Biography, Part 9: Graduation, Military Service, and First Discovery the Christian Faith
As I Finished my Grande Ecole, I had in the last year an internship and research work of 6 months in the robotics department of the CEA (Commissariat à l'énergie atomique), the [French] Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, the equivalent in the US to the Department of Energy. This is a very renowned research structure, that Reuters ranked in 2016 as the most innovative research institution in the world (link here). My research there had to do with artificial intelligence, more precisely with image processing and precise recognition of limits between objects (sub-pixel contour detection).
I graduated from my engineering school in June 2013, thinking in my heart that it was the last time I would be in school for my whole life. How mistaken I was! As a kid, I first hated school, but through the years I came to slowly accept its usefulness.
As a Frenchman, I then started the then mandatory military service (this French requirement disappeared three years later, in 2016). As an engineer, I could become a reserve officer in the French army. After three months of training, I became aspirant, second lieutenant and then finished as a lieutenant at the end of the 10 months. This was a brief yet very interesting time, helping me to see how an army functions, how obedience plays a key role in the efficiency of the structure and how trust is also fundamental. I could also see more clearly the variety of French persons and levels of education. If some were very educated, some soldiers needed to have a green spot on one shoe to help them recognize the left from the right, and some did not know how to read. This was somehow shocking to me.The three months of officer school took place in Tours, in the branch of the infantry named ‘train’ (responsible for transportation and for placing signalization for army movements and for contaminated zones). Then, I was for seven months in a regiment in Fontainebleau, responsible for the computer department.
During my military service, I asked if I could do some teaching, and I ended up giving math classes to the non-commissioned officers who wanted pass the test to become officers, which I enjoyed thoroughly. I also taught the son of the colonel in maths, helping him get his high-school diploma (baccalauréat in France).Through this time, I realized that I really enjoyed teaching. It started for me by helping other students during my ‘classes préparatoires’, then offering to my brother François and nephew Éric to spend the summer 2010 to prepare for the classes préparatoires. This went well, and I was very happy that both Éric and François later succeeded in these challenging studies. My nephew Éric joined the school of public works, and my brother François entered the most renowned French engineering school, Polytechnique. During my studies at Mines ParisTech, I also gave math classes to high school students.What I realized is that helping others succeed gave me a deep joy, a sense of being useful. This opened a path for me to continue to coach or mentor one-on-one up until now as I write, already for 30 years today in 2017.
In the CEA robotics department, at the end of my degree, I had met a young woman, Anne, who was finishing a Ph.D. in robotics. I liked her very much, but shy as I was, I did not dare to speak with her. During my military service, I wrote a story about a young swan and a tree that I sent to her, asking if I could meet her. She responded that she would be happy to invite me to one of the meetings she went to. Of course, I did come.What I did not realize first, was that the group she was part of was a Christian group, having meetings in two domains: psychology and religion. The psychology meetings, I found interesting, although a little bit complicate.The school of thought of these meetings, and its leader Daniel, could be loosely connected to Lacanian psychoanalysis.The religious meetings were mostly with Catholics, and because I wanted to be close to Anne, I did come. I was not interested at all in Christian spirituality, yet I found the group very respectful and kind to me.In the first meetings, I tried to make jokes on someone I perceived as weak but realized that nobody laughed, which puzzled me. I slowly realized that it was a safe place, that I did not need to humiliate, and that nobody humiliated me neither. This was new to me.
Anne liked me as a friend but did not have sentiments for me, something that was very painful to me. In the next three years, I would share a few times with her my sentiments, but she always responded clearly to me that it was not reciprocal.
One day, as I was walking, it is like if an explosion happened in my heart, and I began to cry uncontrollably, seeing in my minds the humiliations that I tried so hard to forget in the past. It is like if the frustration of desiring without being desired in return opened this old and painful wound. I was then 25 years old, and I had not cried since I was 12. It is like if my toughening up when I was 12 had made me unable to really love, and now this wall in my heart was shattered in pieces through pain and tears.
I was afraid of becoming crazy and then decided to start a psychoanalysis with the leader of the group Anne belonged to, Daniel. This proved very helpful to me but presented some challenges.
Daniel helped me learn to interpret dreams and to deal with these repressed feelings of humiliation that had come back to my memory. Yet, when I tried to mention other sources of psychology that I studied before, like for instance books on dreams, I received from Daniel a very negative feedback, discouraging me from reading broadly on psychology schools as I did before. Daniel was also the leader of the religious group, in the Catholic tradition, and this presented another challenge - meeting him in this group and having him as my psychoanalyst. On my side, since Anne liked him very much, I first did not think anything of it, but later I would realize it was not wise for me to have this combination.
Since I liked Anne and could see her in the religious group, I did come frequently to the Christian meetings, like a weekly prayer and weekend meetings. I ended up learning key elements of the Christian faith, like the prayer ‘our Father’.
I remember that I tried to pray this prayer, without much faith, in the evening, and noticed a very positive result: I got asleep very quickly and peacefully. In the past, I always struggled to get asleep, battling often for hours, with the frequent smell of sweat on my pillow. As a scientist, my experimentation with prayer was positive: I said the 'Our Father' before going to sleep and then had a very good night of sleep. As a good scientist, I logically decided to repeat the experiment, and thus began for me the first steps in the domain of prayer. For the first time in my life, I realized that belief in God was not only thinkable but now made sense. It was just a start in the discovery of the Christian faith, yet it was both a very meaningful and encouraging start.
I then started the process to be baptized as a Christian, which I will describe in the next post.
I graduated from my engineering school in June 2013, thinking in my heart that it was the last time I would be in school for my whole life. How mistaken I was! As a kid, I first hated school, but through the years I came to slowly accept its usefulness.
As a Frenchman, I then started the then mandatory military service (this French requirement disappeared three years later, in 2016). As an engineer, I could become a reserve officer in the French army. After three months of training, I became aspirant, second lieutenant and then finished as a lieutenant at the end of the 10 months. This was a brief yet very interesting time, helping me to see how an army functions, how obedience plays a key role in the efficiency of the structure and how trust is also fundamental. I could also see more clearly the variety of French persons and levels of education. If some were very educated, some soldiers needed to have a green spot on one shoe to help them recognize the left from the right, and some did not know how to read. This was somehow shocking to me.The three months of officer school took place in Tours, in the branch of the infantry named ‘train’ (responsible for transportation and for placing signalization for army movements and for contaminated zones). Then, I was for seven months in a regiment in Fontainebleau, responsible for the computer department.
During my military service, I asked if I could do some teaching, and I ended up giving math classes to the non-commissioned officers who wanted pass the test to become officers, which I enjoyed thoroughly. I also taught the son of the colonel in maths, helping him get his high-school diploma (baccalauréat in France).Through this time, I realized that I really enjoyed teaching. It started for me by helping other students during my ‘classes préparatoires’, then offering to my brother François and nephew Éric to spend the summer 2010 to prepare for the classes préparatoires. This went well, and I was very happy that both Éric and François later succeeded in these challenging studies. My nephew Éric joined the school of public works, and my brother François entered the most renowned French engineering school, Polytechnique. During my studies at Mines ParisTech, I also gave math classes to high school students.What I realized is that helping others succeed gave me a deep joy, a sense of being useful. This opened a path for me to continue to coach or mentor one-on-one up until now as I write, already for 30 years today in 2017.
In the CEA robotics department, at the end of my degree, I had met a young woman, Anne, who was finishing a Ph.D. in robotics. I liked her very much, but shy as I was, I did not dare to speak with her. During my military service, I wrote a story about a young swan and a tree that I sent to her, asking if I could meet her. She responded that she would be happy to invite me to one of the meetings she went to. Of course, I did come.What I did not realize first, was that the group she was part of was a Christian group, having meetings in two domains: psychology and religion. The psychology meetings, I found interesting, although a little bit complicate.The school of thought of these meetings, and its leader Daniel, could be loosely connected to Lacanian psychoanalysis.The religious meetings were mostly with Catholics, and because I wanted to be close to Anne, I did come. I was not interested at all in Christian spirituality, yet I found the group very respectful and kind to me.In the first meetings, I tried to make jokes on someone I perceived as weak but realized that nobody laughed, which puzzled me. I slowly realized that it was a safe place, that I did not need to humiliate, and that nobody humiliated me neither. This was new to me.
Anne liked me as a friend but did not have sentiments for me, something that was very painful to me. In the next three years, I would share a few times with her my sentiments, but she always responded clearly to me that it was not reciprocal.
One day, as I was walking, it is like if an explosion happened in my heart, and I began to cry uncontrollably, seeing in my minds the humiliations that I tried so hard to forget in the past. It is like if the frustration of desiring without being desired in return opened this old and painful wound. I was then 25 years old, and I had not cried since I was 12. It is like if my toughening up when I was 12 had made me unable to really love, and now this wall in my heart was shattered in pieces through pain and tears.
I was afraid of becoming crazy and then decided to start a psychoanalysis with the leader of the group Anne belonged to, Daniel. This proved very helpful to me but presented some challenges.
Daniel helped me learn to interpret dreams and to deal with these repressed feelings of humiliation that had come back to my memory. Yet, when I tried to mention other sources of psychology that I studied before, like for instance books on dreams, I received from Daniel a very negative feedback, discouraging me from reading broadly on psychology schools as I did before. Daniel was also the leader of the religious group, in the Catholic tradition, and this presented another challenge - meeting him in this group and having him as my psychoanalyst. On my side, since Anne liked him very much, I first did not think anything of it, but later I would realize it was not wise for me to have this combination.
Since I liked Anne and could see her in the religious group, I did come frequently to the Christian meetings, like a weekly prayer and weekend meetings. I ended up learning key elements of the Christian faith, like the prayer ‘our Father’.
I remember that I tried to pray this prayer, without much faith, in the evening, and noticed a very positive result: I got asleep very quickly and peacefully. In the past, I always struggled to get asleep, battling often for hours, with the frequent smell of sweat on my pillow. As a scientist, my experimentation with prayer was positive: I said the 'Our Father' before going to sleep and then had a very good night of sleep. As a good scientist, I logically decided to repeat the experiment, and thus began for me the first steps in the domain of prayer. For the first time in my life, I realized that belief in God was not only thinkable but now made sense. It was just a start in the discovery of the Christian faith, yet it was both a very meaningful and encouraging start.
I then started the process to be baptized as a Christian, which I will describe in the next post.
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