Modern Pontifex

Here's how I see this role, in one image. There's an exceptional party going on. I have been inside: I have danced, I have tasted what is served in there, I know what the light is like. And at some point I understood something that changed everything: the point of being human is less about getting high in there than about serving from here. So I came back out, and I hold the door.

I hold it gladly, and without worry. We all come from there, and we all return to it: my access is guaranteed by what I am, and so is yours. Which means I can stand here, at the threshold, entirely at your service: no rush, no agenda, no need to prove what I have experienced. What moves me is simpler: sharing a point of view on life that I genuinely enjoy, and that keeps proving itself in my own days through freedom and joy.

Life isn't a problem to solve, it is an experience to be lived. I hold the door open, and walk with those who feel the call.

Hubert-Pierre de Grumsel d’Emale,
Knight of the Holy Roman Empire (1717–1786)

Six centuries at the threshold

The role has a history in my family, and it's precise. For six centuries, my lineage has served as counsel at thresholds: most specifically at the side of the Popes, where the family earned its title, advisors called in when matters exceeded the ordinary frames. The seal they carried was the Chi-Rho: the sign of the passage itself.

I find the continuity instructive rather than glorious. What that function required then is what it requires now: total confidentiality, the ability to move between worlds that rarely speak to each other, and the discipline of serving the one who decides, never deciding in their place. The thrones have changed. The threshold work has not.

So when I named this practice Modern Pontifex, I wasn't reaching for a metaphor, I was describing the family trade, in the terms of our time.

The Lineage

The role, as I hold it

Six centuries gave me the function. What I bring to it is a way of seeing, and it changes how the work feels.

I see this life as a magnificent play. We all wrote our character early, then forgot it was a role: most of the suffering I meet comes from that forgetting, people crushed under a costume they think is their skin.

My work is to hold the mirror where the costume becomes visible again. And the surprise, every time: once it's seen, the play doesn't end. It becomes enjoyable. The character stays, someone has to drive the car and run the company. It simply stops running the show, and returns to what it was always meant to be: a servant, and a rather good one.

This is why there is so much laughter in this work. A bridge builder, in the end, does one thing: he stands where two banks pretend to be separate, and knows they are held by the same ground. Crossing a bridge is remembering there was never a gap.

The company I keep

A door-holder does well to study everyone who ever held one, and I have taken my instruction wherever it was true.

The Tao and Zen taught me the lightness: the way that can't be named, the laughter of the masters, the art of not forcing. India gave me the architecture: the layers of the costume mapped with a precision the West is still catching up on. Egypt and Greece held the initiations: the descent, the death before death, the return. The Hebrew line taught the argument with the divine, and the Christian mystics the scandal that the door opens from inside. Jung drew the map of the shadow for our era; Spinoza proved, with geometry, that the two banks were always one ground.

And the Medici, an odd name in this list, gave a taste of what's possible when the function is held at scale: a whole Renaissance flowering from that one sustained passage. It has been done, it can be done again.

I belong to none of these houses, and I have eaten at all their tables. What they share matters more than what divides them: every one, at its best, points at the same door.

The sources, in depth

The thresholds of our time

The Popes had their thresholds. Ours have changed clothes, but kept their nature. A transmission that's also a father question, an exit that's also an identity question, a responsability arriving in hands that did not build it, a life that has achieved everything it set out to achieve, standing in front of the one question success was supposed to answer.

These are the passages I serve today: the moments when the strategic and the intimate stop pretending to be separate, and the usual advisors, each excellent in their frame, can't hold the whole. The lawyer has the legal half. The therapist has the private half. The board has the visible half. The threshold is where the halves meet, and it deserves counsel that meets it whole.

That counsel takes five forms, from a single conversation to a year of unlimited access. Every one of them begins the same way.