…ELEVATING…

Stage 79 / Tuesday 14 July / From Sarria to Portomarin / 21 km

 

In leaving Sarria, I go alongside a sawmill, obviously in the process of cutting up eucalyptus wood. This essence which comes from Australia has a very pleasant aroma. Although the smell is different, it reminds me of odors of rising incense when I became an altar boy in my boarding school, and was given responsibility for the incense burner. The smoke which floated up after the priest had put a bit of powder of this precious wood on the coals kept red by a movement of the pendulum was very pleasant to breathe in. And at the same time that this lovely fragrance was rising in the apse of the chapel, the choir was intoning a canticle in Latin, we and the children garbed in red velvet cassocks and white laced surplices, we were supposed to join hands and “make the flower pot,” that is to say not moving while displaying an angelic smile.

 

Thus from an early age, subtle mixtures involved all my senses to lift up my thoughts. It was the smell of the incense, the sound of the canticle, the feel of velvet, the sight of these solemn gestures by the priest, and later the taste of the host. They imprinted in me by pleasant visible signs the idea of an invisible and inexplicable presence on the altar. In catechism they explained to me that God himself was thus present. All that justified the gestures of adoration and the angelic pose they made me take while the priest walked around the altar with the incense burner. It is certain that my young and small brain was far from insensitive to all these public manifestations: I considered as plausible, if not certain, everything that they taught me.

 

Later, adolescence and becoming an adult made in me what often happens to ripening fruit: it is ready to detach itself from the tree from which it received everything. And in this period of their life, many of my friends detached themselves from the teachings of their youth. I too began to question odoriferous and pompous rituals which accompanied the indication of the divine presence. I found the language of most clergymen more and more offbeat if not even cryptic. I became more and more indifferent to the quaint popular imagery of most of the worship places.

 

I would have become completely detached without the advice of more sensible people. Among them, a Jesuit priest who had known our family for a long time knew how to make me understand that my reactions were normal and that I had to give myself some time, especially when it came to elevating myself in order to a relationship with the God of Christians. Later the meeting with the one who would become my wife was determinant in a more complete analysis of the important compared to the accessory.

 

We spent long moments debating religion in the period which led to our engagement, and even more in the preparation for marriage which we wanted to be religious: a true engagement before God and man. Because Terry was Presbyterian (austere Calvinistic) and myself Roman Catholic, neither of us was lacking in questions in the area of what, in the end, only represents the visible and exterior side of the rites and practices. For example, does the incense serve to embalm or as a means of smoking out your free will? Do the diverse nearly automatic prostrations and genuflections truly increase the ability to better elevate yourself towards the One you worship?

 

With time, I have learned to reconstruct the logic of that which I know is important to accept, and what I keep as an exterior sign of a tradition without it becoming the primary focus of my religious practice. Up to now, my pilgrimage has sometimes taken the accents of a true pilgrimage in the religious sense of the term, and in other moments has only become a safe itinerary to follow in order to reconsider what God is for me. So far I accept the face of “saveguide” that Guy Trainar has given him. For Guy, God is the spontaneous and salutary information which comes to him at the right moment, at least when he is attentive to it.

 

Guy admits, in his very frank book, that the religious discourse too often outdated has deprived him of the initial meaning which was at its base. This discourse has favored behavior rather parasitic and idolatrous, where there should be significance and sobriety. He questions the “dogmatic” truths established because of the discordance about the foundations on which they rested in relation to the world which gave birth to it. But he retains the nostalgia of the wise, poetic and sacred which, like me, he knew through the religious environment of his youth. Nor does he want to let himself be taken in by the mirage of a total and unrealistic liberty. He knows that taking off toward more panoramic heights requires considerably more effort than gliding in the letting oneself go!

 

Guy only recognizes in the words “transcendence, perfection, eternity” the value of concepts existing only in human understanding, but absolutely non-verifiable in nature or the universe as we know it. Our era is in effect no longer one when, with the hatching of a new religion whose effect was undeniably beneficial, the elevation of populations was made in imposing a blind adhesion and passive obedience.

 

From 775, the king of the Franks had instituted « “the iron law of God” to anchor his authority over the Saxons.  The law was simple: “Choose baptism or die by the sword!” This approach fully contrary to the Christian message helped the “great” Charles to found what one would later call the Germanic “Holy Roman Empire.” Charlemagne was even canonized by a false pope in order to please one of the emperors in his succession, Frederick Barbarossa. Charlemagne is still venerated, by some at least, as “Saint” while he was only declared “Blessed” since the pope Benedictus XIV beatified him in the 18th century. Although the Church has in our time withdrawn him from the calendar, the word « saint » is quite tarnished here, isn’t that the truth?

 

Then, even if it means elevating oneself, one must truly know how to take a respectable height in relation to a certain ecclesiastical weight still debatable in our time. Forcing myself to abandon the low layers of the still too dogmatic heavy atmosphere of my Church, I want to learn how to cross the more stratospheric layers of other religions in which all is perhaps not so light compared to the Christian message.

 

In the take off to which Guy Trainar invites me, like him I want to elevate myself by a flight neither anti-religious, nor non-religious, but rather trans-religious! Will this flight make me climb joyously toward the divine or, on the contrary, am I going to irremediably injure myself falling back down to earth into the sadly profane daily grind?