ORVAL Beauty & Truth
Orval Abbaye, there all is beauty and truth.
Respect of silence Respect of Stones and Respect of lights.
The strict simplicity fills the time in deep synchronization.
Truth is beauty. It hurts sometimes because it illuminates us, awakening a deep sense of life. And life is often more ferocious than death, more violent in these unforeseeable turpitudes, more painful than our first breath. Between these pains, however, moments of grace are revealed, offered in infinite simplicity by infinite beauty. By the goodness of beauty.
In Orval, everything is part of this order, the rhythm of the Romanesque columns supporting the long corridors, the alleys bordering the garden, the majestic entrance to the church with the immense virgin, and the park facing it bathed in its triangular pond; Above all, the Virgin and Child, monumental, overhanging, magnifying, protecting a cross that defines the entrance. It is carved in the same ocher-colored stone as the neo-Romanesque vault in which it nestles. In Art deco style, ageless without origin without culture bringing together all the races and peoples of our species, it imposes. It imposes humility and reverence while welcoming all of humanity.
Everything is beauty and truth in the songs of the monastic community, the smile of his father abbot. Respect for silence. A garden of stones and sand subtly adjusted to the Cistercian style of the buildings which protects it. The strict simplicity of the meals, the hours of the day’s work, offices at the tempo meticulously respected and repeated, day by day which follow and precede the seasons, filling the years and the centuries. Beauty is truth.
