“Ah!
If
Joan Baez shared our faith and sang The
Revelation of Arès, what a great progress we could make!” I
exclaimed in
front of a friend of the great lady troubadour. The man, a mass media
star, turned
pensive, rubbed his chin and then replied to me, «No! Joan’s ideas are
closely
related to yours, but even if she would sing for you, you couldn’t
progress a shade
farther. Just as you Brother
Michel say at times, "Faith can’t be sold like washing powder or
cinema." It’s
not by a show that God will break through the citadel
of indifference. It is by your penitence,
your human touch, but not by anything else.”
I belong in a tiny minority of believers, the ones called Arès
Pilgrims. No
matter what numbers they hold as a group — penitents
(the small remnant) and
their
sympathizers combined—, only a laughable 0,15% of the Frenchspeaking
people of
Europe thirty-seven years after The
Revelation of Arès had appeared, they are men of hope, bound
to take up a
place more and more important in the ascent
of the ethical, spiritual aspirations toward the Saint’s
Heights. The most compelling proof of this is the
occurrence in speeches, religious, political and intellectual, of
concepts,
some of them literal, based on The
Revelation of Arès.
What sort of utopia is The Revelation of
Arès expressive of?
Not only has man been conceived as capable of living in free
society (Rev of Arès
10/10), that is a society selfreduced to little communities
selfmanageable as
well as interfertile, without frontiers, without princes
of the cult whether political, or religious, or economic,
without princes of dominant
ideologies
and reasons, and without any law
but
that of consciousness, but also it is on this condition of freedom
that the soul
(the image and likeness of the
Creator, Gen esis 1/26-27) will
blossom again in man, who will recover happiness and even eternity (Rev
of Arès 35/3) as a
result of his penitence (or search for
good 30/10).
Seemingly this utopia is not really new, but The
Revelation of Arès’s way of
expounding it changes it into
something that can be done, because whatever is utopian from
rationalizing
reason becomes feasible from faith (faith
makes mountains move, Matthew 17/20).
The Revelation of Arès takes
no
account of facts like race, culture, difference between men. Just as
Jesus did
long ago, The Revelation of Arès
once
and for all says goodbye to the old Bible’s categorial considerations,
which
have regrettably made religious rivalries: Judaism, Christianity,
Islam, etc.,
economic rivalries, big ownerships. The
Revelation of Arès alterglobalizes all much better than
alterglobalization
ideologues do, because it is neither for the Left nor for the Right,
neither
religious nor rationalistic, neither political nor libertarian, but it
gives
alterglobalization a universal spiritual basis, in which any man of
goodwill
can see himself.
This implies that an Arès Pilgrim, a brother
or sister belonging in the small remnant,
is not required to
address a human category of limited spirit. An Arès Pilgrim addresses
whole
mankind. Even though he or she is well aware that with things as they
are he or
she can harvest only a small number
of active penitents he or she
speaks
to the human immensity like the poppy lover that I am takes in the beauty
(Rev of Arès 12/3)of poppy
expanses in the springtime, but can only pick a small handful of them,
so
fragile, which he moreover will have much trouble preserving. Small
remnant does not designate
high-flying
believers confident of their virtue protecting themselves from external
confusion and mediocrity, but only penitents
and apostles willing to listen to The
Revelation of Arès, but conscious that they are still
belonging in those
external confusion and mediocrity.
Hence my reluctance to think in terms of identity ever since 1974-1977.
I am an
Arès Pilgrim, but I am just a man —
man Michel (Rev of Arès 1/1, 2/20, 3/9,
etc.) —in the universal sense that the Father
of the Universe (12/4) has given my humanity, my humanity
which yearns for Good, for happiness instead
of the hardships
(37/9) of my earthly crawl and for Life
(24/3-5). Here is one of the big difficulties of our mission:
Is there any
remarkable identity in the fact of hoping for Good,
wanting to be a free
soul, looking for good Life?
These
common words do not make up one of the very noticeable trademarks or
social labels
very much to today’s masses’s taste. This is why we have to name
ourselves with
a strong word drawn
from the Word of Arès,
which distinguishes us from other people very well, if we make sure
that it
rings joyfully: penitents.
All of social designations: Socialists, UMP (a
French
rightist party),
Catholics, Muslims, etc., have more or less quickly become static; they
no
longer designate societies of the future, but frames of mind. A society
of the
future whatever has to move continuously. To us harvesting means
searching for new
penitents, but it is much
more, it is
beginning to build another world, it is a spiritual, therefore human
adventure
of the highest nobleness and universality.
Universality… because we know that, on the one hand, if Joan Baez and
her
talent and fame could not bring our mission out of obscurity, on the
other hand
a line of missionary arguments encapsulated in The
Revelation of Arès would be insufficient to change
the world (Rev of Arès 28/7).
Doesn’t prophethood have the difficult job of making the Word readable
to the
impious, or lost, or indifferent mankind? God’s Word can’t be
negociated (Rev of Arès 15/6),
indeed, and that is
why we missionaries first of all announce it, but if we carefully
listen to how
our human brothers respond to it (see entry 115), it is because their
thought
is not always so much far removed from our thought as it sounds at
first and we
can now and then build bridges between the world’s thoughts and our
thought,
across which the action that will change
the world will pass some day. We do not negociate our faith,
but we do not
shut ourselves away fearfully in our Aresian identity context.
Hard is our mission! It is hard to stay on in the Truth!
But we will eventually manage to be what we have
undertaken
to become: true penitents.
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