WITHOUT A LANDMARK…

Stage 50 / Monday 15 June / From Puente-la-Reina to Estella / 23 km

 

Last week, in total, I tried to answer the following question:

“Meditating, upset by suffering from evil, does it deny, absolutely, an absolute God?”

 

And that led me to topple from his pedestal a perfect God and an all-powerful absolute. There is plenty there to confuse all my reference points. Rather disoriented, I launch myself in my eighth week on the way. Not that the path is more difficult to follow. On the contrary, it is well marked out with Santiago scallop markers and yellow arrows.

 

The number of pilgrims is increasing in this beautiful end of Spring. I rarely have the impression of walking alone: I’m becoming a sheep among others in this transhumance [seasonal livestock movement to summer pastures]. I see more and more human faces. But, in my little brain, more and more specific faces are disappearing that I believed reasonable to attribute to God. In the end, what I had believed I understood from religious discourses was: either badly interpreted by me, or falsely taught by others. I am in full reformation, and I know this will please my Presbyterian (Reformed) wife when I admit it to her!

 

The perspective of continuing reform, along the path, of what I have accumulated since earliest childhood as a vision of the divine concept, pleases me nonetheless: I have covered more than 1000 kilometers and physically I’m in good shape. Even if I have sometimes gone in circles a bit, I haven’t strayed from the path up to now. I am safe and sound after an incident which could have been fatal. I haven’t weighed myself, but I estimate having already lost more than 5 kilos of excess weight. Yes, in the sort of Pascal’s dilemma with which I’m struggling [nothing to lose in betting on God’s existence], I tell myself that if God exists and if it is He who has subtly taken care of me up to now, then the new vocabulary created by my friend Guy Trainar perfectly resumes the most satisfactory image I can have of Him up to now: “A saveguiding God!”

 

Are there other images or faces of Him on which I might meditate? I know that the exercise is difficult. Like Vincent, Emil and Perpetua (in French = 20 hundred, a thousand, and Perpetua) I am constrained by the narrowness, the smallness of what is observable on the scale where I am moving. With their vocabulary and spaces, more limited than mine, they were able to say: “A handkerchief was lost and found, another found twice as often, and another never found.” Myself, benefitting from a (slightly) greater point of view, I could observe a little more than they can. I could use a vocabulary that they cannot easily conceive: “I also see a circle, another larger one, and a straight ray …” But like them, nonetheless, I only see things in a separated, discontinuous manner, while everything in the universe is in fact connected and continuously holds together! A great whole!

 

Is it wrong to enclose God in designating him by a single name, and in attributing to him all sorts of epithets in order to make a great whole, as our Muslim friends try to do among the 99 names they use to venerate him: the All-Merciful, the All-Powerful, the All-Dominating, the All-Glorious, etc? Perhaps not false, but it is surely vain to believe that the undertaking will permit having the complete answer once and for all. As in a pilgrimage, moreover, it is vain to think that one will have all the answers when arriving at the end of the path. All the “Jacquets”, those having completed the pilgrimage to Compostela, will tell you: “You will have more answers along the way itself than in reaching the end of the Camino!”

 

Yes, this pilgrim’s progress of 2015, after the pilgrimage of 2005, already offers me so many different points of view, concretely as well as figuratively! It is fascinating. However, with no reference point, without a higher perspective, how can one know that the rising sun climbing is only the earth rotating forward, and me with it? And that at sundown, I am only shifting backward with my planet plunging steeply into the night? And once night has fallen, that the fat round face appearing in the opaque sky is not Wilson, Tom Hanks’ volleyball. No! … It’s the moon!

 

Oh staggering depth of space, you are playing with me! But who then will carry me in his interplanetary spaceship? In the same way that the vault of a cathedral appears more dizzying in low-angle shot, I need a better perspective. Therefore, my divine quest requires a new approach to acquire better reference points, other than that uniquely centered on the world and nature.

 

In centering his approach to observation by going forward in the world where he finds himself, Emil can only speak of his handkerchief found and found again at a certain frequency. Vincent will also speak of a handkerchief, but found twice as often. And Perpetua will speak of a world where her handkerchief has disappeared forever.

 

They could change their approach, and try to center it on the manner in which God governs their world. Emil will speak of a God who made him find his handkerchief everyday. Vincent will tell him that his God makes him find his twice as often each day (from whence his pretention to have a god superior to Emil’s.) Perpetua will say that God doesn’t exist: she never finds her handkerchief in her world!

 

Finally I could center the research from myself, with my sensitivity and intuition, at the risk of becoming too partial, too emotional and incorrect. In such an approach one could imagine Vincent saying to Emil: “Since I find my handkerchief twice as often as you, in moving at the same speed as you, I think my handkerchief is magic. It’s capable of changing place on its own, in order to come in front of me. That’s the only explanation!” Vincent tries to test this theory and decides to stop at the midpoint of his habitual path between the two points where he usually discovers the handkerchief. He waits and waits … and like “Milady atop her watch tower” (French song of Marlbrough), he sees nothing coming! And there he is weeping too in telling himself that his God has abandoned him: his handkerchief is no longer magic!

 

If one vision centered on the world has the merit of being objective, the two others, centered on God or myself, are surely much more subjective. What’s to be done? I think the latest idea of Vincent had merit: he was observing his world, that of the handkerchief found again everyday, an irrefutable fact, then he elaborated a step in which he intervened himself to test a possible explanation of what he was observing: “The handkerchief comes to meet me, since I find it twice as often as Emil, therefore if I stop walking I should see it coming.”

 

Now he must look again at this iterative process with an additional element. “I find my handkerchief only if I am walking, and then I find it twice as often as Emil finds his, and I know moreover that my handkerchief does not move on its own…” Having confronted a possible vision of his world, where a handkerchief would move magically, he must envisage something else, make another test, for example turning back in the other direction, and testing other hypotheses until enough information leads him to define his world as circular and with a radius half that of Emil’s … Which would not prevent him, eventually, from asking again the question about the god who placed him in such a world rather than in one of a straight line!

 

What does is matter, I too must resume my observations in detail, and perhaps in adding one fact after another, my vision sometimes darkened by mystery, sometimes lighted by a discovery, will become more and more precise in its whole! Human being needed light to better understand the earth, and obscurity to better understand the stars: let’s not give up!

 

At this point, I arrive in Estella … which happens to mean Star! No doubt: it’s another wink of God, He is truly full of humor!!!