Console Thyself

Souer Emmanuelle
1908-2008

Never shying from controversy, Sister Emmanuelle's writings--just like her spoken words--pushed the envelope of social acceptability. In her memoirs, she wrote of the insatiable urges and sexual appetite. She wrote frankly of her lifelong feelings of lust, of masturbating as a girl, of falling in love and having to renounce physical love for the love of God. In a very unusually honest account for a nun, she writes: “when desire assaulted me, only some outside presence had the power to stop me; otherwise I was powerless against the avidity of pleasure. A penchant for voluptuousness and an obsession for sensuality developed in my flesh, the intensity of which is difficult to describe. The fact that the needle has not left my old woman’s body is a source of constant surprise and humiliation. I thought that, with the years, its tip of fire would completely disappear. Not at all.”

She also discussed how she grappled with and overcame her early fear of Jews. Since her grandmother was Jewish, she eventually reconciled that with her religious order which promoted the conversion of Jews to Christianity. She elaborates that “little by little,” she wrote, “I went from rejection of, to pride in, my origins.”

Fagus sylvaticus
European Beech

Medicine and sickness heal each other. The whole world is medicine.

Where do you find your self?

~ Zen Master Yunmen, ninth-century China