In the balance where sufferings are weighed, the cry of a toddler outweighs the clamor of an army, and – for those who succeed – forgiveness opens one by one the doors that life had locked.

But how difficult it is to be a child in this world, swallowed by the absurd that Albert Camus would not have shunned, faced with the digital stupor to which we invite them. A child instinctively knows what the pilgrim seeks at the end of the world, that God stands beside each one, and they live the moment with a fervor that the screen literally screens off Life breathing within them. Pornography, arms trafficking, cyberharassment, terrorist propaganda, the child left alone on the Internet encounters all dangers, and algorithms lock them in a chamber of echoes saturated with extreme images, some of which, writes Cécilia Dutter, resemble a psychic rape.

The chapter bearing this title gives the book its launch. Moving forward with the wind at your back means extending by one’s actions the momentum received from Life by aligning with the Heavens, and it requires breaking the self-imposed confinement. Convinced that the possible is a permission and that permission is justice, the modern man crowns himself sovereign of his life, and the Breath, lacking passage, abandons this closed space for more hospitable hearts. When the self becomes the sole measure, every failure takes on an absolute dimension and the other becomes a rival, until hatred completes the retreat. Pride, which blocks God, is fought step by step, for prayer rises as the granite shell surrounding the soul wears away, slowly.

Before this man imprisoned by his hubris, God waits. “The Lord never imposes Himself on man,” writes Cécilia Dutter, and his silence, in a society that has ceased to listen to Him — and especially to hear Him — marks a withdrawal full of consideration for human freedom, even in our most base wanderings. The return to the true self passes through a descent toward the child we once were. Slow down, inhabit a chosen solitude, listen to the inner voice, let grace surface in the crackling of rain or the flight of a bird; these acts return the being to the divine spark lodged at its center, since everything that grows in a soul matures first in silence. Embracing finitude comes from the same apprenticeship. Against youth-centric culture, Cécilia Dutter invites acceptance of illness as well as age and to make decline the soil of a new life, akin to trees that storms shove and which, with every assault, drive their roots deeper, in an underground labor that the gust ignores.

This wisdom governs her view of the century. Cécilia Dutter critiques the freezing of oocytes in the name of women’s health and ethics alike, defends Fratelli tutti while lamenting the rigidity of the two camps, and forges a middle path, where the Spirit blows and where the prayers that quarrels separate merge, at a certain altitude, into one breath. She sees in the lack of prayer, or its poverty when it is used to soothe conscience, one of the era’s major maladies, and answers it with a prayer offered to the rhythm of breathing while cherishing the discipline of prayer for the secret of the title.