…INTIMATELY…

Stage 82 / Friday 17 July / From Boente to A Salceda / 22 km

 

Revitalized by the perspective of arriving Saturday in Santiago to celebrate the end of my pilgrimage there on Sunday, I get up early in order to accomplish my next-to-last stop. From the hundredth kilometer before Compostela, camino special markers now appear every kilometer. They give me the distance remaining to the goal, which renders my progress to the final marker more and more exciting. It’s a pleasant countdown to observe: 45 km, 44 km, 43 km, etc.

 

I pass through beautiful woods of different varieties: chestnuts, oaks and eucalyptus. Between the woods, there are pastures where proud bulls watch me passing, their serene and curious eyes stare almost as it they could read my intimate thoughts. The pilgrims are constantly passing on these paths which skirt their pastures and these huge horned animals are used to seeing unknown walkers, but they still examine them with great interest!

 

And me, I re-examine what’s left of the divine statue to which I wanted to take my chisel, comparing what is left for me in relation to what is left to the one who drew me into making this virtual pilgrimage. I only have two days left to put the finishing touches on what remains on my pedestal. Guy acknowledges that there is not much left to his sculpture: he has frankly cut out much of the tender side of what remained of his childhood faith. To the extent that he fears having “thrown out the baby with the bath water!”

 

Guy notes with perspicacity that in the early days of monotheism, it was the Word that was primary. Writing was done on wax tablets or parchment which could so easily be erased. They copied and recopied unceasingly the precious manuscripts of the Scriptures. Some of the Ancients thought more easily of the past as being ahead of them, because known. They felt that the future was being behind them, because it was unknown. Today we say more easily that words fly away and writings remain. The question remains more than ever whether the Scriptures presented in the form of The Word are truly absolute or if certain diverse degrees of interpretation are permissible, and if so, to what degree?

 

Traditionally, one set each season between an equinox and a solstice, but doesn’t the first of June generally seem more summery than the 15th of September? Now the first date is in the spring, the second in summer. In the same way, the 1st of December (still in autumn) often seems more wintery than the 15th of March (still in winter). Shouldn’t we see the seasons as straddling the equinoxes or solstices? By this image, Guy wants to show that the truths long anchored and established are often more the result of conventions than anything else. Could it be the same for spiritual matters?

 

With the changing perspective that his line of thought led him to make in the spiritual domain, Guy stated how much the anchorages of faith, to which he believed himself firmly attached in his younger years, have shifted. To the extent that he prefers to use the word “adhesion” rather than “faith” when he analyses what he is still attached to. He prefers the word “ardor” to “fervor” in qualifying the determination that he still has to hold onto what he believes.

 

He “adheres ardently to the vision of anonymous dynamics, which inform everything, from the expansion of the universe to the emergence of life, into blossoming energy at the same time material and spiritual.” He finds in such dynamics the capacity to guide his conscious thought and safeguard it, and that brings him more joy than the religion which nonetheless is trying to say the same thing. This act of adhesion allows him to avoid the conceptual notions of the absolute, of the transcendent and of the numinous. He thinks that since they are beyond understanding, these notions are doomed to disappear.

 

While fully recognizing the pertinence in Guy’s view, which tries to use terms more scientific or in any case more natural than what catechism teaches, I dare to notice the word “spiritual” at the end of his Credo! Guy doesn’t deny that there is something in this unceasingly informing dynamics which surpasses reality. This is for him, as for me, a mysterious reality which, as he says so well, “perhaps does nothing, but without which nothing can be done.”

 

This same reality strikes intimately the soul of the Australian aborigines in their creation myths about the nature surrounding them. It also undoubtedly strikes a good number of scientists struggling against the wall of an unresolved question. It strikes me also in my innermost being, and I believe that accepting the word “creator spirit” as the origin of this reality in no way prevents using abstract conceptual and speculative notions that religion uses to honor Him! Absolutely! Divinely! An in a transcendent manner!