SAINT GERMAINE COUSIN
A MEDITATION ON HOW WE HAVE LOST TOUCH WITH OUR MYSTICAL FAITH
A REVIEW OF THE BOOK:
GERMAINE: REQUIEM OF A SOUL/The True Story of Cinderella
February 11/2018
GERMAINE: Requiem for a Soul / Cinderella's True Story arrives at an opportune time today, as we are tired of fables and hungry for real inspiring stories of people whose heroism has beautifully defied their lives. Germaine: Requiem for a Soul is one of those stories. The story of Cinderella is known, it is said, from the first century Greece, but we think that the most famous version that we read as children is that of Charles Perrault published in 1697 as Cendrillon in Tales of the Past time. Cendrillon or as we know her, Cinderella, has a difficult and painful life, but by the intrusion of magical powers she is delivered from the infernal grip of her stepmother and step-sisters. A tragic if not hopeless tale in which belief in magical powers appears as the condition of salvation for all the difficulties and tragedies of life. Subtle but effective, these fantasies, while entertaining, create a disorder in the soul that clings to their deceptive beauty, delaying the ascension to a greater understanding of its purpose. With time, however, we come to feel that the fairy tales no longer excite the intellect and the imagination or satisfy the soul. So what then? Over time, life is perceived more realistically and we soon give up on our dreams. We finish by attaching ourselves to a more pragmatic notion of life, to finally abandon the false hopes conveyed by these enchanting fables. But how did it happen that for a time these tales have us so much enchanted? How did we become so vulnerable to such fantasies?
Because in the inner depths of our souls we all have a hunger for the reason of things, the truth and the natural order that invites the soul to a mystical ascendancy that brings it closer to God; it's in our nature. It is sad that our culture does not aspire to tell stories rooted in the truth that comfort suffering in this way. We must all grow up one day and face the tragedies of life one by one when they are thrown at us. It is not surprising that we never really fall back on Cinderella's fable to provide us with the real comfort the soul needs when the weather turns gray and cold. There is, in a real sense, a natural tendency to return to this order that the mind desires: a penchant for the supernatural. Instead, we have given peddlers of magic fantasies permission to spread their fabulous stories on which nobody can find a real comfort; after the imagination is temporarily excited, the fatigued soul continues its trek, empty and stripped of meaning, in search of that order which gives the human a sense of mission and destiny. The calamity is that we have not managed to cultivate in our children the belief in an order that directs towards the supernatural. The book, Germaine: Requiem of a Soul does exactly that.
Cinderella's tale and her tragedies show us quickly enough that there is no way out of our misfortunes because magic does not exist. The tragedy is that parents and educators, long ago, stopped murmuring the sweet stories of angels and refused to nurture, in children, any form of mystical life. Thus, this generation robed its children, like the two previous generations, of a deep and rich interior life; suffering can not vanish by magic, never could, and never will. Suffering has been a part of our lives from the beginning. However, few would admit it, but while reading our wonderful fantasy books, we do sometimes secretly wish that fairy godmothers really exist.
What went wrong? Currently, the rise of immorality and a strong sense of desperation are defining the North American culture - times are indeed gray. A front-page article from the February 10, 2014 issue of the UK's Daily Mirror reads: "The Generation Stress: The Scandal of Our Depressed Children". Andrew Gregory investigated the crisis. He described children under 10, tormented, anxious and worried about everything: homework, bullies, friends, appearances, sexualization and consumerism. Lucie Russell, head of the Young Minds campaign, a mental health charity, expressed her concern about these statistics. She admits, "An increase in the number of young people under 11 in need of mental health services is a sad indictment of the society we live in and the pressures that children face."
Children face pressures, but who protects them from the onslaught of demands that saturate their schedules, and the worries and fears that consume them? It can certainly be argued that a social malady in some way is at the root of the break-up of our national culture and spirit; it is symptomatically revealed in our broken families, broken relationships, and dark faces. Psychologists, Twenge and Campbell - authors of the narcissistic epidemic - have argued that narcissism also crept into our culture from the 1970s. Therefore, we boastfully strut about, prideful of our own gifts, sure of ourselves, incapable of sacrificing ourselves for others; unable to love. We live in a time when hope is a rare commodity; depression, anxiety and mood disorders prevail and afflict a large number of people who are eager to understand what is happening to them, and who are hungry for inner peace. Germaine Requiem for a Soul delivers a lot of hope, because the main theme of the book is that we are loved by God; that he is close to us, despite an apparent and disturbing absence, and that we have a mission. This book, because it describes an authentic historical figure, conveys a message of hope that changes everything. Nothing can be the same after reading Germaine's story; indeed, how we see reality can only change and engage us to love more deeply. What makes this story particularly salient and shocking is that it is true. It is indeed a beacon of hope for the most courageous who want to read every page of her painful life.
In writing this book, the author consulted Jean-Pierre Jouffreau, archivist of the diocese of Toulouse in France, about the official historical facts concerning the life of Germaine Cousin. Rest assured that the story of Germain Cousin, recounted by Andrew St-James, and the important facts of her life have been verified and confirmed. The author, for his part, did not hesitate to fictionalize the empty hours of her story for which the documentation was silent, thus filling in gaping voids in such a short life. This author's license in no way hinders the historical character of Germaine's life nor does it invalidate the many miracles; the reader can rest assured that the hope proposed by book is directed to those who are seeking the joy and assurance that he is not alone, and his suffering is not in vain. LINK TO BOOK
