WORD…

Stage 78 / Monday 13 July / From Triacastela to Sarria / 30 km

 

Oh beneficial Galicia, with your refreshing green vitality, your peaceful undulations, the mosaic of pastures in your countryside, the little fields and pleasant woods, separated by hedges give refuge to birds and streams attracting butterflies, you appeal to my heart! And the villagers near their granaries on stilts (hórreo galego, in Galician), full of grains from the last harvest, cheerfully greet us with their warm “Buon  camino! ”  This greeting reinvigorates us, my hiking companions and myself. We thank them with a loud and clear “Muchas gracias!”  (many thanks), then start whistling vigorously our rousing hiking tune. There we are in tune with this good word which is addressed to us thus: “Yes, no doubt, the path is good!”

 

Dynamic of the word! Dynamic of words both familiar and encouraging, simultaneous wishes and reality of the beauty of the segment of time in which we are evolving! The Logos, the Word! “Heading, He, the logos” says Chouraqui, which is generally translated by “In the beginning was the Word!” (John 1:1) What a strange affirmation intended to illuminate the launching of the universe! From whence does come the founding and mysterious flavor of this definitive affirmation expressed with so much self-assurance?

 

Other more recent translations of the prologue of John’s Gospel use “Verb” rather than “Word.” “Word” is easier to understand, but it removes the central grammatical dynamic of the word Verb which is at the heart of the action in every sentence. Without a verb, neither state nor action is communicated by the sentence. No subject or compliment of the verb can then be connected. If I say, “Come!” I transmit to someone by this verb the idea of a displacement in my direction. If there are several people, I must specify who is the subject of my invitation: “Come, Dominique!” In the same way that a subject and verb were necessary to specify the appearance of each thing, for example: “A light will be!” (Genesis 1:3 – Chouraqui’s translation)

 

The word “myth” in its first meaning also signified “word” or “story” before it derivation into the current meaning of “fiction,” and that is too bad because its first meaning also evoked an action, from a reality. The Greek word “λόγος” (logos), the term originally used in John’s gospel, before taking a religious connotation, had simply meant “law of being, immanent reason and universal necessity, beyond man.” This was the opposite of chance at the moment of making a choice to signify that “something is among all that could be.” This word Logos of the Greeks preserves the mixture of all that could be, but founds from the scattered a completely undeniable and unique reality, capable of dynamism.

 

Now “Word” is translated by “Mot” in French, but this noun is of a more static nature than would be the English word “Verb” which translates into “Verbe”. By its nature underlying action, the word “Verb” is closer to the word Logos than the word “Word” used by Anglo-Saxons in their first biblical translations. The word “Logos”, “Verb”, suits better the mythical and cosmogonical sense that the apostle John wanted to express with the original act, the eruption of the universe out of nothing. He meant there what action God was accomplishing when he spoke. This word logos was already in use in certain psalms in the Greek translation (made in Egypt) of the Old Testament. This translation is called the Septuagint because tradition has it that there were 72 wisemen who carried it out in Alexandria around 270 BC at the request of pharaoh Ptolomy II.

 

The original act in the appearance of the world was expressed in different terms under the Asian skies: in the Middle Empire, it was a Chinese word best translated by “breath,” and with the Hindus a word whose closest translation is “silence.” All these nuances can only enrich the attempt that we all always have to interpret the supreme meaning of the primordial origin. Their convergence, nonetheless, is sufficiently close to hope for a common acceptance one day. Agreement that is slow in coming! Meanwhile, either the verb or the word require to be pronounced by someone: this tends to give a human face to the One who is the author of them, an excuse that newly born religions have not missed seizing.

 

Thus, the Word became God. Because God “says,” He affirms! And what He affirms is easily turned into a yoke by the propagators of the Bible. This is no longer V for Verb, it’s V for Victory over those that want others rigidly yoked to their power! But if I refuse the anthropomorphic angle to this God qualified as supreme Verb, if this God is not a person, then there is no longer willpower or coercive intent: all crumbles like the pile of stones at the feet of my statue.

 

In any case, a statue that doesn’t represent a person is that much harder to visualize, especially when I speak of its “face!” And little by little I’ve been led to get around this difficulty in only giving my statue a speculative form. Seen from behind by walking around her, my statue becomes more “virtual,” like this pilgrimage, indeed. And now, I can imagine for its face the features of information! Information in the elementary sense, singular and without a capital, less formidable than the word Verb or the plural word Elohims of the Jews!

 

The only dilemma is that if I want to continue thinking that prayer is useful to me, while I can conceive of praying with fervor to the one John defined as being the Logos, what use would there be for a prayer addressed to “information”?