...A REVEALED GOD?

Stage 21 / Sunday 17 May / Figeac

 

I’m going to “fidget” in Figeac for a day, hooray for Sunday! I’ve now been walking for three weeks, and I have 140 + 141 + 159 = 440 km in my legs, which prove more and more hardy. After all, I just needed to believe, convince myself, and set out on the path. Walking turned out to be less terrifying than I would have believed during the first week, and I already felt rather safeguarded and even guided from the second. I changed regions this past week: “Farewell, rugged Auvergne, hello more friendly Quercy!” And during this transition I gained a new perspective:

“Does intuition reveal an eternity which is transcendental and religiously bring belief in a revealed god?”

 

This progressive revelation, these new intuitions, one can only discover them on the traditional direct path to Compostela? What will happen if I attempt a detour? In moving away from the path, will I still feel “safeguided”? What will happen if instead of moving straight towards Cahors, I head first to Rocamadour, this place whose name is already quite a mystery? … No valid reason seems to forbid me from doing it, this detour!

 

So, where is it, the surest path in our life? Nothing is ever certain, nothing is ever proven, and nothing is imposed. The God of biblical times left intact the mystery of His existence. He leaves each and every one free to believe in His revealed word, or not. The bible, as it were, might always be the work of mystics of superior talents and influence. How easy it is to question the affirmation that this elusive eternal God would be temporarily incarnate in a frail human whose body would never have taken the time to rot!

 

But couldn’t one oppose Emil’s 1000 reasons not to believe in this god with Vincent’s 2000 reasons to believe, adopting an opposite logic and direction, that he could submit with a smile? “I don’t know why, but I bet I’ll find my handkerchief twice as many times as you! My god is at my side, more than yours! Mine is the true God!” Vincent laughs out loud; Emil, belittled, feels powerless.

 

Blaise Pascal thus launched a famous wager, of the same order as Vincent’s: “He who laughs last, laughs best.” This is my abridged version of what may reward the one who bets on the resurrection. Because if you win, you win everything (Les Pensées, fragment 233, édition Brunschvicg)! And if you lose, if there’s really nothing after death, then you’ve lost nothing! Presented thus, isn’t it reasonable to give yourself the greatest probability of laughter … ad vitam aeternam (forever eternally)?

 

And yet, this trap of circularity which leads Vincent in his 2000 passages by his handkerchief supposes this God “of his” exists since his confidence in finding his handkerchief has never been disappointed. It is the same trap that locks religious authority into saying with firmness: “Believe, you’ll have nothing to lose and this revelation comes to us from God in whom one must believe! It’s worth the fight!” What a good sport such a god is!

 

Vincent’s God, or God of Blaise Pascal, where were you hiding when the Australian aborigines were developing their animistic cults and rites, at least 35’000 years ago? … As did independently my earliest ancestors, cavemen here in Europe. Because they didn’t know the God of the Bible, why should we belittle their spirituality that led them to see animated beings in all the dangers of their forests. Is it You who already revealed to them the mysterious symbolism in these Lascaux cave paintings, which contributed perhaps to their survival by the transmission of better hunting techniques? Wanting to escape undamaged from the circular trap that the face of a revealed God might produce, I take my chisel and make that face fly to pieces, as I earlier did with the face of a terrifying God! Okay, where shall I go now that I am freer? It’s decided, a detour! Rocamadour!

 

Itinérary from Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole to Figeac (3rd week)
and from Figeac to Lauzerte (4th week).