Lilian Silburn, a Mystical Life: Letters, Documents, Testimonials

About the AuthorJACQUELINE CHAMBRON, who was a professor of classical letters, met Lilian Silburn in 1965. She was one of her very close friends and assisted her among other things in materializing some of her work. It is to Jacqueline that Lilian Silburn entrusted the personal documents, diaries, correspondence, and various notes, which are the source material for this work.Jacqueline was born in 1926 at the foot of the extinct volcanoes of Auvergne, France in Aurillac, her father's country. When she was six years old, her family moved to Agen on the banks of the Garonne, her mother's country. She lived there until the age of eighteen, even during the war. This city was spared the horrors of the bombings. However, a strong friendship with an Israelite high school classmate introduced her to the barbarity of anti-Semitic persecution. At the age of fifteen she was initiated into the mysticism of Saint John of the Cross by a Discalced Carmelite monk, a discovery which will remain important, but which locked her into an ideal of renouncement little suited to the vitality of a fifteen-year-old girl. At eighteen she left home to study, which led her to discover Paris in the intellectual ferment of the post-war years. She was fortunate enough to live in community houses where communist and catholic student couples lived together. It was a rich and eventful period. After her marriage, two successive pregnancies made it difficult for her to complete her studies. Once she finally graduated, she experienced the joy of teaching, which had been her dream since childhood. Her husband, having completed his medical studies, moved the family to Toulouse where the fourth child was born. There she heard about Lilian Silburn for the first time and, thanks to an appointment teaching in a local high school, she was able to move to Le Vésinet, and afterwards lived in Lilian's wake. Motivated by Lilian, she wrote several articles published in the Hermès review: - The three advents of Christ in the soul, according to Ruysbroeck the Admirable. (Hermes n ° 1) - The three ways and the non-way in the light of Meister Eckhart. (Hermes n ° 1) - The void according to Saint John of the Cross. (Hermes n ° 2) - Nowadays, which master for which disciple? (Hermes n ° 3) - Direct transmission. (Hermes n ° 3) Since LiIian Silburn's death, Jacqueline has continued living in Le Vésinet, surrounded by a few friends. Over the years, she has organized a series of trips with some of them: first to India, where they prayed, filled with gratitude, on the graves of the masters of the lineage of Radha Mohan. Later to Iran, in the footsteps of Bistami, Kharakhani, Ruzbehan, Omar Khayyam.... And finally to Uzbekistan where they venerated the tomb of Naqshband in Bukhara. Jacqueline wrote and compiled this book, anxious to preserve the account of Lilian's experience as faithfully as possible, and also to describe the living effects of direct transmission through her.