FROM WELL KNOWN LAND…
Stage 1 / Monday 27 April / From near Morestel to Roche / 24 km
For the pilgrim, while his body is moving forward, his thoughts on the contrary seem to go backwards: leaving the present moment, they tend to increasingly explore the past.
This is especially true in a familiar area, where memories of ancestors are evoked more easily. Thus begins quite naturally a reflection on all the ancestors to whom we owe our genes. And if I consecrate each of my steps to an ancestor, I can go a long way back in time.
If I walk 1700 kilometers (the distance from Morestel to Santiago) at the rate of 1333 steps per km, I will have taken more than 2 million steps at the end of my pilgrimage. More than 2,000,000, indeed! To be precise, I will have taken 2,266,100 steps! So, if I calculate that I have 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great-grandparents, 16 great-greats, etc., I only need to go back 21 generations to count more than 2 million ancestors. More precisely: 221 = 2,097,152!
So a way to visualize and perhaps even lighten your pilgrimage is to tell yourself, « I’m going to walk for and with the 21 generations who have made me the being that I am! Each one of these generations has contributed to each gene which makes up my ADN, some perhaps more than others, but what does it matter: I am the fruit of the fruit of their fruit….
And the 21-story genealogical tree which towers over my being is something fairly overwhelming to imagine; I cannot visualize it. And yet I am able to walk the distance which separates me from each of these higher branches, and I will do that in approximately 3 months! By the way, in estimating 4 or 5 generations per century, I will only be reaching back to my ancestors in the Middle Ages, 400 or 500 years ago!
Over-arched by this tree, I am also dominated by all that I was taught, all that they wanted to transmit to me from childhood: what these generations, one after the other, believed it their duty to entrust to their descendants in order to transmit the best of themselves.
Among this inheritance, one of the most mysterious: religion! Something very important, and with which there was no joking around in my childhood.
Yes, religion seems a yoke if joy is lacking, and especially if it is imposed like a burden, like an iron collar.
Many want to dispose of it, and it’s quite a natural decision. Why put up with it? Why honor it? Isn’t it easier to reject it in the name of “sacrosanct liberty”? Notice here, in an unexpected way, the ultra-religious adjective of this very secular and ultra-republican desire, accompanying equality and fraternity!
In any case, a pilgrimage can provide the time to reinvent the need – or not – for such domination. It may give the opportunity to disassemble, piece after piece, this iron collar of religion, and to decide if they deserve being thrown away, one after the other, or on the contrary, admire their complexity and therefore submit to their necessity.
