…AN UNDECIDABLE GOD?

Stage 63 / Sunday 27 June / Itero del Castillo

 

I have never received such a pleasant and warm welcome as what awaited me last night in entering the “albergue” of San Nicolás de Puente Fitero. This hostel is quite near the old Fitero bridge, the Roman bridge on the Rio Pisuerga which serves as the link between the province of Burgos that I’m leaving, and that of Palencia where I’m going to enter. This river also marks the former boundary between the kingdoms of Castile and Léon. I’ve covered 120 km since Puente-la-Reina to arrive here.

 

Itinerary from Santo Domingo de la Calzada to Itero de Castilla (9th week).

 

The hostel is now run by an Italian brotherhood whose base is in Perugia, Italy. Imagine a rectangular building almost without windows. This is an ancient hospice dating from 1160, still intact. It shelters in its eastern part a lovely raised Romanesque apse. It is there that Mamma Alba, our hostess of Piedmont origin, washes our feet, as Jesus washed the feet of his disciples before the Last Supper. There were a dozen other pilgrims who had decided, like me, to stop for the night in this simple hermitage.

 

Mamma Alba conferred on several of us the reading of the welcome prayer which was said in several languages. And while she was kneeling to wash our feet in the ancient way, with a pitcher of water, basin and olive-oil soap, we sang a canticle where about welcoming every person as if Christ himself were arriving, disguised as a pilgrim. Many of us were weeping, so touched they were by the simplicity and gentleness of this rite so simple yet powerful.

 

This ceremony, truly moving, was followed by sharing a large platter of spaghetti as only the transalpine mammas know how to prepare them, accompanied by pagnotte ((Italian bread rolls) and a good Castilian wine. Needless to say, those who were there wove very strong ties among them in the evening that followed, chatting, sharing their emotions, and understanding what the word “eucharist” means! Today, no need to go in search of a mass at the local church of Itero del Castillo: I am still in communion with all those I have met; I understand the feelings of the Emmaüs disciples on the road to Emmaus when they realized it was Jesus himself who had accompanied them on their walk! (Luke 24:13-35)

 

The contraction of space matters little in this darkened communal room where bursts of laughter blended with the candlelight! So what if time is dilating in a great moment of happiness and intimacy! If God is timeless and undecidable, it is neither in the universe, nor in the past, nor in the near future that one must search for Him! But one must thank Him for the present moment, this time filled with His presence and which science cannot analyze. Better to have this indetermination that He reserves for us. More sure is this concept of absoluteness about Him, unattainable but perceptible in certain circumstances like the one I’ve just experienced, the most freeing absoluteness in the world!

 

Perched on the parapet of the Fitero bridge, my throat still tight with emotion, I watch the water flow through the reeds. In the same way, God is invisible, but nothing allows us to conclude his nonexistence. Inversely, the fact that I can conceive of his existence, even feel it sometimes, doesn’t prove that He exists. If God is at the same time One and All, He is unique because He is the set that contains all sets, and He is therefore undecidable for at the very moment when I could imagine such a set, I can still find an element deciding not to want to be part of it: an atheist who hold to his right to keep himself outside God’s reach! In the end, God is only subjectively decidable in thought, and that is just as well!

 

Thousands of years of questioning have not permitted finding a unanimous agreement on the possibility of what God might be, if He is. He doesn’t have the same value of truth for everyone. And myself in this past week, I’ve made the following assessment:

 

“Liberty, fragilizing to the absurd the desert, a spatiotemporal one, cause of an undecidable God?” 

 

Oh liberty, dear liberty! You still let me see a pile of stones rather than a face more visible and clearly defined for the One who has been my quest for 9 weeks in 63 stages (1384 km from the neighborhood of Morestel). But do I really need an understandable god, as long as the prayers I intend to continue permit me to meet with an understanding God?

 

So understanding that at the moment when I needed it the most in my desert where space and time were becoming more and more foggy, this undecidable God brought me invisibly back to the concrete of an experience of purification (washing of the feet), of sharing (bread and wine), and thankfulness and joy together (eucharist). Another little miracle, no doubt! Quite as magnificent in its simplicity as the even greater miracle given to all, which we call liberty …