Adonis Diaries

What subject matters for a 15 year-old writer? Abbot Pierre, Emmaus communities

How 15 year-old could write a century ago

Abbot Pierre, founder of Emmaus communities for the homeless around the world, wrote his diaries before he reached 15.

What and how can a youth find subject matters to write about at such an early age?

The name of Abbot Pierre is Henry Groues and was born in 1912.  He fell passionately in love with another beautiful male youth with a lovely soprano voice and got ill six months for his passion. Henry wrote this French poem:

Thorne, Jesus, that is the oasis

Where your heart dwell?

Thorn infested locations are your dating places;

And for so long I have been looking for you

Among roses.

Asking along the way to the flowers

“Is the Divine heart here?”

My heart is torn apart

And bleeding day and night.

May my thorny heart be your resting place.

A student was assigned to console Henry.  Henry was in bed for 17  straight days and Francois Garbit (of the same age) wrote him a letter in 1928.  It says:

“Sure there are villains on earth. I don’t know how they should affect you and render your life bad. Everyone does what he wants in life.  A few drag life in the mud. How can they dirty ours?  The villains show us how to make life ignoble. This is our lesson for making life splendid”.

We cannot make life more splendid than it is.  We can go through life wholeheartedly and then relinquish it as we received it at death.

We need pure hearts and ideals to look at life as beautiful as it is. All we have to do is interrogate life and finding a meaning to it.

Do you realize that you are complicating your dreams with vile feelings; paralyzing your activities and braking your ideal longing?

There are all kinds of love (friendship, parental love, spouses, girlfriends, carrier…).
A single love won’t cut it and no earthly love will fill your life.

Those who restrict love to a woman are senseless; who define love in order to put them at ease are egoist.  All great vices shrink life to their dimensions, and belittle life at their expense.  Life is vaster than all your dreams.

What is life at our young age?  

We are just seeking a sense to life: that’s the future. As for the present, it is working for the well-being of our family and comrades.

Life is the joy we spread among our friends. It is perpetual struggle against our pessimism and conserving the purity of our heart.

We are preparing our life and it is this period of preparation that our future life depends on.

You wrote somewhere that your life has been a total void. What?!

Between the age of 15 and 25 life is at its spring season, abundant and growing in us.

This is not the time to doing penitence for the sins of mankind.

You are now asked to fulfill the few homework required of you.  We are preparing our future unconsciously and softly.

The tiniest gestures acquire great significance later on.”