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The man in the street
can’t stand the
world’s noise (Rev of Arès ii/7-13… xLvii/2)
anymore: news, ads, appeals, requests,
announcements,
warnings, etc., but
he can’t escape them. So he escapes everything else. It is that escaper
that The Revelation of Arès and its
missionary try to speak to.
When every so often an impatient ear strains at the missionary, he can
scarcely
be other than brief.
None knows better than I a chatterbox know how painful an effort to cut
short a
talk may be. I feel inadequate, nearly unfit. I would like to spill the
torrents of the
Water (Rev of Arès18/5, 23/5, xi/12, etc.) through my lips,
but
the time fails me, so I can let out only a jet or even less, a spray,
of it.
Volatile! What would be left of it, if I had no flyer?
I hand a flyer out to the listener. A flyer can be taken away. It may
make
the
listener a reader —o holy hope!
But the flyer has to be even shorter than the word for a public still
more
impatient at reading than at listening. The public overwhelmed with the
heavy
rain of set
readings —the verbose regulations, newsletters, general terms, law,
contracts,
official documents, food ingredients, schedules, etc. — calls for
dryness, curtness,
whenever
they aren’t forced to read.
 The curtness problem actually is more difficult
for a flyer than for
the word. The voice can vary, make up for slips, change the tone in
seconds according
to the
listener. A flyer can’t adjust to every one of its readers. So I have
to make
my flyer short and simple, as if all of its readers were expected to be
impatient and uncultivated. I am looking for penitents,
but not theologians, anyway.
My curt simple flyer looks like low-grade propaganda, I know. This is
its
shortcoming. It looks like it sought to move pusillanimous people while
in fact
I’m seeking for penitents
determined
to achieve the Word (Rev of Arès 31/6), in
short heroes (Rev of Arés xxxv/4-12). That’s
where the flyer art meets the japanese print art, that is, the art of
suggesting
much and even beauty (12/3) with
almost nothing.
Sometimes my brevity for fear of sounding too faint might lapse into
affected
ways of grief by despairing of the sinful world subjected to the white
king and
black king (Rév d’Arès xxxi/12, xxxvii/14) and/or prophesying
dark
days to come, the sin of sins (Rev of Arès
38/2). I am wary of this sort of pathos.
Sometimes my brevity very nearly goes surfing over commonplaces and
issues in
vogue much more easier and curter to say than the spiritual, but I
remember my
brothers’ regrettable "social mission", that
certainly spared us
the beating by the "counter-cult" groups, but made
us
misunderstood, unclassifiable, which nowadays is tantamount to
invisible. I’m
wary of this too.
Sometimes the need for brevity could force my enthusiasm. That’s the
way people
often think they force facts to happen, but the real facts are already
present,
they pass me second by second on the sidewalk, human beings with no
ideals, just
paying attention, if so, to the immediate concrete. Spiritual
enthusiasm
doesn’t reach the masses. I’m wary of this too.
The public despise fossil concepts like God,
sin, penitence, etc. in the senses that religions have given
these words, but,
don’t let that fool you, the public likewise dislike the subjects in
vogue already
dealt with by the sellers of all that can be sold, the politicians, the
union
activists, the NGOs, etc. The public despise everything except whatever
could
relieve their boredom. People have shut themselves away in their
routine not
because they don’t dream, but because without their knowing their life
is
planned and banned from adventure. The technologically advanced
kaleidoscope of
color, stir and sensation that television, news, trade and business are
nowadays cannot make up for this frustration; it can’t relieve people’s
boredom
but at times.
Which just goes to show our street mission is extremely hard, as what
it gets
at is not the spinal cord to excite it, but the heart to make him open
like a
cage and set free the pious man (Rev of
Arès 32/8) and his Life (24/5)
that have been languishing there for ages,
What does my flyer have left to say to mate the human beast and the soul
again?
What my flyer has left to say is all that I have just said and that I
have to
avoid saying, but that I can’t completely avoid saying, ever, because
all my
flyer has is words, while it ought to convey something else :
the
unspeakable ! The unspeakable marvel of Life
(Rev of Arès 24/5) which generations
of penitents will recover
for the whole world.
My flyer made of inadequate words may
have only one chance of picking the good Fruit
(Rev of Arès i/17-19), but it’s no small chance :
miracle !
Miracle is rare. This reminds you missionnary that, if the
leg that follows you (Rev
of Arès i/18) is rare and
miraculous , it
is
because the
world will be saved by a small remnant of
miracles.
Don’t you feel miraculously helped when your
decision
to be penitent is met by the
strength
to be penitent, something that
humans, even believers, have forgotten? You do.
You have been patient enough
to
read the text above. Congratulations!
Now read what's following only if you're more patient than the most
patient reader of flyers!
That's saying a lot.
I have to care over what my
flyer
reads
and shows. To make it curt, though clear, requires my labor, my effort
to
escape the maze of my long-winded self. Each chatterbox likes the sound
of his
or her voice; I have to put myself in the position of those who will
read my
flyer, whose least of their worries The
Revelation of Arès is really. But once my flyer is made, I
have to accept
it, believe in it, for a missionary who thinks that his or her flyer is
of
little use dare not confront his or her own faith.
You faith saves you, go in peace (Mark 5/34) and missionize!
I know that Salvation can’t be
shown
in a flyer like the Tower Eiffel in a postcard. I know, however, that
not only
will my flyer tell the passer-by The
Revelation of Arès, but it may awaken his spiritual
conscience and that,
even though he might never get involved in the small
remnant, he might have something left like a wisp of vague
nostalgia
of the very old days when he was a God,
immersed
in the Creator (Rev of Arès 2/13).
Not only is a flyer a short memo, but also the missionary’s calling
card, an
invitation to meet him or her later on.
Man, who formerly was alive, sensitive to ideals, whether he was
against or in for
them, has lost his spiritual matter. At best he has become a spiritual mummy
(Rev of Arès xLix/7) which we have
to undress and resuscitate. The miracle of spiritual resuscitation The
Revelation of Arès has given us the
capacity to work.
Back in the street, from which violent men —mosly Evangelists like
those who
want to burn the Quran today September 11— had forced me to cave in
under their
insults and blows, the world I have met there has grown more apathetic,
more
dead metaphysically than they had been when I had last met them. What’s
to blame? The plot of the media, politicians,
capitalists,
intellectuals, all those whose scientism gross and often cynical is now
perfectly
well-suited for a man in crisis, who doesn’t know which way to turn?
There is no such thing as a plot. What is to blame is just the immense
understandable
disappointment of an old world that has very long been deceived himself
on all
sides. So the great void left in man’s heart is culturally logical and
well in
the continuity of deceived men’s relationship. Indeed, some men and
women have
not lost hope —the ones that the harvester
and its flyer hope to come across— , but the continuous trickling of sin
on them has neutralized them, They
don’t
think it is remediable; they even think it is normal.What
can my flyer do then?
See above. Il can do what the Father’s
Word can do : work miracles.
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