…A SAFEGUIDING GOD?

Stage 14 / Sunday 10 May / Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole

 

If I somewhat increased the length of my stage yesterday, it is because I knew I would be entitled to Sunday rest today. In the myth of the Creation, it is God himself who founded this custom of Sabbath rest on the seventh day. “Custom” isn’t exactly the right word. This was a commandment addressed to the Hebrews: the famous Sabbath day! One day to recuperate, to safeguard one’s strength… The God of the Hebrews showed wisdom, granting himself such a rest on the evening of his sixth day of his creative drive. Adopted by Christians, though one day later, this rest took on the name of “the day of the Lord,” dies Dominicus in Latin. This day was already set apart under Constantine, the first Christian emperor, and its designation evolved to become the French word dimanche.

 

How interesting, this tradition of a God who seeks to safeguard your energy, and who guides you to do it every 7 days by his own example! When the French revolutionaries wanted to impose a decimal calendar in 1793, with a week being 10 days, the day off came only every décadis (10th day), the résistance in rural areas was considerable. This was one of the reasons for the return to the Gregorian calendar in the year XIII of the [first French] Republic.

 

Going deeper into this notion of a God who would watch over my safeguard and guide me, I admit that many times in my life I felt myself escorted and protected. This sentiment was confirmed especially when my actions were oriented toward trying to do good and external events conspired to prevent me to do so: I had the impression of an exterior force inspiring in me the right method to use, the good path to follow.

 

Does he exist elsewhere than in my imagination, this philanthropist from above who facilitates the means of reaching my goals, when these are valid, and who helps me overcome obstacles that never fail to arise? A God who proposes railings when he guides me on a narrow bridge toward a brighter shore? A God who safeguards and guides … Let’s dare a neologism: a safeguiding God!

 

Oh great! … self-doubt returns. Am I wishing to invent a name for the simple interiorized projection of a desire not to be alone? What is this image of a divine benefactor, subtle and delicate in the help he brings me to better succeed if I get outside myself and try to do better? Could it just be a phantom in my subconscious?

 

The unconscious is a strange reservoir where masses of right and wrong decisions are accumulated, the experience of preceding generations. This reservoir, where the essence of my self was settling, gives me better reflexes when I am thrown into an unknown situation. One discovers the unconscious in innate behavior that we attribute to animals, that which gives a baby bird the reflex to open its beak to the first shadow that falls on the nest. This behavior is the one that gives the baby gull the reflex to tap the red spot on the approaching beak, and gives its parents the reflex to regurgitate their food.

 

Is He real or illusory, this “safeguiding” God? Whether objective or subjective, has this image been reinforced by generations of readers of the Bible? Is it reasonable to believe in a God capable of undertaking a personal relationship with each individual? Shepherd, guardian angel: that is how they presented him to me in my childhood … The followers of Darwin accuse him of being only a simple anthropomorphic representation of a global evolution which, neither moralistic nor perfectionist, neither just nor unjust, assures the survival of certain species for a given time. Others see in that an astute cerebral invention, concocted over ages to soften the blow of the cruel reality of a nature that favors the law of the strongest.

 

So what? Too bad, I like this face I imagine of a “safeguiding” God. More smiling than terrifying, it evokes the universal dynamics that supports and illuminates each form of existence for a time. I’m going to continue searching and verifying its structuring reality in my life:

“From stasis to flux, guided, instrumented, programmed, in becoming,
are we being constantly constructed by a safeguiding God? ”