Leaving bits and pieces of one’s life around the world... Camões
Coordinates of human life
The human being is a spatiotemporal being. He occupies a space for a time, so that, as it happens in the universe and nature that surround and involve us, there is nothing stationary or permanent about human life. We cannot stand still in time or in space: life implies movement, a process, a becoming, a path, a change.
By the way we use and situate ourselves in time or relate to it, we can be fugitives or vagabonds; the gospel, however, exhorts us to be pilgrims.
Life is wide, but short. It is wide in possibilities, in the many and diverse ways of using our time, but it is short in length. Therefore, there is nothing worse than to think we have to kill time because we have too much time on our hands. This is not true, so there is no time to kill nor time to lose, because the reality is that time is scarce.
Fugitives, vagabonds and pilgrims have in common the fact that they are not attached to people, things, or places. They are never stationary at one place, but easily move from place to place. Therefore, they also have in common the way they settle in time and how they live the present moment. But they differ in how they relate to the other two times of human life: the past and the future.
The pilgrim lives well the three dimensions of time, while the fugitive lives bound hand and foot to the past and fears the future. The penniless vagabond has no past, no present and no future, he lives suspended in time like a reed shaken by the wind.
Human time is three-dimensional: past – present – future
The three times in which life takes place are interactive: neither the past has passed completely nor all of the future is yet to come. The two times exist in the present and interact with it. As such, the present does not always refer solely to the present, it can refer also to the past as well as the future. Just as the past and the future visit the present, the present can also move into the future and the past. The present in itself is what is occurring, but when we think about what is occurring, it is already in the past.
The past has passed, but is never gone; the future arrives, but is never fully here, it moves forward like a carrot tangling in front of the donkey’s snout. As long as we exist, all three times exist with us and we will only stop having a present and a past when we stop having a future, that is, when we die. Since all three live together, all three also die together, just a few seconds apart. We die from front to back: first the future dies, then the present and only then the past.
We are like an arrow that someone has shot in the past. According to life’s circumstances, we can have some control over the direction the arrow takes, but we know that "all roads lead to Rome", that fate is common, that death is both certain and uncertain. Certain because it is the only thing we know for sure about our future, as Heidegger says, we are a being made for death. Uncertain because we do not know how or when we are going to die, and I don't think anyone is interested in knowing.
In case there is eternal life, as we Christians certainly believe, then the future dies and so does the past, because they cease to be interactive in the present. Life made up of ticking time ceases to be a reality. What we were, we are. What we are today is a contribution of both the good and the bad of our lives. All events in our past served as the scaffolding for the building construction. When construction is over, with our death, the scaffolding is no longer needed: what we turned out to be is now what we will be forever in eternity.
Our physical body also belongs to the category of scaffolding, because through it and with it we build our being, our spiritual body, and when it is built, time ceases in its dimension of future and past, and remains in its dimension of present, an eternal present in God and with God.
To live is to leave
People whose mother tongue is English can distinctively pronounce these two verbs without any effort; foreigners, however, tend to pronounce them the same way. The fact that I used to pronounce them in the same way led me to discover an intrinsic relationship between them.
To live means and implies to leave, to let go of the place where we are and go to another. The pilgrimage is printed in us already at the chromosomal and cellular level. If the tubules within the testes where sperm cells are produced were straightened, the total length would extend about 70 centimeters.
The X or Y sperm cell that gave us life passed through these tubules, and when ejaculated travelled further through our mother’s reproductive system until it united with its other half cell in the Fallopian tube and formed a new being. There the conception took place; but four days later, the new being had to leave this place in order to travel and live in the uterus where it nestled for nine months until it completed its growth.
At birth, the baby leaves his mother’s womb and enters the bosom of a family where he is loved unconditionally. As such, this becomes the second maternal womb until the day when he has to go to school where he is no longer loved unconditionally. The first day of school is tough. I recall how I used to keep my eyes fixed on my mother until I turned the corner at the end of the street as I left my home to go to school.
Just when primary school becomes familiar, it is time to leave to go to high school; for me it was the seminary. On the first day, my father took me there, but when he left, the world came crashing down for me... and I cried bitterly.... Some of us leave our family to form another family, some of us leave our land to seek employment in another.
Immigrants leave their land in order to seek a better future for themselves and their families. To leave the principle of pleasure for the principle of reality; to leave father and mother to join with his wife; to leave everything to follow the master. Those who do not leave, like the rich young man, do not find life.
In time we are fugitives, vagabonds or pilgrims
As temporal beings, our life takes place within the three dimensions of time: past, present and future. Depending on their age, people tend to favour one dimension over the other two.
Children and young people – Setting the past aside, they live the present as a preparation for a future they dream of and in which they project themselves. Because the future may never come, each day must be worth its own weight, not detached from the future, of course, but not lived entirely in function of it either. The advice then is to live the present in charity.
Elderly – When objectively there is not much left to hope for, they live on memories. The memory of past happiness does not give joy but sadness. It is true that life is better understood by looking back, but it is lived forward. Even in old age, Christian hope tells us that the best is yet to come, therefore what can be done must be done. The advice then is to live the future not in anxiety, but in hope.
Adults – They live installed in the present, they do not care about the past or the future. In fact, they live as if they would never die. They do anything to stop time and the damage it causes in their life: the plastic surgeries to maintain a youthful appearance when they are no longer young, overly concerned or not concerned at all about exercising, diets, health, that is, too focused on themselves. The advice then is to integrate both the past and the future of one’s life so to live the present in charity and not looking in the mirror or at one’s umbilical.
Fugitives
And the LORD said, ‘What have you done? Listen; your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground! And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. When you till the ground, it will no longer yield to you, its strength; you will be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth.’ Genesis 4:10-12
God said to Cain that because he killed his brother, he will be a fugitive on earth. The fugitive is haunted by remorse for something he did in the past. On the run from the police, he has no present or future. What goes around comes around or here they do, here they pay... Cain is a fugitive because he is running away from a past that haunts him in the present. His path is determined by his persecutors, not by him; therefore, he has no present and no future. He is trapped by something he did in the past that is always present in the form of remorse, so much so that it denies him a life.
Hunted by one’s past is an expression that denotes well the circumstances the fugitive lives in. Like a hunted prey, he lives life in fear of being caught. The unresolved issue of the past haunts him in the present. Passed waters do not move mills, and yet many people, contradicting this law of nature, have their mills or heads moved by past waters, because they have not apologized or forgiven, or because they were traumatized or abused and they repress or pretend that nothing happened.
"Have you ever forgiven the Nazis for all that they did to us when we were prisoners in Auschwitz?” a former prisoner asked his friend after many years without seeing each other. The friend replied, “I haven’t and I never will forgive those bastards!” “Oh yeah? " Replied the former, “then you’re still there, in Auschwitz."
The one who does not forgive lives in the past, he seeks to escape from this past that always haunts him and which negatively determines his present. He deludes himself, thinking that the past has stayed in the past, but the truth is that what we know and assume of our past is redeemed and, as such, we can control. What we do not know and do not assume or forgive of our past, precisely because it is repressed and outside of our day-to-day consciousness, controls us, bursting forth into our present in a thousand and one ways. In projecting the ghosts of the past into the present, we may think that we are fighting our enemies, when objectively we are fighting windmills, like Don Quixote de la Mancha.
Whoever does not owe, does not fear; the fugitive does owe and therefore, he fears, he distrusts everything, everyone including himself. He lives anchored in the past that has traumatized him and continues to reproduce in the present that past; in other words, he lives in a prison. The one who has been abused will be an abuser, the point is to abuse without getting caught; thieves only consider themselves as such if they are caught. Those who have skeletons in their closet never live feeling safe.
Vagabonds
The vagabond in time corresponds to the tourist in space. We come from nothing, we go to nothing; in this way, life has no meaning; therefore, the agnostic and the atheist are fundamentally vagabonds. Nowadays, there are homeless people who are so by choice, philosophers who want this type of life, who do not commit to anything or anybody, not even to their own survival.
Carpe diem became the motto of life for many people after the popular 1989 movie, the “Dead Poets Society". The vagabond lives in the present, but not the conscious and omniscient present of Eastern philosophies, but rather in a consumerist, hedonistic and unconscious present: die Martha, die fed up. Without caring about the past that has been and the future that is not yet and may not be, the vagabond walks in the vicious circle of an eternal return. “For those who do not know where to go, there are no favourable winds”.
I don't make promises lest I fail, something we hear so often. The vagabond promises nothing to no one, nor commits to anything or anyone, because that would mean counting on the future. But the vagabond doesn't know the word future; he lives in the moment and for the moment. In relation to the past and the future he has the attitude of an ostrich that sticks its head in the sand, he represses and denies its existence. He prefers not to think and therefore he abstracts himself, using diversion or work like a drug to avoid thinking and confronting himself.
He has no past nor future, he lives installed in the world as if he is from the world. He lives as if he will never die and dies as if he had never lived (Dalai Lama). With a divorce rate in Portugal greater than 70%, many do not want to make long term commitment since it is seen as mortgaging the future, as limiting one’s freedom.
The young people want to have their options open and therefore, they live installed at the roundabout or the crossroads of life. Since they never choose a route, they are like hamsters running on rotating wheels, never going anywhere. Because choosing one route means saying no to all the others. But if you spend your life without committing yourself to anything or anyone, you are like a car with its engine on but going nowhere.
To live is to choose a path to go somewhere, not to go in circles; it is always to leave Egypt to cross the desert, in the hope of entering the Promised Land. For this, we need a guide; but the vagabonds, since they are going nowhere, they do not need a guide, do not accept advice from anyone. For those who do not know where to go, there are no favourable winds.
Pilgrims
Happy are those whose strength is in you, in whose heart are the highways to Zion. As they go through the valley of Baca they make it a place of springs; the early rain also covers it with pools. They go from strength to strength; the God of gods will be seen in Zion. Psalm 84:5-7
In the prehistory of our faith there has been countless pilgrimages: Abraham, the wandering Aramean who only possessed a grave that he bought for his wife, left his city in Mesopotamia to go to Canaan; the Hebrew people from Egypt, the land of slavery to the promised land of freedom and prosperity; the journeys to Jerusalem for the Passover.
After Christ, there have been Christian pilgrimages to the Holy Land, Rome and Santiago de Compostela; in the Orthodox tradition, the Russian pilgrimage; already in our times, pilgrimages to Guadalupe in Mexico, Lourdes in France, Fatima in Portugal, Czestochowa in Poland; pilgrimage is a very important Christian practice because, in some way, it is a parable of life. To live is to make pilgrimages, a Christian must behave towards the world around him and his fellow men like a pilgrim.
A pilgrimage is a metaphor or parable of how human life should be lived. Abraham, our father in faith, was a wandering Aramean; the Hebrew people, by leaving Egypt, crossing the desert towards the Promised Land where milk and honey flowed abundantly, established the paradigm of human life.
• Karl Marx – capitalism, dictatorship of the proletariat, classless society
• Mandela – Apartheid, 30-something years in jail, president of a society of equals
• Addiction – cleanliness, withdrawal syndrome, freedom
Unlike the fugitive, the pilgrim lives reconciled with his past, so he does not depend on it; unlike the vagabond, he has a goal that he intends to attain, so he lives the present moment with intensity, always knowing who he is, where he comes from and where he is going, he is never bewildered or disoriented, because his life is regulated as if he had a GPS.
The biblical man – In the Hebrew language the word "Nikud" means both future and backs; on the other hand, the word "Quedem" means both past and east/the direction of the rising sun. Therefore, we can conclude that the biblical man has the past in front of him and the future behind his back, that is, he walks with his chest and face turned to the past, with his back to the future.
With our eyes on the past because that is where our roots, our being, our identity are, we live moving towards the future, but we understand our life by looking at our past and through the past we orient ourselves toward the future. We know little or nothing about the future, which is why we walk backwards, that is, blindly; the only thing we know for certain in our future is death, but even then, we do not know how or when or where it will occur. For the pilgrim to remember is not to live; that is why he looks to the past not to relive it, but to orient himself, using in the present what he has learned from the experiences of the past, to find the best way to the future.
There is no evil that always lasts nor good that always endures – The pilgrim knows that life is made up of ups and downs, like the line of an electroencephalogram or electrocardiogram, he knows that on the way to God he can find both heaven and hell, but he also knows that everything is fleeting, so when he is on a high, he does not lose his head, and when he is depressed, he does not lose hope. At every moment and every place, he lives under the Lord’s protection, and therefore, he is constant, patient and faithful.
Conclusion - The Pilgrim is not like the fugitive because, he has no regrets, he is not tied to his past. Nor is he like the vagabond, because he lives committed in the present, in giving himself to a cause and to concrete people with the same intensity, as if it were his last day.
Contrary to the #Fugitive, tied to a past from which he flees, or the #Wanderer, uncommitted to the present, living without a future, the #Pilgrim is proud of his past, walks to the future with hope and fills his present with charitable deeds.
Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC