...REVEAL…

Stage 16 / Tuesday 12 May / From Malbouzon to Salgues / 31 km

 

Holy cow! How long and heavy were my notes yesterday! The pretty horned animals of Aubrac did inspire me, no doubt! I would have liked to make it shorter. But trying to cut across the pastures where these bovines watched my movements, I sank too deeply, here and there, in a few of these famous peat-bogs about which people had warned me. Today I’ll resign myself and be more careful: I’ll zigzag more by the straight paths that go around their humid enclosures, with less risk of becoming bogged down.

 

In fact, I move with a faster pace, and even if the stage is a bit longer, my progress is more alert. As if one gains in adhering to every good truth revealed! Which makes me return to my reflection on the Bible: can I see there the absolute, unswerving, indisputable book of a divine revelation?

 

The Old Testament is clearly the work of undeniably very gifted scribes. Some were poets, others mystics of genius, others historians. They inscribed in Hebraic characters the history and beliefs of their people. They affirmed that their hand had been chosen by their “Almighty” to reveal the 613 articles of a “Law” necessary to live better together. And certain knew, after the fact, how to wrap up the credibility of revelation by attributing to certain famous people “prophecies” that announced events which would happen later.

 

Now at about the same time, in other parts of the world, other scribes equally as genial were writing the precepts for better living together in the Chinese language. And as a notable simplification, 500 years before our Christian era, Confucius resumed one of the five virtues he favored, goodness, in these simple terms: “Love ALL people!”

 

With the Hebrews, it was necessary to await Jesus for the Talmidic Law “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” to be dethroned by the famous “Love your neighbor as yourself!” Then what was written about all that was revealed regarding the man Jesus, namely the New Testament, needed to be highly ordered to give an account and explain a most difficult phenomenon: the resurrection. Moreover, the battle is still not finished in the selection / sorting of the writing called canonical and those which one puts aside, the apocryphal writings. There isn’t a decade that passes without the announcement in one language or another of a better “translation” of the revelation!

 

Revelation which continues, by what one asks you to believe, imposing on you definite challenges: “Our Father” (understood to mean God the father, our creator), said little Johnny after his catechism class, “Our Father who art in heaven, if you are everyone’s father, how can you have an Only Son?” Spirit-filled, after his confirmation, little Johnny would later ask: “How can you be one God in three persons?” In the course of time, I learned to appreciate what one can answer to Johnny, but it is far from obvious!

 

Is it divine, the revelation? Is the Bible true and sacred? Why not, if one wants to adhere closely to the following thesis:
- A perfect truth cannot come from men, by nature imperfect.
- Not coming from men, the Biblical message could only have come from God.
- Having come from God, men could only know it by revelation.
- Therefore the Biblical message, revealed, is necessarily divinely inspired.

 

But this reasoning is circular: one cannot use it with impunity. I prefer to see in this Biblical revelation, “source and finality of Creation,” a personal invitation to happiness. This message often heaped happiness on the medieval world. By chance (or was it a blessing?) I was born in a corner of the world which knew such happiness and believed it a duty to share it with others: they launched a great civilizing movement, proposing thus a sense of enigmatic intrusion of the human in the universe. Alas, this impetus was quickly misdirected by some and used as an instrument of power! And we’re not about to see this change! ”Errare, humanum est” [To err is human] …