The object of this sketch, based on the biography by Luc Weizmann, is simply to give a background to Pacot’s work — the formative influences; so this we will do, not, therefore, providing much information once the background is firmly in place. A good place to begin would be by quoting in lightly adapted form the back cover of Weizmann’s book:
“Luc Weizmann proposes to disclose Simone Pacot’s (1924–2017) course through life and the essence of her message which articulates Christian faith and a psychological approach. Before her engagement in this domain, of which she was a pioneer, Simone Pacot was an advocate, engaged in the struggle against racism as well as for relations between Jews, Christians and Muslims; she was a member of the Communauté de l’Arche de Lanza del Vasto, a “militant” in non-violent, civic action and a jurist specializing in family law.
After her professional retirement, she consecrated herself entirely to spiritual counselling and the spreading of a message profoundly based on the word of God. Thoroughly ecumenical, she found and demonstrated in the Bible five “laws of life” that are intimately constitutive of the human person, with their invitation to the inner freedom laid out by Christ.”
Pacot was born in Casablanca, Morocco, where numbers of French emigrés lived in a sort of nation building effort; her father was an advocate, which is to say a lawyer; her mother somewhat younger than him. She didn’t work and is described as “rather strict.” The father is described as “tall, solid, authoritarian, a little cold … passionate about boxing … absorbed in his work… he made his children rise each morning at six to work on their Latin.”
Pacot describes her childhood:
“I enjoyed a golden childhood prior to adolescence. We had a large garden with oranges, lemons and plums. We lived out in the fresh air with a group of young people. We went swimming in the sea. After all that changed, problems came along. I was surrounded by tenderness, but with lots of unspoken inter-parental conflicts. But I knew tenderness. That helped me a lot later.”
She sang, played cello and was a champion runner over 400m, and continued later to follow athletic events. Encounters with Christ took place at the age of 9 and again at 14, and in the Moroccan setting this led to a desire for a prayer life conjoined with an active presence among the poor. She created an impression of a strong spiritual presence among her friends but there were important relational difficulties “prayer such as I practised it was unable to regulate.”
Prior to her father’s death in 1952, Pacot had qualified in law herself and taken over her father’s office, but her role seems to have sat uneasily, particularly in view of her dissatisfaction with inter race relations, with the French keeping themselves apart from others; Pacot “adhered” to a Moroccan resistance movement calling for independence from France, and she was signatory to an important letter, a step which could have led to imprisonment. When independence came in 1956, there was a necessary “return” to France.
In 1959, Pacot became a member of La communauté de l’Arche, a foundation concerned with social justice through peaceful means, a simple life and spirituality; she came to be in charge of new members and therefore involved in counselling, as briefly referenced in her books. The daily rhythm of quiet was formative: “This regular time of silence led to connection between the work of the moment and the divine presence. It is thanks to this that I discovered the deep heart which nourishes itself on God.” Pacot was active in the social efforts, particularly with respect to France’s colonial war in Algeria, making use of her legal abilities. However, personal difficulties with the leader of the community, who Weizmann describes as conducting non-violence in an emotionally violent way (!) led to her joining an outreach of the community in the far south of Morocco, deep in the Sahara where she spent 2 or 3 years, greatly appreciating the local people and the simplicity of life, but, again difficulties arose, as they will in community when those with “dysregulated behaviours become involved with the psychological fragilities of the others.” These were the difficulties mentioned in the Preface to Evangelizing the Depths.
In fact, reading between the lines, it looks as though she had become somewhat institutionalized, so this, together with her imperative need to explore her “psychological problems” of which she was “completely ignorant,” led her to leave the community and “go towards herself,” as we read of Abraham and as pursued in the books. She had come across a book on psychotherapy; she writes:
“This first step in psychotherapy made me aware that my identity was mixed with that others, that I did not enjoy inner freedom, and that I was living with a false sense of guilt. I had very wrong ideas about the will of God, quite separate from my own most authentic desires. I was not allowing myself the right to let the fullness of my humanity emerge, my reality, my way of living out the incarnation in my own flesh. The fact that I was very sporty had hidden this failing from me. I had not managed to see the difference between God’s gift and the form in which it is expressed. I began to feel that the only way I could recover a life-giving pathway was to leave Arche. Which I did.”
Moving to Paris, in 1969, she took on a role working as an advocate, which soon developed into a legal practice she co-founded, where she specialized in family law. The books contain a number of accounts drawn from the legal practice, notably descriptions of how to be thoroughly engaged with God in the workplace. The “collective” ways of the practice are described as somewhat utopian, reducing fees for those less able to pay, but managing to get by. Pacot herself had something of a financial conversion at this time, which she actually describes as her conversion! She had thought that unless, like “the rich young man,” she had given away all she had, she wasn’t really up to the mark; the standard she had accepted was in fact poverty, which she had pursued in her own finances and encountered in the moral poverty of her clients and a general ambient spiritual poverty. Accepting the need for her own provision, which meant buying an apartment, was part of developing riches towards others. Her engagement with the legal firm seems to have lasted some 20 years; along the way, she wrote a booklet concerning legal aspects of divorce. From our point of view of interest in her counselling, it seems plain that it was in the midst of living a Christian life in the working world at the same time that the charismatic renewal was happening in the churches that Pacot began to enter into her spiritual ministry, as the Holy Spirit would lead her as she worked with clients and in a healing group. Growing consecration in this led her on as her working life drew to a close. “I had learned that the Spirit is alive. What a joy!”
Weizmann specifies in a central chapter of his book, the means of a very specific change which took place in 1973, so, soon after her starting legal work in Paris. An episcopal couple were speaking and ministering on “inner healing,” a term Pacot later preferred not to use. I will quote the whole thing:
“I immediately felt personally concerned. During this seminar, I experienced a profound liberation which made me understand what the vital relationship between the body, the psyche and the spirit could be.”
Their teaching on the theme of inner healing was a decisive trigger. Simone would go over this essential moment of her life thirty-five years later, during a conference held at the Valpré center in Lyon:
“They told my story, characterized by a fusion and a serious control over me following a promise made to my mother in my childhood: I promised in a way contrary to the free life proposed in God. I was in fact always bound by this promise: intellectually I knew that it was a path of alienation, of destruction, but it was always there, I could not be freed. I learned that this type of promise does not only concern the psychological domain but that the fact of binding oneself in this way, of remaining under the influence of a human being instead of being docile to the word of God, to the movements of “the Spirit,” was called idolatry and that idolatry was a sin denounced throughout the Bible. I understood that this type of bond prevented giving to God, and correct, fruitful relationship with others. It was a transgression of God’s life, not just a psychological law.
“In a second, right then and there, I understood the difference between psychology and faith.
“I heard the speaker say: “In the name of Christ, I declare that all who are bound by unconsidered promises will not have to keep them.” I immediately gave up this promise. I was capable of doing so since I was obeying an order from Christ and I no longer wanted to remain in idolatry. I was immediately and totally liberated.
“I was able to connect my psychological experience to the word of God. I understood that the form of liberation that I had experienced through my therapy had its source in a law of God […]. That the word of God concerned the totality of my humanity. I understood the vital, incarnational meaning of the word of God: it is important that we have psychological knowledge but it is the word of God and the life of Christ in us which will work.
“I knew that this was what my mission would be!”
“In an interview with the newspaper La Croix, she testified about her intimate experimentation with disarming honesty:
“It was the first time I heard this term “inner healing” and it immediately appeared to me as bringing a new understanding of the two promises that God makes to his people: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, from the house of slavery (symbolizing internal slavery)” (Deut 5: 6) and “He has sent me to bring the Good News, […] to the captives their liberation” (Lk 4:18). During this session, I found the junction between psychological life and faith that I had been looking for for so many years.
“I understood that the misdirections I had not only had to be explored on a psychological level, but that they constituted transgressions of God’s laws. Suddenly I saw my share of responsibility in my story, even if these transgressions had been involuntary.”
The challenge then became to reconnect with a life of neglected faith, while continuing a necessary therapeutic journey. To extend a sense of meaning and become familiar with oneself.
“I experienced the power of God’s word, the truth that sweeps away our false beliefs.
That day I knew that it is truly God who saves, Christ who frees us and that human beings are called to participate in this liberation. I then knew what to do on a spiritual level with what I had seen on a psychological level. My faith has become truer, more alive, more humble too.”
The foregoing passage seems to sum up a great deal of Pacot’s ministry. For the next many years, until 1987, including a hiatus of health demanding critical surgery, she combined her legal work with what Weizmann describes as “boiling inner research” (French authors tend towards the flowery) and spiritual interviews in the Bethanie group; she retired from the legal profession aged 63, stating that now she was “going to get to work”! Initally she continued with Bethanie, but as so often is the case with Christian ministries, she found she had to go her own way, and in 1994 founded Bethasda, which from then on was her principal vehicle. Initially, the title of the group included the idea of “inner healing,” but this was “rectified” in 1996 to “evangelizing the depths”; the inner healing idea, to quote, can have as its goal “healing without conversion.”
In her books, Pacot frequently cites Xavier Thevenot, a well-known Catholic theologian; it seems he was an important personal contributor to Bethasda, providing a needful solidity. Pacot’s ministry steadily extended: individual counselling, group meetings, teaching, conferences; then there came the important step of writing, in which she was encouraged and perhaps mentored by Thevenot. It looks as though the years following retirement from the legal office were simply very fruitful; but by 2005, health concerns were leading to an eventual second, fuller retirement, though throughout the ensuing, closing years, she “tirelessly continued to order her inner condition” and continue fruitful, if to an overtly lesser extent.