Religion never leaves anything much to freedom, to the Word's freedom as well as man's. Religion has dwarfed or diverted the Word's perpetual fundamental dynamic, towards which it has rendered man apathetic. Religion has inflated, reformulated, decreed what in the Word is just indicative; it has generalized and perpetuated what is local and temporary; it has turned the Word's love and latitude into narrow ethical standards; it has filled the Word's silences the wisdom of which it has ignored. Religion has skirted round the Wrath that God has always aimed at it. To cut a long story short, religion has often fantasized, vaticinated, and decided on the behaviour ans destiny of God — the elephant (36/10) — like those of man — the hanged one (XXX/3).
As a churchman I used to have only certainties, and an answer for everything. Perhaps I only used to feel innocent of any error. I rarely, and vaguely, asked myself questions about potential errors and fabrications in the doctrine. Had there have been some, I never felt involved in them; the founders, the 'fathers', had initiated them; I used to have visceral reliance on God's acknowledging my innocence and saving me on my dying day. Although is occurred to me that some great churchmen might have abused their autotity, I was never a deceived man turned prudent (28/5). I, a devoted, committed cleric, reckoned my religion to be perfect, the truest one for any man who 'wisely' refrained from reflecting and had enough 'discernment' to let oneself be led. I used to believe without the slightest misgiving that my church did have 'the plenitude of truth'.
1974. The slow hard awakening of my consciousness began; it would end with the Theophanies which would set me upright, with my eyes wide opened. Jesus caught me shrouded in the theological clouds at the top of my cliff of certainties. He blew and drove me up to the Sea, the Sea on the Heights far higher than the peaks to which I had elevated myself. I began to swim stripping off my fineries (34/2) of cloth and intellect alike, and struggling to find the Air (XXXII/4). Sobered, I perceived the humbling vastness of the unknowable Sea, and the human swimmer's incapacity to view it beyond the immediate billows. I realized that I knew nothing, and what I began learning in God's Water represented all that a man can ever know about it, the sole part within a sinner's reach, nothing else. Beyond my small wave of awareness the immeasurable Sea ran from a Hand to the other Hand of the Maker (IV/1). I was going to rise later as a falcon from the tumultuous waves of my apprenticeship, when I realized that a bit of the true (II/8-9, XX/2) saves, if it is achieved, but much theology leads astray as surely as dream does.
Michel Potay
(extracts)
Brother Michel, witness of the Revelation of Ares
N.B. Extracted from the yearly periodical "Le Pèlerin d'Arès 1991-1992", the pages of the text "We believe, we do not believe" (the complete text is also published in The Revelation of Ares bilingual english-french, edition of 1995), where wroted by Brother Michel during an illness the outcome of which was uncertain. He meant to leave to his brothers what he called a 'direction of certitude' and urge them to definitively forsake traditionnal mental reflexes harmful to their mission which the public reckoned as religious propaganda.
The Revelation of Ares does not give the world a religion, it gives spiritual life.
Spiritual life is not fidelity to dogmas, a cult and a list of attitudes supposed to save man by the very fact that he believes in them and observes them (this define religion). True faith certainly falls within a scope : God's Word, but within it faith is constructive fidelity to man's will to change (30/11) himself, — conquer sin, first the sin against love — and change (28/7) the world. True faith, therefore, is neither dogmatic nor worship-like; it is free, creative, evolvable. Man, co-creator of the world along with God, essentially has to build himself again in goodness, in love, in intelligence. This is the very genious of The Revelation of Ares and God's whole Word since it began.
