LIBERTY…
Stage 57 / Monday 22 juin / From Santo Domingo de la Calzada to Tosantos / 30 km
Last night I calculated that since my departure I have covered 1164 km, and my daily average fell below 21 kilometers per day last week, since I had done less than 140 km. Challenging the presence of God, my walking slowed down! In setting off very early this morning for a longer stage—I must indeed if I want to maintain it, this sacred average—I discovered a strange fog, just outside Santo Domingo. The early dawn gave this fog a dull blue-green and disconcerting color, and I found myself once again without reference points. Hmm… liberty, dear liberty, are you playing games with me as soon as I dare try to evacuate God?
The constant oscillation between my doubts and my certainties weighs heavily on me. I would like to evacuate everything that makes me vacillate, beginning with my mechanically recited devotions, my horribly guilt-ridden scruples, to find again a serene vision ahead … and yet it’s no! It’s the fog!
Then it’s a strange noise coming from the heights which intrigues me as I approach Grañón after an hour and a half walking: as if someone were loudly clapping his tongue! Then suddenly the last vapors of fog dissipated under the rising sun, and I see the bell-tower of the St John the Baptist Church in the village. The noise that surprised me was coming from there: pairs of storks were nesting there, and were bill-clapping as a form of courtship display. A strange and atypical noise which shattered the cottony silence which I was beginning to enjoy: it forces me to begin listening again from the depths of my fog. But what or whom am I listening to, great God?
And free I am, certainly, but in relation to what? Free to accept or reject the beliefs of others, perhaps, but if I insist on being coherent, I must reconstruct for myself a more solid spirituality, and which will hold up, as I understand it! “Click this, click that, click here, click there!” the storks seem to answer from the top of their bell-tower, “and you mean what, exactly, by your word liberty?” Like time which flows – but flows in relation to what? — my freedom exists, but in relation to what does it exist? In autonomy when faced with possible choices? Am I truly free, when I choose what I feel is the best option, although in fact it “imposes itself” on me?
And then perhaps I am free to make my choice of the moment, here and now, but I can no longer do anything to make my earlier choices whose time has lapsed and which have led me to the present moment! And abruptly breaking with this past will break the harmony of everything that I am part of … Oh tyranny of this very word “liberty”! One must have it in order to talk about it, but it reveals itself quite constraining as soon as you want to brandish it. For the saying is quite correct that: “My freedom stops where that of others begins!” And as every action leads to a reaction, I am limited by the laws of cause and effect. It is better to see in freedom the means of rendering equal all those who think. Each one is free to believe what he judges good to believe, as long as there are no consequences leading to actions that deprive others of their freedom …
I would like to be able to say that liberty is full and entire up to the moment when what it leads you to do will only have consequences for yourself, and will in no way hamper that of others. But the problem is really that we are all connected in one way or another. I believed myself absolutely free to choose to pass by Rocamadour without that implying any consequence for others. But if I had been killed on that stage, when I got carried away momentarily to descend a steep path too quickly, what do you think would have resulted? A lack of freedom for others!
Imagine the impact of my disappearance? The concern of my spouse not receiving the daily message sent in the evening from the portable phone she insisted I carry? The searching by rescue workers until they found my lifeless body at the bottom of the ravine of the Alzou. My freedom is good to have as long as I don’t use it to accumulate errors. And since I cannot avoid mistakes, my freedom is good to have as long as mistakes I make serve to teach me not to repeat them. Improving myself, that is my supreme freedom! With or without God to protect and guide me?
