There were a lot of us for a Wednesday evening. My city center had become very soft.
It was almost as if the light emanating from the café threw a great invitation onto the Well’s sidewalk to dare to hope.
Jeremy would arrive by bus. Jacques would come and meet me a little before the event I was hosting that evening. I picked up my daughter from school, not far from there, walked down the long hill of King Street, saluting the Monument to the Brave as I went. My daughter asked me what this “madam with wings above the soldiers” was. “I think he’s the angel of victory.” A long discussion followed since for her, the “madam with wings” was more like death.
Discussing death with my 7-year-old daughter is one of the things that gives me this feeling of experiencing what Jérémie McEwen calls “the thickness of the world” in his essay I don’t know how to believethe one that we were going to discuss in front of an audience, that evening, with Professor Jacques Quintin, ethicist at the Faculty of Medicine and associate professor at the Center for the Study of Contemporary Religion (CERC) at the University of Sherbrooke.
All children ask the question of death at one time or another, whether their mother was seriously ill or not. By simply noting that living things have an end: the snail, the caterpillar, the dog, the cat or grandmother, they experience something of the great mystery of being there, of being oneself, not another, if small, but already full of this strange substance of being alive.
“An admirable sign of the fact that human beings find in themselves the source of their philosophical reflection are children’s questions. We often hear words from their mouths whose meaning plunges directly into philosophical depths,” said Karl Jaspers.
As I entered the café, I found a whole series of familiar and loved faces. The walls seemed to gently embrace us, holding within their walls what we call a “community”. At the height of November, we were there, in this café, come there, to hear about this tension between knowing and believing.
There were many of us, yes, but through the hugs exchanged a sorrow that was ours that day also infiltrated. The Center for Contemporary Religious Studies (CERC), organizer of the event, informed us that very morning that it
was going to have to close its admission to future students.
Already the phoenix of the defunct Faculty of Theology, the CERC could no longer pursue its university mission, namely that of casting its unique, authentically interdisciplinary perspective on the religious phenomenon, combining an epistemology specific to knowledge from the humanities with that of the human sciences. called “modern”. It is still necessary to re-explain that the study of contemporary religion has nothing to do with the promotion of religion. This amalgamation alone testifies to the bad faith (no pun intended) which the proponents of an anticlerical discourse demonstrate when it comes to evacuating an entire section of human experience under the pretext that “religions , it’s bad “.
The numerous religious historical traumas which mark Quebec explain this great rejection of the thing. However, this is how we establish what we call a taboo. Not being able to approach something, think about it and dialogue about it does not make it disappear, whatever the defenders of secularism think, which very often concerns the religion of the Other, moreover. But religion is not just political, it concerns everything we put in place, as an individual and a society, to give meaning to what does not always have meaning. It is both vertical and horizontal, intimate and collective, historical, anthropological, psychological, theological, political, legal, philosophical, artistic and sociological, hence the need to focus interdisciplinary eyes on it.
To be made to believe that religion no longer exists in Quebec is to leave a deeply present phenomenon in the shadows of a society, without us being able to observe it to understand it, which, in my opinion, gives even more power to this “dreaded” thing. In a “religiously atheist” society according to the expression of
McEwen, we quickly understood that maintaining our Center was going to be difficult to defend, on a political-
university where the accounting columns so often have the last word.
At the height of November, we were nonetheless there, together, professors, lecturers,
students and members of the public, also creating our horizontality. We discussed these fundamental questions: Can we believe in God some days and find ourselves fundamentally atheists the next? What is the presence of God in the end? A chill ? The other’s face? The desire to say thank you to life, at 4 a.m., when you come home, a little drunk from a delicious evening? Talk to our dead? Perform a ritual upon the death of loved ones? Didn’t we throw the baby out with the bath water after Overall refusal ?
We came to think, together, that there was sometimes more dogmatism in the affirmation of the absence of God than in the arrangement and maintenance
of a doubt.
Then, a participant told us, in the middle of the event, of the death of the Cowboys singer.
We were silent.
A minute, to taste the depth of the world, to feel something like “the sacred” of the moment, its eternity placed at our feet.
These moments do not need evidence to tell. They are there whether we study them or not. They will continue to exist, whatever Freud thinks, he who announced to us the end of “illusion” in 1927.
This will not be the only time that Freud was wrong.
While I write this column, after having been so moved since Wednesday, in front of my secular Quebec so united, with its candlelight vigils and its songs, its completely horizontal verticality, my daughter hums “put your head on my shoulder, so that my love touches you.” “I don’t know how to believe”, me either, not knowing if it is the love of God, or that of the other, or just the love that touches me, in my pain. But I like to believe that doubt is my ally, whether it is profitable or not.
Clinical psychologist, Nathalie Plaat is an author and teacher at the University of Sherbrooke. [email protected]