Yvon Rivard’s text “How to survive so much hatred? », published in The duty of January 23, carries a major double challenge to Quebec society. First, by its content. He dares to call for us to “find[e] the very spirit of all religions” provided that they are “paths of compassion to give form, rite and material to the Invisible which founds us”, quoting Christiane Singer. An invigorating call which shakes up in one stroke the a priori of a poorly understood secularization, or secularization which should, according to its advocates, exclude from public dialogue, by immediately disqualifying them, all religious sources. But Yvon Rivard goes even further, by targeting the unthought par excellence of a society obsessed with technical power and scientific knowledge to the point of forgetting “the Invisible which founds us”.
The fascination with them has made us lose sight of the incalculable, the elusive of our existence, that which goes beyond the instrumental and the utilitarian, and looks towards the abyssal fault, the impossible-to-fill lack which inhabits us. , the shadow of the light, and what is hidden there: the infinite in finitude, which can only be explored through groping thanks to myths, faith, poetry, any language that borders on silence and is imbued with it.
By stuffing ourselves with techniques and gadgets, we have unlearned how to pay attention to our human presence, to our neighborhood with the dead who speak to us, the multiple and age-old voices which inhabit us, the soul of the things and beings who make us sign and the abyss over which we walk, tightrope walkers on a tightrope from birth to death. And in the illusion of finally being satisfied and at peace, we forget that our existence is above all a struggle and quest for meaning with a view to a true peace with the world, never acquired, a thirst that nothing quenches, especially not the accumulation of things, nor money or power, but which the gift of oneself, kindness, the thirst for justice, for example, can hope to appease.
Rivard’s text then challenges us through its form. Texts like this, which are openings of light in the darkness of current events, are too rare in our daily lives, and yet they are essential. One day, the media will have to understand that this type of text is fully part of their civic mission. There is a place for not only journalistic articles and critical opinion columns on social, political, economic and cultural news. They must open their pages, regularly if not daily, to texts like that of Rivard, whose sole function is to direct our gaze to our humanity beyond raw facts as well as political and ideological divisions.
Because without them, the glasses and analysis grids that we use to read reality risk becoming blinders. Forming public opinion goes beyond information and left-right speaking, which are certainly beneficial to civic education. But we need more, particularly in our era which gorges itself on superficiality and laughs at the interiority of existence, which literature, philosophy and religion explore in their own way. We urgently need texts like daily bread, which manifest in form and content the non-instrumentality of language, thought and life, and on the contrary evoke our human condition in search of meaning and of light, essential human foods.
Our era suffers from a lethal deficiency. When meaning deserts the world, cynicism, violence and hatred proliferate. And they have a bright future ahead of them in social networks, the streets and public and political spaces, if we only use words that inform and analyze, because they are able to distill their poison there. We also need words that draw from the silence and the meaning of the world a few drops of light, crumbs of meaning, which leave the venom untouched, but help us to live, to love, to hope, to stay upright and moving forward, even in turmoil, on the path of our humanity. And I say it again – because the way of understanding secularism which is imposed in Quebec unfortunately makes us lose sight more and more of it – religions, as Yvon Rivard mentions, offer wells of meaning and light in the middle of the deserts of hatred and power.
I say this as a Christian and as an atheist in the face of the idols which flourish in abundance in our modernity and on whose altars we are enjoined to sacrifice our lives. I am not saying, of course, that they are the only ones or that they are not without reproach, nor that they do not have dirty hands, those of men who use them to hate and oppress ; I am simply saying that we must not turn away from it under this pretext, ignoring its luminous side, and stupidly waiting for a pure source from which to drink, unless we risk dying of starvation. For us there are only troughs and ponds from which we must, bent and thirsty, draw this tiny and vital part.