Published May 21, 2012
After his pivotal encounter with the Bishop of Digne, it took Jean Valjean years to learn how to pray. He had forgotten any prayers he learned as a child; now he had to teach himself. He found it easier to talk to himself than to talk to the Almighty. It was something he had to practice at.
He felt selfish when he prayed for himself. So, over time, he tried to focus instead on praying for others.
Why had he gone to prison in the first place? Because he tried to steal bread to save his sister's family – the family that he almost forgot in his long life. He was sometimes ashamed that he thought of them so rarely; he had to remind himself to pray for them. He wasn't able to save them. But because he failed there, he was able to save others elsewhere.
Jean Valjean later realized that Fauchelevent was right: it was ungrateful of him to forget the people he helped and saved.
He had gained the trust of the residents of Montreuil-sur-mer only after saving that baby from a fire. Looking back, Jean Valjean thought that fire may have been a godsend, since in the confusion no one had bothered to look into his past.
He had risked – really forfeited – his own freedom to spare Champmathieu from a life on the chain gang. But because of that, he was able to live with an almost-clear conscience afterwards.
He saved a man, whose name he did not know, who fell overboard the Orion, and that had given him an opportunity to escape and find Cosette.
Jean Valjean made a habit of praying for all the people he had saved, and all those who had saved him – people like the Bishop, and Sister Simplice, and Fauchelevent. There was the old woman who had directed him to the Bishop's house when he could find no shelter. Even the man who drove the fiacre for Javert, Marius, and himself, after the émeute, was a hero without whom they might have been lost.
Jean Valjean thanked God for the miraculous circumstances in all of their lives, and blessed everyone he encountered.
