…BUILDING UP…
Stage 81 / Thursday 16 July / From Palace de Rei to Boente / 24 km
More and more pilgrims everywhere on the paths! In search of calm in order to finish putting in order the edification that this pilgrimage could give me, I try some alternative paths, going around small cities and market towns, only passing through villages and hamlets. These temporary detours might give a slight sense of guilt to some: it means leaving the path marked by associations desirous of making the Camino a relatively easy and always pleasant path towards Santiago de Compostela. But for myself, I don’t worry about leaving beaten paths, especially for peaceful meditation!
The same is true for religious matters: like many who obviously do, I can pick and choose! Certain rituals bring me nothing because I probably don’t understand them enough. For example, some of these rituals lead the crowds to sing. I have heard parishioners all bleating in chorus, like sheep in the alpine fields being herded into the sheepfold at the end of the day, in order to spend the night protected from wolves. When the crowd effects lead to such discordant chants, I myself feel more irritated than edified! I need twice as much courage to return in these parishes where bleatings rather than melodious chants are too often a regular part of the ritual of the shared Eucharist.
I also do spiritual shopping around in connection with certain ways of imposing traditions in the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. For instance, I don’t understand why priests are forbidden to marry, nor that the ordination of women priests is prohibited. We know that Shim‘ôn, called Petros (Chouraqui’s translation), more often called Simon Peter, was the first apostle and leader of the Christian community born after the death and resurrection of Christ. Peter had a mother-in-law (Mt 8:14), and that didn’t prevent Yeshoua (Jesus) having confidence in him (Mt 16:18) to lead the first flock of believers entrusted to him. And he did it remarkably well, without our knowing what influence his wife or mother-in-law (cured by Jesus) had on him!
We also know that the Samaritan woman, whom Jesus had met at Jacob’s well, drew a crowd of people from her village and convinced them that the Messiah had come (John 4:39)! So we can certainly see that a woman could also announce the good news in those days! Moreover, it certainly seems that later Paul, the little runt of God, in his letter to the Romans, greeted Junia, a consecrated woman (Romans 16:7). From the earliest days of the Christian community, we have retained the name “Fathers” of the Church. Why have we not retained the name “Mothers” of the Church, with the notable exception of Myriam (Mary), the mother of Yeshoua (Jesus)?
Why was it necessary that, among these Fathers, there was only a minority who could make the decisions regarding the choice among all the writing about Jesus after his resurrection? They only retained a limited number of these texts which today constitute the New Testament in the official Bible of the Roman Catholic Church? Why were certain writings of the Jewish Bible retained and others not in what we can the Old Testament? Were some of them less edifying than others, to the degree of meriting the “apocryphal” qualifier (which means writings whose authenticity has not been established)? Did the Church Fathers also do their spiritual shopping? Undoubtedly!
In these texts, there were probably passages which didn’t serve their own view of the budding church, so they rejected them and only retained in their Latin translation what they considered as “canons” for their purposes. These are the canonical or deutero-canonical (accepted later, secondarily). Now it is interesting to note that at the time of the reformation, the “Protestants” chose to eliminate certain ones: for example, the protestant Bible, rejected the writing of ben Sira, known also as Sirach or Ecclesiasticus. And yet, in my view, this is a text full of wisdom, where I find numerous edifying passages.
Thus, like the author of the book “D.I.E.U. sauveguide? ” which inspired me to do this virtual pilgrimage (to which I don’t yet know the conclusion), I also hesitate to accept everything. What is advanced in the official Bible of my religious tradition as being the bearer of “truthful truth” with a capital T doubly thick, “TRUTH”, requires slow and patient examination, and serious reflection before acceptance. Certain texts are much more edifying than others, without doubt. Among them, the four gospels retained by the Church Fathers, those of Mathew, Mark, Luke and John are, for me in any case, by far the most edifying!
For Guy Trainar, the comfortable religious varnish which, over the years, had somewhat built him finally began to crack. But along the way through the chapters of his book, whose titles we have seen up to now in the form of stages, Guy write that he feels more responsible for himself, more unified, more solid. He finds doing good more valorous because he has chosen to do it rather than from fear of an invisible policeman God threatening him. He sees more and more harmony in nature, from the flower which opens to the galaxies which do much the same. He no longer sees the world as an object of creation, but rather as the subject of a becoming in which he takes part, being situated at its center. There, instead of joining his hands he prefers to spread his wings in knowing that: “One cannot command the wind, but one can leave the window open.” And he makes reference to some beautiful quotations like: “Life is a long poem that one writes oneself and in which I alone can give its punctuation.”
I myself see no contradiction in continuing to accept that belief in God is a completely free and unforced act. The revelation of this God can grow in me by stages without everything being set in stone once and for all. My knowledge of God increases to the degree that I seek to understand Him. I increasingly know that one cannot prove the existence of God, but I want to leave my window wide open to what I feel generously blowing, coming from Him: his Spirit. I believe that this is inherent in the freedom that is given to us all, the thinking beings.
But I also sense that if I accept His existence, and that I enter candidly in the exercise of trying to define what God is, my religious tradition based on the Old and New Testaments of the Bible generally suits me fine, and helps in my personal edification. I also like to increase my understanding of the complexity and beauty of the universe, detached from God and yet reflecting his conception.
I increasingly realize the possibility given to the human to intervene positively or negatively in the processes until recently considered as “natural.” It’s as if God were associating the thinking being to his own genius, initially the sole creator, in giving him more and more the possibility to be co-responsible for what our planet may become. The human is still much nearer, historically speaking, to the prehistoric than to the modern.
But already today, man can render the Earth uninhabitable by the conflagration of nuclear missiles. And inversely, he can also prevent famine and give decent conditions to all those who are today ignored by the majority of the wealthy. Tomorrow, humans will no doubt improve their chances of survival in setting on Mars. Our “noosphere” will then stretch beyond our planet. Will it reach one day in the distant future, why not, the scale of our galaxy?
And even later still, why not, might the noosphere extend in an intergalactic way? Before reaching that point, “somebody” must “save” us a lot, and “somebody” must “guide” us a lot, because how many mistakes – not edifying! — aren’t we capable of making in the meantime? Will we be capable of agreeing with each other at least on the possibility of admitting the necessity of this indefinite “somebody” in the role of the “safeguiding” Spirit? The exercise is delicate, here is the challenge: I’m not sure that Guy and I will succeed in agreeing on this point!
