Epilogue rediscovering the diagram from the prologue

 

 

It is time to return to the diagram, not quite complete, in the prologue of this virtual pilgrimage. I think that like me you will see it a rather like a clock with each hour being a week of walking accomplished with the chapter titles of Guy Trainar’s book. The dilemma that Guy proposed at the start must now find an answer. ”Do I pray to God because he exists?” or instead “Does God exist because I pray to him?”

 

In walking through the beautiful nature between Saint-Chef near Morestel and Santiago de Compostela, at the invitation of the author of D.I.E.U. sauveguide ? [G.O.D. saveguide?], I deliberately questioned anew all the religious discourse I had received since childhood in order to give my reply to this dilemma. I greatly appreciated Guy’s approach. It forced me to re-examine the overly anthropomorphic expectations attributed to the classic aspects of God. These came from the sacred books of western religions, the Judeo-Christian tradition and Islam in particular.

 

Guy rightly rebelled against the vision of a God arranged to fit the human scale. He demolished the traits that one might imagine on his face, those of a “terrifying” God, a “revealed” God, a “person” God. He questioned again the “absoluteness” of God, his “omniscience,” the fact that the word God is associated with the notion of a “creator.” I did not always join him in these domains. When he saw these notions more as a means of pressure to justify the hierarchies subjugating other humans, I agreed with him. But intimately, I was not personally able to definitively remove all attributes necessarily intangible to the human being, other than in thought, as soon as one wants to explain the origin of the universe and the divine role in what we find there.

 

Thus I cannot accept the “absence” of God, nor that He is totally “undecidable” because I have decided that He has intervened many times in my life, and I have also given examples of his “benevolence,” powerfully experienced for example 10 years ago in the circumstances related here in stage 23 of Rocamadour and the episode of the hostel San Nicolás in Itero del Castillo (stages 63-64.) This was therefore not virtual, this impression of having been safeguarded from a fall, and guided to the eucharistic experience of communion proposed by mamma Alba: may God preserve her!

 

Guy Trainar doesn’t deny that in the nature of things the concept of a spirit capable of inspiring original thoughts in the human. He senses it as capable of nourishing his subconscious with a flood of continuous information capable of enlightening what he calls his “Reverse side” : the world of the observable and of appearances. He considers as possible what he calls his “Right side”: the location of a reality which will remain forever invisible to him.

 

I like this manner of describing the perception that one can have in contact with nature, where certain things seem to flow from a source, without our knowing where they come from. The difference for me will be first to put a capital s on the word Spirit, and wanting to believe that what is invisible will one day be revealed, when our soul has left its carnal and putrescible mortal coil.

 

The Spirit I’m talking about is the manifestation of God’s love for us, and this manifestation exists even among those who have never read nor adhered to the Bible. And I want to believe that when I shall be returned to the Right Side, I will also encounter there all the souls of those that I myself wanted to love in this first existence.

 

And therefore for me, the question mark remaining at noon in the rosette of my prologue is the word “Love,” synonym of God, and much stronger and more concrete for me than the interesting but incomplete D.I.E.U. “Dynamic Informing Eflorescing Universality. »

 

For myself, I believe that I pray to God because He exists! Ultreya!