Evil is nothing other than vice.
And nothing is more devastating than when it enters a human life.

Did we allow it in?
Did it slip through cracks, through wounds, through places already fragile?
In the end, it hardly matters. Once present, it is often difficult to rid oneself of it.

Evil assaults, causes suffering, brings one to the ground — sometimes to the very edge of inner death. Its consequences can resemble true wounds of the soul and the body.
No one is spared: even the saints have encountered evil, in one form or another.

Faced with it, the human being can feel helpless, overwhelmed, desperate.
And sometimes, only prayer — or the help of others — makes it possible to endure and to glimpse a way forward.

Whether it manifests through events, trials, abuse, violence, vices, or horrors, evil often leaves bitter fruit in its wake.
The consequences can be heavy: trauma, deep fears, hypervigilance, post-traumatic stress, wounds that may mark an entire lifetime.

Life is no longer the same once suffering has left its imprint upon innocence.
The path then becomes like a battlefield, where every encounter seems threatening, where trust is weakened, where one’s vision of the world is distorted.

It sometimes takes years — sometimes an entire lifetime — to survive the unthinkable and begin to move beyond it.

And yet, the wheel eventually turns.
Light, sooner or later, returns.

Believing then becomes an ode to hope.
Each day, one more step widens the heart, makes room for goodness and beauty, and teaches us to lay down judgment and criticism.

When evil has knocked at our door and slipped in through a crack of light, it makes us bitter, distrustful, sometimes strangers to the world. The gaze hardens; our relationship with others becomes troubled.
But the spiritual path exists precisely for this: to purify what has been altered — not to deny suffering, but to pass through it and transform it.

Then, little by little, a singular path takes shape: one’s own.
A path that may become a field of flowers, or a trajectory above the clouds.

Passing through those clouds is often necessary to reach this luminous road, where the human being finds their rightful place, and where one understands, with time, that even vice itself may be called to transformation.

For more than three years now, each day, I have opened my heart to this path.
It is sometimes arduous, demanding, slow. Yet it teaches me the kindness of others, self-giving, and a return to what is essential.

For the spiritual path does not consist in accumulating knowledge, practices, or experiences.
Rather, it consists in removing, layer by layer, what is no longer true — without force, without violence, without haste.

This path is never complete.
But each step taken gives rise to a quiet, deep joy — like a calm smile offered to life.

I wish us the courage to embrace this path — at once magnificent, demanding, sometimes exhausting — and to transform it into a living jewel.
So that we may discover the Self, at the very depth of the human being.

Clémence