Colloquium-action “Spirituality(s): archipelago or common good?”

Forum 104, Saturday, February 1, 2025

Report

At the end of 2022, Forum 104 entrusted“Democracy and Spirituality” with a project born of :

• The profound crisis of meaning in our societies,
• The fragility of living together due to the exploitation of diversity to develop fears rather than make it a source of wealth,
• Archipelagic” spiritualities sometimes used to manipulate.

“The spiritual, our last chance to get out of it today?” asks author Eric Vinson.
Three working groups functioned as a “laboratory, listening to today’s world and experimenting with possible responses”, according to 3 themes:

• What spiritual resources can we draw on in the face of today’s challenges?
• What words do we use to describe the spiritual?
• The spiritual: a common good?

The participants, from different denominations, have in common a search for the spiritual; the quest for meaning brings them together, the challenges give them a “hunger for action”. They have built trust with each other, worked together, sometimes hard, and identified their differences to see them as complementarities and richness. Learning to recognize each other’s differences “created deep joy”.
The aim of the symposium was to report on this collective experience and extend it.
Draft tools for “interconvictional dialogue and pathways” were presented, and proposals for action submitted to the 70 or so participants present at the symposium, with the aim of involving more widely the associations that are members of Forum 104 or not, and increasing the diversity of participation, including intergenerational participation.

Vice-president Anne-Marie Podesta, who attended the symposium, shares her thoughts with us.

My presence at this symposium reflects the importance attached by the French Society to the spiritual dimension of the Pilgrim’s Way to Santiago de Compostela, and is in line with the project carried out within the framework of Europa Camino Compostela by Patrice Bernard, our President, and Pascal Duchesne, President of the Belgian Association of Friends of Santiago de Compostela, namely to make a contribution on this subject in the same way as the Italians and Spaniards have done on the theme of pilgrim accommodation. In this text, I’d like to share with you my thoughts on the conference and the concrete ways in which I believe this notion is alive and well in the world of Santiago de Compostela, as a working document to be enriched, amended and developed.

“After 75 years of existence, what are the challenges for the future? Since the creation of the Société Française des Amis de Saint Jacques de Compostelle, this short article in the Echo des Chemins de Saint Jacques highlights the growth in the number of people visiting the paths as they opened, and the exponential popularity of the Camino experience. This craze shows just how much the Camino experience is in tune with the expectations of our contemporaries, and often exceeds them, as many of those who set out on this adventure can testify.

Increasing commoditization, a risk

At the same time, there is a demand for services that approach tourism standards on the one hand, and on the other, an offer and practices that are foreign to pilgrim frugality. Digital tools are driving usage on the most popular routes towards the standardization of tourism operators
While we can celebrate the success of the “Camino”, the commoditization we are seeing is reducing it to a banal tourist product, obscuring the qualities that distinguish it from a trek or a hike, and running the risk of extinguishing its “pilgrim spirit”. The challenge ahead will be to ensure that the experience is infused with the “spirit of the path”.

The spirit of the road: what’s it all about?

The oft-used expression sums up the characteristics of the “Way of St. James”: simplicity, encounters, welcoming and sharing, effort and self-denial. These are what make them so valuable, and in their practice lies their true benefit: the possibility of personal transformation, of a spiritual adventure.
These qualities are the legacy left to our times by the medieval pilgrimage. The challenge is to remember this religious legacy and to live up to its spiritual invitation, and therefore to ensure that:
– Both institutional and private players maintain the possibility of this spirit of generosity and gratuity, which makes the walker a pilgrim.
– The place and role of hospitaliers are valued
– Volunteers from Jacobean associations are supported and not hindered.

Spirituality, religion, secularism

We in the Jacobean world need to clarify the links between these terms, which reinforce rather than oppose each other. If it’s possible to define such a complex notion, what are the words to describe it? Let’s try: it would be that call to more than oneself, a thirst for the absolute, that essential “which we say we seek and yet of which we are ignorant” (Reza Moghaddassi), the extra soul that opens hearts and minds. It presupposes an inward-looking approach, a willingness to turn one’s gaze towards one’s emotional weather, one’s inner landscape with its precipices, its horizon, its sky…

Walk within yourself, all the more easily because your feet walk the paths themselves.

Spiritual aspiration can be seen as the root of all religions, each one a particular form of this quest. The spiritual would be the common denominator of all religions. The medieval pilgrimage to Compostela is unquestionably Christian in origin, and imbued with all the spirituality that goes with it. But the pilgrimage itself, with its cult of relics, no longer speaks to our contemporaries, even though this revived tradition has nourished the Camino as we know it today. How can we go back to the spiritual source that nourished it?

– Constantly reminding us of the Christian origins of the pilgrimage to the tomb of St. James in Compostela
– Finding words, other words, to express the exceptional experience offered by the Camino de Santiago.

As for secularism, the principle that guarantees the freedom to believe or not to believe, it organizes society: it forbids treating people differently according to their real or supposed religious affiliation. It’s up to us to incorporate this value into our approach.

On an interpersonal level, it calls us to go further: to recognize the right of others to profess convictions other than my own, even if I don’t share them. Including the right to deny a spiritual dimension to the journey to St Jacques…

– To show that everyone, whatever their reasons, is invited to participate
– To explain the Jacobean fraternity that links all those who have trodden the paths of St. James, where they will be most welcome.