…A TERRIFYING GOD?

Stage 7 / Sunday 3 May / Vernoux-en-Vivarais

 

Memorial plaque in Memory of the Jesuit and Cardinal Henri de Lubac,
whose family was from Vernoux-en-Vivarais

 

[Translation : Descended from a family in Vernoux-en-Vivarais, Henri SONIER de LUBAC was born in Cambrai (Nord) in 1896. He died in Paris in 1991.
Entering the Society of Jesus in 1913, ordained priest in 1927, he served God in his teaching of theology in Lyon, by his well-received books, and his apostolic undertakings.
From 1937 to 1944, as a Christian he resisted Nazism and anti-Semitism. In 1941 he was co-founder of the reputed “Christian Sources” collection of texts. He became a member of the Institute of France in 1958.
An adviser to the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), he exercised a discrete and profound spiritual influence. On February 2, 1983, Pope John-Paul II appointed him Cardinal.
Humble scholar, faithful to the Church, enriched by all his doctrinal sources, he opened Christian thinking with insight to an interior knowledge of God, and to dialog with western and oriental atheism.]

 

Today, in the image of the creator, who not only considered it good to rest on the seventh day, but who even made it a beneficial commandment for the Jewish people, I prepare to savor a day without hiking: I’m only going to stroll in the very old French town of Vernoux. And here at the corner of a street, I come upon the plaque above. A wink from on high, this suggests that the place is right for theological reflection! Especially on the “interior knowledge of God,” the plaque tells me. Terrifying coincidence, isn’t it?

 

I decide to begin by removing from my pack the heaviest things I’ve accumulated this past week, with the healthy intention to dispose of it in the first trash bin in the village. No doubt, what weighs the most is my conscience. This famous conscience that made Cain run away. Conscience which, according to Victor Hugo, found him even in the depths of the sepulcher where he had asked his children to seal him: “The eye was in the tomb looking at Cain!” (La Légende des siècles – 1859) [The Legend of the Ages]. The eye of a pitiless, terrifying God!

 

I’m going to summarize in recalling the headings of each stage up to now:

 

“From well-known land into unknown territory,
does introspection, without too much inspection,
insert the sincere fear of a terrifying God?”

 

Leaving Morestel, I came out of the land of my ancestors (I mean in fact the ancestors of Guy Trainar, but I know that Morestel was for a time included in the Savoy of my own ancestors!). There the terrain was familiar. The roots of my being had been nourished there, from my earliest childhood, by ancestral compost which generations of my family considered the best for my growth and security. I departed, like the prodigal son, straight toward adventure.

 

Thus I abandoned the soil which made me grow, where I was fertilized with certain love, but where I was also pruned from time to time like a young vine, trimmed … for my own good! There they had infused me with the precepts of a potentially fruitful life, without neglecting the fear of punishment. “Yes, be careful of lightning and hail from the sky, little plant only interested in good times!”

 

Lightning and hail: the big question concerning such punishments “from above” is whether or not they choose their target. Will they fall more surely on transgressors, on the prodigals who (like me) decide to go off in search of adventure after settling accounts with their old man? The choices which I am going to be called to make, after leaving the land of my ancestors and their rules, will they necessarily render me unjust in the eyes of a higher court, quick and strict in its punishments?

 

Is it really the permanent fear of this celestial policeman, inflexible and nit-picker, that will forever be directing my life’s path? To avoid the fall of this Damocles sword which sways above all my actions, must I compensate for every distancing by a return and immediate penitence? And this constant return to a subservient position, will it justify my avoiding the torments of purgatory or even hell?

 

But is this truly reality, this picture of a terrifying, all-powerful prosecutor, ever ready to flog a victimized creature? Or is it the religious power itself that has invented it, to better subjugate by fear and terror? Using the instinctive and quite real fear of the storm, hasn’t a human hierarchy established this as a means of domination?

 

How useful it has been and still is, this scholarly threat assembled in complex and constraining dogmas, this original sin whose consequences will subdue you under this yoke for which only a few seem to have the liberating key!

 

But this constant fear of punishment dragging the subject to suffer with patience and resignation, is it truly the intention of a king whose breath would be full of love and his law full of mercy?

 

From an instinct for survival, the animal in me has attacked the word “conscience”. That makes sense, for it is this word which would separate human from animal! And this chiseling has begun to chip away the face of a terrifying God who would make his creature crawl. A few stones begin piling up at the foot of a tutelary statue that I am re-sculpting. Oh manna from Henri Lubac, you are still scattered in his ancestral land!

 

Itinerary from near Morestel to Vernoux-en-Vivarais (1st week)
and from Vernoux to Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole (2nd week)