Polyifaceted and disconcerting artist, child of Elche overflows spirituality and now is embedded with the mystics. Francisco Contreras, as his DNI says, has just published a new poems, ‘Conversations with a wooden monk’ (Espasa), in which he starts a dialogue with a size that sculpted the poet and theologian Ernesto Cardenal, who was Minister of Culture During the Sandinista revolution. To light these poems, many of them in prose, has submerged in the reading of San Juan de la Cruz, Santa Teresa, San Ignacio, San Benito, San Agustín and another Rosario de Santos, while diving in the monks that The silence pursues with boldness.
—I dedicate me to the artistic world, which I have some connection with spirituality and with other energies that have nothing to do with it. Every person who is related to art has, or not, a relationship with spirituality, with the inexplicable, with the mystical of existence. – Is it a book that drinks from the Spanish mystical tradition?
“To write this book I have immersed in many books, especially those referring to monacal practice.” Many of the reflections are taken from there, but apart from that, there are also a lot of tradition or texts that are related to silence.
“We must live every day as if it were a miracle?”
“Yes, I live it.” It is one of the great learning of spirituality. Not so much understanding him as ‘Carpe Diem’, but as the gratitude he feels for every miracle. An author who has helped me a lot is Christian Bobin, who said that you have to be attentive to the daily miracle that God has saved for you. From that listening is how I think you have to face life. “Is the aspiration of every artist to become a classic?”
—I If being a classic means anchoring in a conservative static canon, no.
“To seek spirituality, it is necessary to lock yourself in a monastery?”
“No, and to seek silence either.” The poet and musicologist Ramón Andrés teaches us that silence is above all an awareness.
“Do you think in God, how can you imagine?”
“Well, I could say that I believe in God, yes.” For a Catholic, God molds the human being in his image and likeness. But in other religious traditions you don’t think so.
“And your convictions are made of pieces of different religions?” Is it dogmatic?
“I am a person of rituals, of the daily rituals that have to do with day to day.” In everything you have to take into account science. Today those who defend the existence of God most are astrophysicists, scientists, especially in the twentieth century. There is a wonderful book, Divine Planet, by Antony Flew, the great Atheistic philosopher who later converted to deism, which alleged that all his scientific and philosophical base was to demonstrate the existence of God.
“Do you think in the chastity vote?” Does sex make us free or do we hinder us?
—I have experienced that one of the great virtues of the human being, and I say this for that thing of the monacal demon that they say I have in my past lives, it has to do with self -control. And that self -control also has to do with sex. I am a very sexual person and I understand that God is also there, of course. Ecstasy has to do with that too, with the ideas of San Juan de la Cruz, who reached orgasm only with the passion of love to God.
“Once Ernesto Cardenal, theologian of liberation, knelt before Pope John Paul II and he abroncted him.
—Pet the institutional authorities is usually humiliating. It is one of the things that spirituality teaches us precisely and many of the people who were related to the Church. The delirium is having understood the Church as an institution close to the State or even within the state of the state. The Church would have to understand as a counterpower.
“Ernesto Cardenal didn’t mind cleaning toilets when she was a trapense monk.” He said that humility and simplicity helped him write. Would you get so much?
—The Buddhists have the rite of cleaning associated with spirituality. My friend Andoni Luis Aduriz, one of the great Spanish chefs, who carries the Mugaritz restaurant, taught its workers, including its chefs, to doublerically bend the cloth. When one reaches that virtue, to that point, things are much easier.
“And you practice those rituals to meditate?”
“In many things, yes.” When breakfast, for example, I make a series of rites to place things in a non -geometric way. And it is that order and rite are etymologically sisters words. Everything has to do with finding a state. I have never sung at my house, nor will I, because the state of the home has nothing to do with the one I need to activate the voice.
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