This is the final installment in a three-part series on Jacques Lusseyran. In his book, Against the Pollution of the I, Jacques dedicates a chapter to Jeremy, an old man whose life intersected with his own for a few weeks when they were both in the same concentration camp at Buchenwald.

“Jeremy did not have his gaze nailed to the smoke from the crematorium, nor on the twelve hundred terrified prisoners of Block 57. He was looking through… At first, I didn’t know who he was – people spoke to me of ‘Socrates.’ ‘Socrates said…,’ ‘Socrates laughed…’

I was expecting an eloquent reasoner, a clever metaphysician, some sort of triumphant moral philosopher. That is not at all what I found…He was a simple welder from a small village at the foot of the Jura mountains…I heard Jeremy speak of men who did not come to his shop just for their horses and their wagons but for themselves. They came so as to go home all steeled and new, to take home a little of the life they were lacking and which they found overflowing, shining and gentle at the forge of father Jeremy.

One went to Jeremy as toward a spring. One didn’t ask oneself why. One didn’t think about it. In this ocean of rage and suffering there was this little island: a man who didn’t shout, who asked no one for help, who was sufficient unto himself…Jeremy found joy in the midst of Block 57. He found it during moments of the day where we found only fear. And he found it in such great abundance that when he was present we felt it rise in us. Inexplicable sensation, incredible even, there where we were: joy was going to fill us. I knew this state through Jeremy. Others knew it too, I am sure. The joy of discovering that joy exists, that it is in us, just exactly as life is, without conditions and which no condition, even the worst, can kill…He had touched the very depth of himself and liberated…the essential, that which does not depend on any circumstance, which can exist in all places and at any time, in pain as in pleasure. He had encountered the very source of life…the act of Jeremy sums up to me the religious act itself: the discovery that God is there, in each person, to the same degree, completely in each moment, and a return can be made toward Him…I have spoken of him as a living prayer.

One day, someone told me that he had died… I remember…that he came to see me, several days earlier, and told me that it was the last time. Not at all in the way one announced an unhappy event, not so solemnly. Simply – this was the last time…He had been of service. He had the right to leave this world which he had completely lived.

What was [exceptional] in him…didn’t belong to him; it was meant to be shared. [It] was for us to find, and to find within ourselves. I have the clearest memory of finding it. I perceived, one day like the others, a little place where I did not shiver, where I had no shame, where the death-dealers were only phantoms, where life no longer depended on the presence of the camp or its absence. I owe it to Jeremy.”

Have you borne witness to someone like Jeremy who has bubbled with joy even in the midst of hardships? Do you believe there exists an inexhaustible reservoir of joy within you? What are you doing to go on that search for this vast treasure within?

Warmly,
Hitendra

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