…TO THE SACRED…

Stage 80 / Wednesday 15 July / From Portomarin to Palace de Rei / 26 km

 

In trying to elevate myself yesterday toward the divine, at the invitation of Guy Trainar, I have evoked one of the moments of meeting during my youth with what one calls the “sacred.” The choirboy that I was would learn much more in this domain. This was not only in the domain of the religious, when solemn masses or other ceremonies that I had the fortune to spend “sacred moments!” This rich and new sensation, this sentiment beyond the ordinary that I had had in manipulating a censor, or in being still as a statue in chapel or church, I also found it again in the most profane activities or moments of contemplation.

 

These non-religious moments, so special, still come back to me in memory many years later. For example, I was only 13 when the farmer of the domain where my grandmother lived taught me to use a scythe to cut the grass to feed the rabbits in the farmyard. The movement was not easy to master; it required balance and rhythm to produce a good result. Once I knew how to do it, I often had the occasion during the summer vacation to go scythe grass. Leading the horse harnessed to his tipcart into the next meadow, I would cut, load the grass with a pitchfork, then come back to feed the rabbits in their hutches. What happiness, this sacred moment when I could prove a certain sense of responsibility! I had even learned how to sharpen the scythe with a flint stone. How proud I was to have learned such things outside the family circle!

 

Another sacred moment later, around age 18, when I went climbing for the first time, roped with a friend more experienced than I, and we reached the summit of one of the peaks overlooking the valley of Chamonix. Then again, a good sacred moment, being higher than most people and closer to heaven! The joy of such a moment, I have continued to search for it all my adult life, with more or less difficult climbs. I think I have been able to communicate it to my wife and my children and other members of my extended family. Many years later it has led to a certain complicity still felt among us when we decide to go hiking. And it prepared me for the joy of hiking which motivated me to go all the way to Compostela.

 

The most beautiful “sacred” moments my wife and I have known were undoubtedly the births of each of our children. I was present both times and have evoked these moments in stage 45, about trying to help diminish Terry’s birth pains in the breathing techniques of Dr. Lamaze. Once the child was born, what joy to hear the baby’s first cry, to see their first nursing, to admire their first smiles! Your throat tightens, your eyes moisten, you take your wife’s hand and suddenly measure the importance of the fact that what was only two had become three (when Nicolas came into the world) and when only three became four (at Camille’s birth two and a half years later)!

 

The resonance of these particular moments is extraordinary: the mysterious emotion that grabs you in the beauty of a gesture mastered for the first time, or an alpine valley’s panorama, is even stronger in the welcoming of a life completely dependant on your own existence. All that destabilizes you and makes you reach a new degree of knowledge and grateful stupor at the same time. Gratitude to whom? It then seems that your “I” is erased, forgetting the “ego” of your being, to better enhance your “me” which slowly becomes aware of an unmerited goodness which affects you and delicately lifts you gently. No violence, no rage in these striking moments! Instead serenity, peace! And your heart swells with gratitude at this free and gracious disposition toward you!

 

This experience of the sacred can be solitary, but it can equally be felt collectively. I evoked this event experienced together at the birth of a child. A sacred moment can also be shared among more people. I still remember the collective emotion that seized the audience in the university auditorium in Ann Arbor at Christmas time as we listened to Handel’s Messiah and were invited to all stand to sing together the Halleluiah chorus with the university choir. Tears rolled slowly down my cheeks, and I noticed I was not the only one weeping for joy in this powerful moment, so transcendent, so “sacred!”

 

I am now wondering if a certain form of ritual is not often the avenue that leads to a sacred moment, either individually or in a group. In the gesture of the reaper, there is the ritual of this slow swinging of the body and its accompanying rhythm. This ritual permits aligning one after the other with method and efficiency the swaths (parallel lines) of cut grass. There is quite a ritual in the preparation for a mountain hike: preparation of the backpack, choice of clothes, map research of the path to follow in order to arrive at the summit, and the traditional picnic out of your backpack that you share with your companions when you reach the top.

 

As far as “painless” childbirth is concerned, the ritual is all in the preparation through the technique of rhythmic breathing, at different rates, for which the husband serves as “coach” for his wife. There are rituals in the theatre hall, such as the silence required during the interims between different movements in classical movement, or the applause, which begins with pattering, then organizes itself into unison thundering to call the performers to an encore. As for religious ceremonies, I needn’t list all the details which tend to ritualize the sacred moment, there are so many of them!

 

Very often too, objects contribute to making the moment sacred and later in conserving the memory of the sacred moment in which they served. Many years after learning to mow, I found the flint I had used to sharpen the scythe in a corner of the farm hangar. The farmer had been dead a long time, and there were no longer any rabbits to feed, so I asked if I could keep this object which I now use to sharpen our kitchen knives. Each time I use it, I am reminded of the happy moment when I mastered the scythe in the fields of my childhood!

 

Guy Trainar elegantly evokes in his chapter on the sacred what he calls “an interior vital space which is inscribed in the dynamic of information to which he adheres … and in which continuously flow the inert, the living, thinking, then sacred, in pursuit of possible communion with the deep meaning of the universe.” I join him in this pursuit, but I myself believe perhaps more than he that the sacred is not a simple mental pipe dream facilitated by one or more accidental rituals!