…IS HE ANNIHILATING HIMSELF…
Stage 54 / Friday 19 June / From Sotès to Azofra / 19 km
The quantity of poppies growing in the middle of the wheat fields bordering the path is unbelievable. As if they had wanted to plant poppies, and by accident the stalks of wheat appeared in their midst! This pretty blood-red flower became the symbol of the English troops fallen during the First World War. On November 9, 2014 this red flower was also found at the heart of an ephemeral work of art installed in the moats of the Tower of London, where some 888’246 ceramic poppies had been planted, one for each man fallen in combat. For each flower, a man annihilated: what a human waste, so abominable in its tragic beauty!
In the same way, to each of the hammer blows I have given up to now in trying to chisel out the image of the beauty of the God in whom I would like to be certain, piles of debris have fallen, never to rise again. Annihilated, too, the sensible references and finality to which I cling! I have the impression that I myself have slid into the void. The fall is at the same time worrisome and irritating: how and on what am I going to land? And will I be able to stand up again, or will someone come to lay flowers in my memory, one of these beautiful poppies scattered with little black spots?
Among these martyrs of the Great War, defenders of liberty, generously fallen on the field of honor, a great number were imbibed with the certainty of the human finality by divine salvation. It was an honor for them to fall in combat. Some had even preceded the call to arms! If they risked annihilation, it was because they were certain that it would allow them to gain Heaven! What grandeur in their humility to serve and obey, to defend their country, or the country of others!
Now, whom were they fighting? We know well, alas, and Christian Carion’s film “Merry Christmas” (released in 2005) shows it: they were fighting other Christians! In any case, a majority of the ennemies were Christians! Certain Scottish and French troops on one side and German troops on the other, to the great dismay of their chiefs of staff, accorded themselves on 24 December 1914 a Christmas vigil, a moment of truce to sing together. The occasion? It was the holiday well known by the western world, in our Europe of Christian roots: that celebrating the coming into the world of the Redeemer: the Son of God, the Prince of Peace, the baby Jesus!
Beauty and horror of religion! It served indirectly as a motor to insure the docility of the troops, on one side and the other. Religion explained the adhesion of the regiments to leave the trenches in order to annihilate “the enemy.” The Christian religion was also capable, at the time of a festival, to reunite beings vaguely conscious of the depth of love of a God capable of incarnating himself to pay the price of human transgressions.
Truth or obscurity of religion? Are they all in heaven, the French “poilus” as well as the German “boches,” the Scottish “tommies” as well as the “krauts?” And their superiors, a great number also believers, who sent them to their death knowing full well that there was no hope in the face of enemy machine guns, are they already “bought back” by the Redeemer? Did the butchering fill paradise more than hell?
How can we know, as there aren’t and can’t be proofs? Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), said in his Thoughts [Pensées] : “Recognise, then, the truth of religion in the very obscurity of religion, in the little light we have of it, and in the indifference which we have to knowing it.” (Pensée No. 565 in the Brunschvicg edition). What more would Pascal have said in seeing the trench warfare between Saddam Hussein’s soldiers and those of the Ayatolah Khomeini from 1980 to 1988? There again, the same kind of situation, but using another religion, Islam, to galvanize the troops.
How easy it is to pass from the believer state, for which no proof is necessary, to the doubting state, for which no proof is sufficient! Much more difficult, but some do it in hoping thus to avoid all potential enslavement by other humans, passing from doubt to atheism. With the danger of seeing materialism little by little replacing the unique God with only that which is observable and can be bought, as we have seen and continue to see in the communist ideology!
And am I not myself navigating somewhere between religious materialism and a materialistic religion? “Is my quest – as Guy Trainar says so well – is it that of a sublime dosage of knowledge and faith, capable of materializing my religion and religiously living my materialism?” I like the scientific results which support the story of Genesis. As I said three stages earlier, I take pleasure in seeing the parallel between the Big Bang and the creation story in the Bible. Now science has everything to lose on its side in agreeing to see the fingers of God slipping into the cracks of its ignorance. And on the other side, what religion will we have in the fourth millennium, if we haven’t yet blown up the planet or disappeared in total pollution?
Shall we hope Christianity capable to liberate itself from its provincial sources surging from the middle-eastern desert, and opening up, without being untrue to itself, to a vision of truly universal scope? What will it do the day an extra-terrestrial intelligence is truly discovered? What will become of the dogma of the unique Son of God then? Will we discover then in distant planets potentially inhabited by other redeemers who will save from eternal damnation the E.T.’s also engaged in fratricidal struggles? Will they be in human form, or green with hearts radiating red, like that of the statue of Jesus of the Sacred Heart? What would Teilhard de Chardin say about this?
Meanwhile, against all winds and tides, for fear of total annihilation, I persist in praying: the chasm of the hard-line material world is too deep, and the excessive materialism which could result from falling into it seems fearful to me, that it would be too liberated from all restraints! Yes, I dare not laugh too much at the notion of God. Today is Friday, and like Jean Racine (1639-1699), I repeat: “Goodness me, don’t hallow till you are out of the woods: he who laughs on Friday, will weep on Sunday.” (Les plaideurs – The Litigants – Act I, scene 1).
