In his book La philosophie du Petit Prince (ou le retour à l’essentiel), Paul Meunier, philosopher and theologian, takes us on a long meditation on this well-known tale, highlighting the many evangelical attitudes that Saint-Exupéry wanted to promote.
Let us first recall that everything this author wrote after 1935 was marked by the experience he had had in the Sahara desert when his plane crashed there; a defining experience of the same kind as that recounted by EE Schmitt in his work, La nuit de feu.
This experience led him to recount the equally decisive encounter between the Little Prince and the fox in his tale for children and adults . As presented, the fox plays the role of one who teaches, guides and consoles. Judge by these famous phrases:
“You can only see well with the heart. The essential is invisible to the eyes”.
“It’s the time you take for your rose that makes your rose so important.”
“If you tame me, we will need each other. You will be unique in the world for me. I will be unique in the world for you”.
The main element is love, of which the rose is the symbol. This is the idea taken up by Gilbert Bécaud in his song L’important, c’est la rose…
Time should be taken for the essentials, to nurture and develop our loving relationships, whether with family, friends, community of faith and even, according to the Gospel, with our enemies.
This is what makes each of the people we love unique in the world… even if there are thousands of them around!
Besides the fox, the Little Prince meets several characters who have far too important things to do to tame anything, like the aviator who breaks down in the desert (like the author!). He is too busy fixing his plane to listen to the Little Prince talking to him about his rose. Here, Paul Meunier makes a distinction that struck me between what is urgent and what is important. For the aviator, the urgency was to repair his plane rather than to listen to the Little Prince. Like the following characters, do we ever slip into the same mistake?
- the king drunk on power, who only wants to be served…
- the conceited man, who seeks admiration…
- the drinker who drinks to forget his condition rather than to face it…
- the businessman blinded by his ambition…
- the industrious lamplighter bowing to instructions without a critical mind…
- the geographer fond of being recognized for his knowledge…
All this reminds me a bit of that passage from the Gospel of Matthew (22:5) where Jesus compares the invitation to the Kingdom to an invitation to a wedding banquet; when offered the invitation, one man goes to his field and the other to his business. One to his thirst for power, the other to his thirst for admiration, etc…
Let us therefore know how to respond to the call of the Risen One who wants us to follow him in this never-ending quest for the essential!
[Facebook post by Richard Guay, shared with permission – PHOTO: Devran Topallar – Pixabay]