…THIS ABSENT GOD ?

Stage 56 / Sunday 21 June / Santo Domingo de la Calzada

 

“Dies irae, dies illa, the day of wrath, that day …”: this musical sequence sung for centuries at the mass for the dead comes back into my head in reading my notes from yesterday in which I questioned certain fundamentals of religion that I was taught. What punishment from heaven is going to fall on my head for having thus dared to doubt what the priests giving us religious instruction (a long time ago) said was “the revelation”? Is it my fault if I found some points strangely similar to other ancient or oriental mythologies, for example the Egyptians’ Book of the Dead? Must I conclude from that, as some do, that God, our God, is absent?

 

I look again at the sequence of my reflections during the 128 km that I did during the week:

“Without a landmark, nor coherence, nor sense, nor finality, is he annihilating himself,

piously, this absent God?”

 

I’m going to profit from my Sunday rest to go further into the possibility of nihilism: it is a fact that “God,” the god of my Christian religion, has not yet revealed his presence to me, nor made me hear his voice in a direct manner, for example, as He did with Moses from the burning bush (Exodus 3:1-6). If this god is outside the universe, I quite understand that he is inaccessible to me, but if he is in the universe, or if he is the universe itself, then what has he got truly divine in him? Should I conclude that he manifests his immediate absence to me because in fact this god is not truly present? Or is this a voluntary discretion on His part in order to allow me total freedom be concerned about Him?

 

Aye, aye, aye …Powerful dilemma! Am I there, with my chisel immobile, uselessly scrutinizing without success, trying to distinguish the face of an absent God? Or instead, should I accept the absence of any face of God? Now, Moses, hearing God speak to him on the slopes of Mount Horeb, all he could see was a fire! The absence of any face was manifest, at least, and the fire blinded him so much that he could only prostrate himself! Is this also the reason why Saul was blinded for a moment after being thrown to the ground on the road to Damascus? I feel the logic of this episode of rare manifestation by the God of Moses: He blinds with His light the zealous Pharisee Saul who was aiming at the wrong target in persecuting Jesus’ followers, and when He speaks to him, it is by the very voice of Jesus! (Acts 9:1-9)

 

Thrown to the ground, blinded, conscious of a manifest presence of God through the one who claimed to be the son of man and the son of the God of his fathers, “Saoul” (Aramaic form of the name Saul, whose root means “question!”) would change his name, in humility, to Paul, God’s “little runt of the litter!” For the word Paul is the Latin “paulus” which the Romans used to designate someone small, weak, little to be considered. Once again, powerful dilemma: this God is “either take it or leave it,” and in any case to question, and He sure can give you a sense of your pettiness!

 

Then this question comes to me: “If I had never received the least religious teaching, what would I have become?” Animist—seeing the divinity in a thousand beautiful or frightening things? Deist—thinking that the divinity exists but not wanting to give it the least attribute? Atheist—affirming that there is no God? I recognize the last position presents a certain ambiguity, for even if God doesn’t exist, the fact of denying it implies the idea of God at the outset, then to make the difficult step of separating oneself from it. Now, I don’t see myself taking a decision like the nihilist. No, my feeling is that there exists “something” indefinable which resonates in me and around me. This feeling is sufficiently strong not to refute God totally. In so doing, I would be dishonest, I wouldn’t believe in what I think: I am not capable of putting God beyond the reach of my thoughts!

 

For example, I would have trouble eliminating the word “pilgrim” from my vocabulary, and starting to say that I’m only an “itinerant” or a “wanderer.” No, honestly, I set off on the path to review the idea I have of God, not to try and learn to get along without Him. And even the idea of trying to do it makes me uneasy: I truly have a certain admiration for these atheists who say they have taken this step and feel no worse for it. For me, that is impossible!

 

If the human as I contemplate him today in all his science and all his barbarity is not the ultimate goal of the creation, in what should we hope? In an invasion of extra-terrestrials capable of better policing us? Are we at the eventual mercy of rescuers coming from elsewhere to enslave us, so that our behavior aligns with what we would like to see more often in this world: joy, solidarity, fraternity, justice … in a nutshelle, loving one another? Now isn’t that precisely, doctrinally, the position of the God of the Christians? Can we believe the human capable on his own to convert to a universal philanthropic attitude, while accepting that after a brief tour in this life, there is nothing more, “nihil, the void, nothingness?

 

It makes one’s head spin! The idea of God has certainly evolved over the ages, as has the opinion of man, moreover, regarding the benefits of science. But the absence of God would make me feel like an orphan, not a liberated responsible person, ready to be heroic in helping others … What will the freed slave do? Devote his life to freeing other slaves, or take refuge where he thinks he can survive in forgetting his former state?

 

I feel like Paul, so small in facing the universe, and also so small before the face of a God who (even if He has not put me on earth like himself) finds a way to prevent me from giving Him the face of an “absent.” Because holding this visage of absence would put me in an awkward position with what I feel, and I wouldn’t know how to sculpt Him thus … but rejecting this face would be demonstrating the great liberty that He leaves me, enough to melt even more in astonishment and smallness, faced with what He is able to do!

 

Itinerary from Puente-la-Reina to Santo Domingo de la Calzada (8th week)