Bertrand Catry

Francis, this locket:

A bronze locket: we read in international language: ” Practice any faith religious or not”. This could well mean in French: ” Pratiquez la religion ou ne pratiquez pas la religion“.

Francis Delaye

Practice a faith. I am not saying a religion, even a non-religion. Practice a faith, religious or not. This means that it must be a faith that is not religious, a faith in life, a faith in the principle of life.

Bertrand Catry

This principle of life that you illustrate with a cross, the sacrificed heart of Jesus, a fish, the Jewish star, the crescent of Islam, and the principle of the universe: “The Alpha and Omega.” What is this principle of life?

Francis Delaye

The principle of life is what makes us all live. We are in the hand of life, on earth. A life that is restricted by death since we are made for eternal life. But it is a life that is an ordeal for everyone, in everyday life. And the principle of life is what drives everyone’s day-to-day life. We call it The Providence, because when one is a believer, one gives a personality to the principle of life that one calls God. But those who cannot give a personality to the principle of life, live it anyway. But what I say for Christ is a problem for The Christianity, of which I am a part, and which has brought me until here. For, for ecumenical Christianity, it is Divine Love that is the foundation of biblical revelation. Now, we come back with Christ at the beginning of the proclamation of the Gospel, from his departure, saying now that Love comes after the humility which Christ’s humiliation has demonstrated by, in particular, his agony of Gethsemane stronger than the crucifixion itself.

Bertrand Catry

This vector of secular friendship can allow by the second advent of power, well, to imagine a dispassionate and reconciled world!?

Francis Delaye

Yes, but it is in the complete international understanding around Jesus Christ, who is the king of peace. 

Bertrand Catry

Francis, we will now continue inside your house. Tell us, The Virgin to the Child.

Tell us a little bit about her story, and what is she in your daily life.

Francis Delaye

I have always had the same intuition since my dream of 1963, which gradually developed to express itself in a clearer way now, but I always had this kind of intuition of Jesus’ “enthronement” in relation to us, without knowing how to express it exactly at that time. So, I used a direct cut in a stone to represent the child Jesus without the sceptre that belongs to him as a child; without the royalty that belongs to him as a child.

Bertrand Catry

The sceptre is seen here:

It is his royalty. Does his royalty come when he was born? Or is his royalty a future after his resurrection?

Francis Delaye

In fact, what we Christians believe is that Jesus Christ was born God and Man, if you will; and that, as God, he is entitled to power. Now, what I think is that the true power of God is not in the realization of an external power, even divine, but in a humiliation that he gives to all men.

I carved it in my studio, 14 Avenue of Maine, with the model of one of my grandchildren that I had by his mother.

Bertrand Catry

By humility you give up your occupation as a sculptor to be a stonemason. Why this path?

Francis Delaye

I thought I was not worthy of decorating churches and cathedrals, with ornaments, but I was good in carving foundation stones from the church that were demolished at the time and needed reconstruction.

Bertrand Catry

So, you spoke to me earlier, and you drew my attention to a sparrow. The Virgin presents a sparrow.

Francis Delaye

Yes, there is a sparrow at the foot of the Virgin who pecks at the gospels.

Bertrand Catry

Who pecks at the gospels…?

Francis Delaye

It was I who wanted to represent him pecking at the gospels because since my conversion, what I only did is meditate on the gospels.

Bertrand Catry

This subject, this theme, it comes straight from St. Francis of Assisi where obviously the birds of Heaven are there and escort him on the way to St. Francis. It is very serious at the same time and at the same time it is facetious, it is funny, it is fun!

Mary herself is wearing her crown.

Francis Delaye

Yes, because in fact it is the Virgin Mary who must announce the child Jesus. It is not the child Jesus who announces himself! In fact, the humiliation of the Christ, it is really the Virgin Mary who is sustaining him in her heart since the beginning of the incarnation of her son, by the pain that her heart gives her before our sins, and of which the son also has the content. And what I told you is that it is not only this pain; it is this pain that must take us but in joy, because it is really the work of salvation of the Father of Heaven, the principle of life.

Bertrand Catry

It is this royalty which is the principle of this announcement.

Francis we will continue our walk. You left there in your house, in this little chapel, we will say, a stained-glass window. What did you want to express?

 stained glass

Francis Delaye

I wanted to express the love of God raw, naked, the love of the Alpha and Omega, by a young man who crosses his legs and uncrosses them, with… It could be glasses he is wearing, and gloves on his hands. But it was intuitive. When I did it, I did it the way I did the Virgin, that is, in a completely intuitive and unprejudiced way about what it would mean later when I am older. Because you say I have still a lot of things to say, but I am 97 years old and I do not have much time to live anyway. 

Bertrand Catry

That time it is quite relative. In the context, you have of course been many times in the Cathedral of Chartres and its stained-glass windows, the blue of

Chartres. There, we have a round, in your stained-glass, of colors and blues; in this life given to us, deep down we are a little bit the Alpha and omega. Pascal said that one was a nothing, and that one was something in the middle of the nothing and all; so, we are at the same time nothing, we are at the same time the whole? Because to say that we are nothing before the Lord is perhaps to offend him? Because God needs our cooperation! To say that we are everything, we see   where it led man, to madness and world wars, and in particular to this science, to the excesses of science that would forget to be at the service of man. Montaigne told us that we can worry about having a science without conscience that would lead us to the ruin of the soul. Deep down, in this stained-glass window, in these colors, at a moment anything is possible. We are routed between this Alpha and Omega. What is our freedom? 

Francis Delaye

In fact, God gives man the power to replace him. He is free to do it or not. It is up to us.