Coming to terms with grief, by Jean-Michel Logneaux

This session is integrated into the rhythm and life of the monastery.

It is an opportunity to experience a time of renewal and introspection.

Guests are invited to participate in the community's prayer.

To encourage recollection and inner quiet, meals are taken in silence with background music.

Guests are invited to embrace an atmosphere of discretion and meditation inside the buildings and in the retreatants' courtyard.

What is grief?

• When we are grieving, what are we really grieving for?
• How can philosophy help us navigate the various losses that mark our lives, and not simply endure the changes that each loss brings about?
• Drawing on a series of presentations, Jean-Michel Longneaux will invite us to reflect on three essential dimensions of our human condition: our finitude, our solitude, and our uncertainty.
• He will place these in perspective alongside the desires at work throughout our lives, in our relationship to ourselves, to others, and to our future.
• We will discover how accepting this threefold reality - finitude, solitude, uncertainty - supports the cultivation of certain values, such as solidarity, tolerance, authenticity, and the courage to take initiative.
• Through the presentations and question-and-answer sessions, we will come to understand more clearly why it can be said that, whatever the loss involved (a person, an object, a job...), grief consists in freeing ourselves from what we no longer are in order to be reborn into what we have become.

From Friday, March 21, 2025 (5:00 PM) to Sunday, March 23, 2025 (4:00 PM)

The facilitator:

• Jean-Michel Longneaux is a philosopher and professor at the University of Namur.
• He is an ethics advisor in the healthcare field and editor-in-chief of the journal Ethica clinica, aimed at caregivers across all professions.
• He has published several books, including: "Petits essais philosophiques autour de l'éthique des soins" (Weyrich, April 2014) and "Finitude, solitude, incertitude. Une philosophie du deuil" (PUF, 2020).

Suggested offering:

A facilitation fee of €30 will be added to the standard accommodation with meals rate at the Orval Abbey guest house: €96 for a standard room (without private bathroom), €120 for a room with private bathroom.