A MAN OF CONNECTIONS (short version)

Jean-Paul Guillet

a Man of Connections

« Since you like to make connections…»

the superior told him with a half-smile…

by ELOY ROY

Jean Paul Guillet is one of the founders of the SME mission in Honduras. In January of 1956, he enters Choluteca in a « baronesa » (bus-truck).

At first, like any good missionary, he baptized thousands of children, crisscrossed mountains riding a mule to be by the side of sick people until their last moments and experienced the chores of the patronal fiestas in far-away villages.

Afterwards, with Guillaume Aubuchon and Henri Coursol, he drew on the abundant reserves of popular religiosity and established traditional apostolate movements. Their purpose was to begin to gather together people around ordinary leaders in the making. In spite of their modest look, those movements were the first to lay down the foundations of an undertaking that would soon get over the walls of the chapels and transform thousands of ordinary lay people into agents of a deep transformation of society.

But Jean-Paul Guillet’s actual mission took form when he had the idea of fixing loud-speakers on the bell-tower of a church and had them speak…

 

                              

Nowadays, if we are not «connected», we stay outside the planet. Still, sixty years ago, in the south of Honduras, who spoke of being «connected»? ... The population of that region was really scattered and communications were simply disastrous.

Yet, one day, fell from the heavens a man to whom God had given a multitude of talents;  one of them was « to make connection » with electrical wires…That man was  Jean-Paul Guillet,  a Canadian priest of the Foreign Mission Society of Québec.       

Through the relentless work of that rather shy missionary, « connected » to his inner world and not meeker than necessary, God pleased himself by not leaving anymore the people of south Honduras « unconnected ».         

Playing the accordion or singing, on the back of a mule, by motorcycle or at the wheel of his Volkswagen van, that man covered many roads. Everywhere, apart from his talent for connecting electrical wires, went along with him that of manufacturing from old things devices that would work. His mission itself was to give a voice to the voiceless. This he discovered on that day when came to his mind the idea of hanging big loud-speakers on the bell-towers of a church and have them speak. That marvel was an instant sensation; it brought him a lot of joy and, in addition to that, a strong desire to go further.                     

In fact, that brought him with the time to set up radio stations and to install radio antennas on the top of many mountains. He either founded (or contributed to start) formation centers full of life for many popular leaders in the making who in no time became real champions. At times alone, but very often supported by teams trained around him, he launched on the Voice of Suyapa, the catholic radio station of Honduras, the famous program of the Broadcasting Schools. Through the radio waves, that «long distance school» appeared in the skies of Honduras as a gift from God for literacy, for social awareness, for the formation and evangelization of a countless number of farmers throughout the whole country.                                          

Jean-Paul would prepare programs with contents accessible to the ordinary people, according to a pedagogy known as «liberating» which was rooted in the real life of the participants and which aimed at a reversal of their situation of being marginalized.  Even without machetes and bombs, that approach had the impact of a revolution, of which the origin, it should be noted, had been the desire of awakening the voice of  a huge number of farmers by «connecting» them to the voice of Jesus of Nazareth, the most famous countryman of all times.               .

At the beginning, when we referred to «Schools on the Air», no one knew exactly what that was all about, not even Evelio Domínguez, the auxiliary bishop  de Tegucigalpa, nor Guillaume Aubuchon, superior of the SMÉ in Honduras, neither Jean Paul himself…. The latter had already got to hear of something of the kind, but that was long past. When bishop Evelio asked the good Guillaume to lend him assistance for that project and when Guillaume opened the topic with Jean-Paul, he told him with a Chinese like smile: « Since you like making connections with electrical wires, maybe you could help him »…  It is only with that kind of diploma that Jean-Paul dived headlong in that project of Schools on the Air and became the architect and engineer of what was going to become the main endeavor of the SME mission in Honduras,

With the Schools on the Air, a wide awakening took place gradually all over the mountains. We saw the opening of roads, wells being dug, schools and clinics being built, ways of farming and rearing animals being updated, small co-ops and trade unions for peasants making their first steps, women-maidservants being transformed into leaders, many groups of young people rising and bringing their energy to that movement of new life.  And then came the day when, in all places, the celebration of the Word of God began. It had nothing to do with the Word of God being wildly used of the traditional liturgy, but a Word of God based on the awareness of extending in the present the great battle of the people of the Bible to free itself from all slavery in the risen Christ. It was at least the general orientation of the Celebrations of the Word in their first years in existence.   

Yet, not everything was a bed of roses. From the doctors of the old clerical church, Jean Paul, of course, never received the slightest support, and much less from the big landowners. Those trigger-happy men, followers of all the military governments, only saw in the peasants a cheap source of labor. For his part, Jean-Paul, through his radio programs and at the formation center of La Colmena, breached that kind of vision of things. And when the peasants, one day, showed with some rather spectacular initiatives that they would not let themselves to be fooled any more by the big landowners, the latter pointed a finger at Jean-Paul as the great culprit of everything and set a price on his head. Fixed price: 250.00 US dollars. Not very expensive, really…  

One day, while I was in China, I received a letter from Rome, sent by   Jean-Paul. In that letter, he was telling me that something was disturbing him. His old clerical formation being still alive, he felt guilty for not having been able to dedicate himself to more «priestly» tasks.       

« You have your head in the clouds, my friend! », I answered him immediately. «Look at Jesus. In all honesty, tell me if he carried out many «priestly» tasks in his life…And since we are on the topic, who condemned Jesus to death? Were they not by chance the priests of the Temple who were all the same totally dedicated to their «priestly» activities? ...   

Jesus, actually, was a man of the people and a lay man (to use today’s language) who did not belong to any religious caste. He preferred to let himself be guided by the talents that God had given him rather than by the norms established by the clergy of Jerusalem. For him, what pleased God more than anything was not the cult which the priests offered inside the Temple but the gestures, even those without any religious connotation, which the most ordinary people would make to bring out of their prostration the impoverished, the despised, the forgotten. And then, Jesus never spoke of saving souls apart from the bodies. He was at the service of what is human in its totality, on the material, physical, psychological and social levels as well as on its spiritual dimension.

The highly «subversive» parable of the Good Samaritan cannot be more precise about that. In that brilliant parable, Jesus shakes up in a terrific way the priests and the devout who place religious practice above everything else and who separate people between the «pure» like them and the «impure» or the heretics like…Jesus himself and his disciples. The Gospel as a whole is summed up in that short story.       

According to the parable, it is the «impure» Samaritan who saves, and not the priest nor the levite. Now, that impure Samaritan is no other than that Jesus whom the priests have already stigmatized as a sinner, a heretic and even a devil. It is him who leads towards  eternal life by making himself near of the man abandoned as dead along the road, and who lifts him in his body (and not in his soul only) with his wounds, his broken ties, his drama, his history…To pass over that story rapidly is like bypassing  the whole of the Gospel so as to continue to pretend that what is «priestly» or «spiritual» is purer, more sacred and more important than any other task at the service of human beings. (Luke 10:25-38).

And so, in the presence of a «spiritualist» and manichean Church which still persists in proclaiming as holy and more worthy of God all that stands afar from the flesh and of the ordinary life of the human beings, le work, science, technology, the economy, politics, ecology, etc., a disciple of «Jesus the Samaritan» must put his pants on and affirm without shaking that the salvation of the world is more a question of «connection» than that of cassocks or cult.        

The legacy which Jesus left to the world is, in fact, a «Spirit of Connection», and not a white dove, nor a moral code, nor a compendium of rituals and ecclesiastic norms, nor a liturgical calendar. The Spirit that Jesus gave us does not «consecrate» the castes and the sects but undoes them so as to bring together, unite, articulate all that is scattered into a vast body of an infinite diversity and of a unity always growing, just as it is with life. That Spirit is «pure Connection»: connection with self, with reality, with the whole of humanity, especially with all the «disconnected» of the world, connection with the cosmos, with the Kingdom, connection between heaven and earth, connection with the One who at the same time is Three and One.          

It is on the wave of that «Spirit of Connection» that Jean Paul Guillet has surfed all his life. He knew how to «connect» the scattered, beginning with the most impoverished among the hundreds of thousands found along the road of his missionary journey. When he saw them, he «did not cross on the other side of the road» but, because of his many «connections», he «made himself near» to them, he had them rise again by giving them back their dignity. He gave them confidence in themselves and connected them into communities. He initiated them into democracy. He had them learn about their duties and especially their rights that were being totally ignored or flouted.  He gave them a passion for justice. He awakened in them the critical conscience which is the secret of the freedom of human beings and of God’s children. He gave them a joie de vivre, a hope in the future and a first taste of «eternal life». 

And God saw all those beautiful «connections». He saw that his people, cured for a good part of its dispersion, had stood and had begun to walk. He was delighted and cried out: «For heaven’s sake, that’s all SUPER! »