Meditation 3: Arrival

Keeping to the main road is easy, but people love to be sidetracked.
Lao Tzu

I’ll labour night and day to be a pilgrim. Hymn 564

As you may know, we did not walk the entire 1521 kms/960 miles in one trip; we broke it up into four segments. Hence, for the next three springs, we researched where we were going, I would phone across the ocean to make reservations for the first two weeks, we’d pick up the packs, and hit the road. Only that first spring did we have the sense of total confusion and feeling lost; on subsequent trips we better understood how the system worked and could re-enter with minimal difficulty.

After the first spring, we knew what the daily routine would be and I would find myself looking forward to its simplicity. Just as a monastic community has its rhythm, so does the pilgrim community. Depending on where you stayed determined reveille. If we stayed in one of the dorm-like refugios, the rustling of plastic bags (always!), thundering footsteps, no matter how quiet people tried to be, and whispers would wake us up. If we stayed in a more civilized place like a small hotel or B&B, we’d get ourselves going. No matter how many times we did it, it still would take us an hour to pack up (because the night before we had totally unpacked, especially if we had to use our sleeping bag because it resides in the bottom of the pack), get our water set and boot up. If it was raining, putting on the rain gear added time. Before leaving, I would pull out the little slips of paper on which people had written their prayers, and I would go through them so I could carry them with me in the course of the day. I had a rota going so I would say: OK, you need to remember to pray today for so-and-so.

Sometimes we would set off having had breakfast, other times we would have to walk a while before getting that first cup of coffee, orange juice and croissant. The first half hour was getting the kinks out of one’s system, adjusting boot laces, wondering if that tendonitis in the knee was going to kick in, or if that deep blister was going to hurt more than it did the day before. At the beginning of the day, there sometimes would be short stops to get organized. Then we would walk for another three hours or so before stopping for a break. On long days, we’d try to knock off 20kms in the morning before lunch because after lunch, the walking was always harder. On super long days (35kms) we would crank out as much as we could and take as few and as short breaks as possible. Afternoons and early evening, we’d begin to wind down — not intentionally but simply because we’d been walking all day and it was one day piled up on top of another. The last hour, no matter how far or short a distance remained, could be the worst and there were days I felt like a moribund tortoise.

When we’d get to where we were to spend the night, we’d change into our one other set of clothes (our ‘evening clothes’) and do laundry of what we’d had on. Everything we wore is synthetic meant to dry quickly. I would try to journal where we’d been or anything of interest. Sometimes sleep would get the better of me. Then it was off to dinner, meeting up with other walkers, and then back for an early bedtime because we’d be doing the same thing the next day.

Anyone who has walked either the Long Trail or the Appalachian Trail knows that there is a whole trail mentality and community. On the LT and AT people give themselves trail names, leave messages in notebooks at the shelters, help one another out and sometimes even share food (we do because we are always short haul walkers).

So it is on the Camino. We rarely knew other people’s names (I sometimes felt it was like being in a huge twelve-step meeting) so sometimes would end up giving them nicknames like Dog Man (because he walked with his dog) or the Swiss woman, the horse people (self-evident), the photographer, or the nice Danes who shared their lunch with us. (I suspect some called me gimpy the third year of walking.) Still, we tended to walk with a pack of people insofar as most people started from and ended up at the same places. You’d recognise faces, wave to one another, ask the essential: how their feet, knees, shoulders and back were holding up. We’d share chocolate, bread and cheese. If someone looked lost, we’d whistle and wildly gesticulate to get them back on the path. The Camino community watches out for itself.

Most walkers were what I would call ‘seekers,’ the folks who would say they were spiritual but not religious, in other words, plugged into the institutional church. It being France and Spain, we ran into a lot of lapsed Catholics. Despite their lack of church affiliation, they would pick up on the inherent spirituality found in walking a pilgrimage route that dates back to the 9th century and on which thousands and thousands of feet have trod.

Claiming the title, ‘pilgrim,’ took some time, however. Initially, I was someone from the Untied States, a French medievalist, an Episcopal priest. But pilgrim? Gradually, the name took. Perhaps it was being wished every day buen camino, have a good trip, by so many people along the way. Or it was people calling us pilgrims. Well, we were. That’s what it said on our credencial: we were walking this pilgrimage route on foot for spiritual reasons. We would stop in any open church we could find (in the Alteplano of Spain, our success rate was dismal); I would light any candles I could find (lots of real ones in France, lots of electric ones, which I just can’t bring myself to ‘light’ in Spain) and we would sign the book that countless pilgrims before us had signed. These books both in Spain and France contain the prayers and thoughts of pilgrims and I would always read the page on which I signed. If I had time (i.e., if we were taking a break in a cool church on a hot day), I would go back several pages. We were walking for the MDGs in 2007; in previous years, I had other intentions for which I was walking. Eventually, I claimed being a pilgrim in my heart as well as in my mind and on subsequent trips, I refound the pilgrim spirit within hours.

Oftentimes people set off on a pilgrimage with a set idea of what they are going to discover. I tended to go with an open heart and mind, trusting that over the course of two plus weeks of quiet time, God would reveal Godself in some way to me. My first year I think the message was a continuation of sabbatical: what does it mean to live simply in a pared-down life? The second year, I was discerning whether or not to go forward in a conversation with a congregation and on the second-to-last day, the message was quite clear that I should. The third year I learned what it meant to live with daily pain and to have more compassion for others who suffer with it, and to have patience with myself. And the last year, I lived in one of life’s hard lessons, letting go. I found that the patterning rhythm of walking, the quiet (we would talk sometimes but other times walk for an hour or two in silence) would allow for God to come close.

We experienced four departures and four arrivals. Each arrival had a different impact on me. Obviously the most significant arrival was that of Santiago. After all, those who walk the last 60 miles (100 kms) receive the coveted Compostela (mine hangs in the office here) which I received on 6 May 2004 in a jubilee year. The closer we got to Santiago the more crowded the Camino got and the harder it was to find lodging. That was when I was set to make phone calls to hotels to book us rooms ahead of time so we could walk in peace. We decided not to stay at the massive pilgrim center, a former army base, five kms out of Santiago but instead walked in our last day on a 18 km walk. As we got close to Santiago the heavens dumped on us for good measure. We got to the outer road of the city and realised this was it; we were about to arrive. We came in through the side street, walked through a passageway and found ourselves at the cathedral, this huge gaudy Baroque building (the façade covers a Romanesque tympanum). My first unvarnished thought when I saw it was: So this is the object of my desire? This is what I have been walking two weeks for? My next thought was: And we have to climb up all those stairs to get inside?

When we arrived two years later in Saint Jean Pied de Port, the end of the 450-mile French Way of Saint James, I started to weep. It wasn’t just because I had just walked two weeks with two broken toes, it was because I realised I was finishing this part of the pilgrimage. Even though I knew the next day that we would be walking over the Pyrenees to Roncesvalles, Spain, I still had this deep ache that we were leaving the pilgrimage route.

In 2007, when we walked the last 20 kms of this 1520km trek, it seemed unreal. For four springs we had packed up our lives, entered into this flowing stream of humanity headed westwards and now we were truly ending the quest. We walked into a very small hamlet in the mountains and it was at a little chapel run by a monastic order that I lit my last candles, said my last prayers and left the Camino. The next day we watched the pilgrims begin their day but we had already stepped off that treadmill. It was very hard to see. Each spring, I get intense longings to rejoin that stream of humanity.

We learned as so many other pilgrims do in those moments is that the ending is not an ending and it is not what matters. What one finds out is that the journey is what matters. A mural on a wall outside of Nájera contains a poem painted over several panels. It asks: ‘Pilgrim, what attracts you to the road?’ It then gives possible reasons why and on the last panel the answer appears: ‘Only the One above knows.’ Elsewhere in a refugio, pilgrims will read: Peregrina, you do not walk the path, the path is YOU, your footsteps, these are the Camino.

What one realises is that throughout one’s entire life, one is a pilgrim. One may never set foot on a pilgrimage route, but one is a pilgrim as one tries to hear what God might be saying, as one prays, as one participates in the community’s life of prayer.

T. S. Eliot wrote:

We shall not cease from exploration
And at the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Arthur Paul Boers reflects on this stanza: ‘We shall not cease exploration’; we are always sojourners moving along the way, not just when we are official pilgrims. That ongoing restless wandering perpetually brings us back home to ourselves. Just as the Camino showed me more deeply things I already knew about myself, so it invited me to be acquainted with my home and life in new ways, ‘for the first time.’ And, as Scott Russell Sanders notes: ‘Pilgrims often journey to the ends of the earth in search of holy ground, only to find that they have never walked on anything else.’ (1)

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We are about to start our Lenten pilgrimage. We will find that the path is us. We may not know where the road will lead; we follow day by day…. Come Easter, we will arrive at a point and place in time but we know that next year the pilgrimage route will call to us once again. There is some consolation in that knowledge; whatever we don’t get to this Lent, we have all year to walk with it. When we arrive at Easter, remember to let your soul catch up with where you have been. Be in the present moment.

As we walk into Lent, may we pray: Lord, take me where you want me to go; let me meet who you want me to meet; tell me what you want me to say, and keep me out of your way. (Mychal F. Judge)

END NOTE
(1) Arthur Paul Boers, The Way is Made by Walking: A Pilgrimage Along the Camino de Santiago (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2007), 178.


PHOTO
Saint Jean Pied-de-Port, 28 May 2006.

Meditation 2: Pilgrimage

The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.
Loa Tzu (570-499 BCE)

You cannot travel the path until you become the path.
Buddha (563-483 BCE)

So after all the preparation, we found ourselves flying across the Atlantic to London, then onto Madrid and finally onto Pamplona. Jet-lagged, we arrived in Burguete, via taxi, as planned, in the late afternoon. For those of you who have spent the night up like that, you know how your head begins to spin from fatigue.

Part of where we were was familiar, that is, I had been in Spain before, I spoke Spanish. I had even been in Basque country in the Pyrenees on both sides of the border (French and Spanish). But to realise that from here on in, we were on our own, on our feet, was a different matter.

We had all our photocopies and books. We even had a fairly good idea of how long we would walk each day but that was all theoretical. So, rather than deal with the whole pilgrimage, we decided to go for the particular: we walked the 2 kms over to Roncesvalles to have dinner and then go to the pilgrims’ mass.

We got lost heading up to the monastery because we didn’t yet understand how the signals worked: if the shell points one way you go left; if it goes the other right and finally a third way, straight. We ended up on someone’s barnyard and knew that wasn’t right so simply walked up the road some until we saw another yellow shell that got us on the path which was much nicer walking.

There was a sense of feeling it all was surreal. Perhaps it was because I had studied about this area and now I was in the place where it had taken place. But most of it was because we were about to walk some 250 miles across the top of Spain and were going to be calling ourselves pilgrims, too.

The pilgrim mass, which is held every night, helped us take those preliminary steps. I have no idea what the priests must think, doing this every night. Most of the people there were staying in the cavernous refugio across the street from the church so we were a bit disconnected from the mob that had walked across the Pyrenees that day from France. We all had gotten our credencial, the little booklet that proves you are a pilgrim and gives you access to refugios and sometimes breaks on prices on museums and restaurants but mostly affirms that you have walked the requisite 100 kms to get the Compostela, a certificate that one gets at the end of the pilgrimage. We hailed from all over but mostly Europe. People were surprised that people from the United States had even heard of the Camino, which always led into a discussion of how that might be possible.

I wasn’t expecting the liturgy to be moving but when the priest blessed us all at the end of the mass and prayed that Saint James would accompany us all the way to Santiago, I felt as though this pilgrimage was officially launched.

But growing into what it means to be a pilgrim, and owning the label ‘pilgrim’ did not happen right away.

We went to bed with a combination of excitement and exhaustion and slept through to the morning when it was time to get up and out. We packed up our packs (making sure to have water to get us through the day) and then stepped out the door.

It was pouring rain, not just a nice mist but pouring rain. No lovely sights of the Pyrenees — we could barely see down the street. So on with the rain gear and off with the glasses (which always makes life impressionistic). Off we went on our first day of our pilgrimage!

Walking with a book bag or a purse is a different proposition than walking with a pack that weighs 22 pounds. Add in another 3-4 pounds of water and you’ve got an extra 25 pounds on your knees and feet. But that thought is for another moment, another time.

We walked down the main street, the very road on which the taxi had brought us in. We couldn’t find our yellow and blue shell anywhere. We crossed the road to where we thought it might be but didn’t see it. We went in circles for about ten minutes and then, frustrated and grumping at each other, decided to walk on the road. Not an auspicious beginning! That was not a terribly nice choice because the edge of the road was narrow and the cars tended to go very fast even though it was a winding, mountainous road. Every time a car would go by, we would have to jump to the side to avoid its spray and getting clipped.

We walked probably a mile and a half, wondering all the while where this stupid (that is what I was thinking by then) pilgrimage path was. How come we couldn’t find it? Why wasn’t it better marked?

Finally, our path and the Camino met. The camino had been across the road — we had figured that out by then — and it had to cross the road to climb up into the woods above the road. When the two paths converged, we felt better: NOW we were en route.

But what we ended up walking was hardly easier or nicer. The Pyrenees are old mountains and have a lot of ridges. Add to that, hundreds, thousands of pilgrim feet walking the same path, rain or shine, snow or dust, and you get erosion. Our going was slow: the camino had been worn down to a spiny ridge that was on an angle (we were walking across a slope). It was incredibly muddy which made things very slippery. I was already questioning our sanity. We had no choice but to go forward. We had a tight calendar, Debbie was already an hour plus ahead of us and we had to walk our way out of this mess.

It was also very cold and our fleece gloves soon got soaked. I discovered that even if they are soaked they can reasonably keep my fingers warm. I thought of how crazy it was to be doing this activity: willingly walking in the pouring rain with all this stuff on my back.

We sloshed our way through the mud and gradually made our way down from the mountain. We arrived in another village and took refuge in a jai lai court. There we met a French woman who asked if we had walked from Le Puy, France. No, we answered. She said we absolutely had to — the region of Aubrac was gorgeous. We didn’t realise at the time that this discussion would set the course of the next three years and that we would, indeed, go to France the next year and walk from Le Puy to Moissac, going through Aubrac which is gorgeous and very similar to New England. At the time, we simply ate some fruit, chatted and commiserated.

As the day went on and as we walked out of the mountains, the rain let up and by early afternoon, we could take off our rain gear. That felt good! We walked past a concrete factory, which was dismal but on the other side of it we entered a hamlet and I saw a house that had four cats, two in each windowsill, one on top of a geranium flowerpot and the fourth lying in the sun. It was good to find something familiar in the midst of the unfamiliar.

We finally arrived at the place to where we were supposed to spend the night [Zubiri]. We had looked at our guide in the morning and selected three or four possible places (we weren’t making reservations) and given the names to Debbie who would have arrived before us. While it hadn’t been raining for a while, we were still muddy and wet. We stopped at each one of the places. No Debbie. We even stopped at the refugio, which was in the municipal building. Even though it was afternoon, the place was a beehive of activity — people drying out, cleaning the mud off their boots and packs and staking out their bunk. We weren’t ready to deal with that yet so we walked to the end of town to a small restaurant that had rooms for the night. We booked a triple so that if we found Debbie, there would be space for her.

Then we also unpacked. We discovered that the reason I was soaking wet from within and without was that the fancy new waterpack had split and the two liters of water had streamed down my backside, turning my new pants an interesting combination of khaki and blue dye. So they would remain for the rest of the walk. Our passports, plane tickets and credenciales were also soaked so we hung them up to dry on some parachute cord we had brought with us.

Still no Debbie. Here it was the first day of our walk and we had lost her!

Sometimes things don’t always go according to plan.

We found that lesson out later on in the Camino when we went through a stretch of days where the Camino veered off the routes that were so carefully printed on our maps. For three or four days, I shoved the Xeroxed map into my pants pocket because it had become totally useless. The directions told us we would cross railroad tracks, go through a village, come out the other side, and walk along such-and-such a road. Instead, we found ourselves crossing a bridge over an eight-lane highway (detour number one), then walking three of the four sides of a wheat field (detour number two), going under another bridge that was very new with thundering traffic overhead (detour number three), and meandering along a river (detour number four). At least on that particular stretch the locals knew we’d been taken off the predicted track and had placed a wonderful plaque on the bridge which asked our forgiveness for this detour.

On days like that, I just walked, not worrying about what the map said since it no longer reflected reality as I found it in front of me and under my feet. I trusted that somewhere there would be a scallop shell that would give me a clue of where I was to go.

As for claiming the name of pilgrim, I will reflect on that in the next meditation.

And Debbie? She had stopped one town before we were stopped, spent the night and then walked 5 kms the next morning. Just as I was about to call her sister in France, she walked into sight. After that moment, we were more clear about where we going to stop and we never lost one another again.

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What does it mean to walk in prayer? Even if one is not walking physically, one should think about the speed with which one lives and prays. Jane Redmond in her reissued book, When in Doubt, Sing, cites Kosuke Koyama, a Japanese theologian. He writes in his book Three Mile an Hour God: ‘We live today in an efficient and speedy life… There is a great value in efficiency and speed. But… I find God goes “slowly”’ in helping human beings to grow. ‘Forty years in the wilderness’ points to God’s ‘educational philosophy.… In the wilderness we slow down to the pace at which we walk: three miles an hour. Entering prayer… is, in many ways, entering a kind of wilderness, where the essentials of life stand in starker relief than they do outside, in the world’s rush. ‘Love has its speed…. It is an inner speed… a spiritual speed…. It is the speed we walk and therefore it is the speed the love of God walks.’ Redmond say: To encounter the love of God in prayer today, we may need to slow down to ‘three miles an hour.’ (1)

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In each of us dwells a pilgrim. It is the part of us that longs to have direct contact with the sacred. We will travel halfway around the world and endure great sacrifice and pain to enter the sanctuary, whether it is a temple, shrine, cemetery or library. This is the way that is no way, but a practice. Your practice is your path. If so, ‘the Way is uncontrived,’ as Lao Tzu said. It is simply the way of seeing, the way of hearing, the way of touching, the way of walking, the way of being, with humility. (2)

In the end all our journeys are journeys to find God, and therefore to find ourselves.

What happens when we get off-course? How do we get ourselves back on course? Certainly returning again and again to a life of prayer, returning to the community at prayer helps one regain one’s footsteps and direction. Sometimes we have to ask others to pray for us; that is why there is the community.

There are times when our prayer life doesn’t go the way we want it to. We think that God should be telling us in clear terms what we should be doing. Usually in those moments, we create enough static that God can’t get through to us, in the same way the Job did when he yelled at God. Finally, when he quieted down, God spoke to him. There may well be times when our prayer life seems to take us way off the track. In those moments, we have to trust that God will get through to us and steer us back in the right direction.

Finally, carving out quiet time to find the three-mile-an-hour God (which actually still is a good pace when walking) can help keep us on the Way. Simon Weil, the French philosopher, spoke of practicing mindfulness, that is, attentiveness. She said absolutel attention is prayer. Taking time out to notice the small things in life will heighten our connection to God.

So, let us begin our pilgrimage into the day’s quiet and into the mystery of Lent.

END NOTES
(1) Jane Redmont, When in Doubt, Sing: Prayer in Daily Life (Notre Dame, IN: Sorin Books, 1999, 2008), 24.

(2) Phil Cousineau, The Art of Pilgrimage: The Seeker’s Guide to Making Travel Sacred (York Beach, ME: Conari Press, 1998), 92.

Lenten Quiet Day meditation 1, Preparation

This weekend I did a Lenten quiet day for the church's chapter of the Daughters of the King. I used my journey on the Camino de Santiago as my example and extrapolated some reflections from it. The first is here.

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The day on which one starts out is not the time to start one’s preparations.
Nigerian folk saying

Five years ago when I was thinking about sabbatical, a first for both Saint Mary’s and for myself, I cast about how I might spend the three months away from the daily routine of parish life. I knew somehow that I wanted to be physically challenged, spiritually engaged and participating in some form of outreach.

I had thought of doing an Outward Bound program about which I had heard from our neighbour who had led it once upon a time. It involved cross-country skiing and camping in Minnesota in the winter, a solo trip in extreme cold and simply being out there. What intrigued me was her description of sleeping on the ice of a lake and hearing it ‘talk’ throughout the night. Even though I feared for my digits, I thought it would be neat to do, to push my body in ways it never had been before, to get away from civilization and to experience beauty that otherwise was inaccessible. But the timing and the cost of the program made it impossible so I laid aside that idea, waiting for the right one to come along.

At the same time, I was trying to figure out the outreach component and spiritual engagement piece of sabbatical. The spiritual seemed the easiest to work out: I had long wanted to experience Holy Week at the Convent of Saint Helena in Vail’s Gate. It would be my first Holy Week not in charge of everything in a decade and that also would be a change. Getting a room at the convent was easy and so that part was all set up.

Likewise, the outreach part of sabbatical seemed to present itself without much thought: go to El Salvador and live there, doing whatever the bishop wanted me to do. Again, those pieces fell into place rather easily: we agreed on the dates, there was a room where I could stay and when I got there, we would figure out what I would do.

But what about the physical challenge part of sabbatical which seemed so important at the time? I was running into dead ends until a dear friend, Debbie, who wanted to go on pilgrimage said: What about the Camino de Santiago de Compostela? All of a sudden, little bells started to ding in my head and I remembered how in 1984 I had encountered churches along the Camino as a group of medievalists and I travelled through northern Spain. More bells went off: of course! I had written my Ph.D. dissertation on the Song of Roland, which describes the ambush of the rear guard high up in the Pyrenees. The Camino starts at Roncesvalles, the site of the massacre.

It all made sense and the sabbatical was then in place: I would spend six weeks in El Salvador, return, go to Saint Helena’s for Holy Week and then we would take off on the Camino for two and a half weeks.

Getting the itinerary and timing was step one in the sabbatical process. Then it was preparing the congregation for the time away, lining up who would do what in my absence (as I called it, ‘the little things that just happen’) and making sure there was supply clergy for the Sundays I would be gone. With help from vestry members, those needs were also taken care of and I felt I could leave for sabbatical without worry.

One can prepare for El Salvador only so much because life there is so unpredictable. I could take a big suitcase with me (back in the days before the airlines charged so much money) with enough clothes for six weeks; I didn’t have to worry about money because El Salvador uses the dollar and therefore using ATMs wasn’t an issue. The actual agenda down there was a whole other matter and I knew from experience that one just went with the flow and tried not to let it wear oneself out.

Preparation for the Camino was a whole other matter, however. And being in El Salvador got me off the hook; it was Anne who did all the work. As I was trying to keep my head above water with the cultural and linguistic challenges, I was getting emails like these:

I have tried on six different boots so far. A couple are possibilities…. Am also checking out rain jackets. There is [one] that is about $100 that looks good. The best is another, but it is $179. The store has a medium on sale for close to $100 that would probably fit you…. There is yet another one that looks interesting that the person at the store said is in between the other two quality wise. They only had large and all of them are blue. Might work for you.…

Are your eyes crossing? Think about reading these words when it’s 90 degrees outside and you are sitting in an office in front of an air conditioner.

Another note said: I am obsessing about the backpack situation. It seems dumb not to use the ones we have but I think they are too big and too heavy. The new one I got is light enough and it is quite comfortable but it is also big. I have put a bunch of clothes in it, and I realise that though the pack is far from full, it has way more in it than we will carry in Spain. So I have gone back to researching light packs.

OK, there was less disconnect simply because I wasn’t thinking about jackets. I could understand backpacks, sort of though I couldn’t really imagine what 20 pounds felt like since I usually haul that much around in books and laptop.

Then she started to write about the weather: I found a site that has temperatures for Spain. I copied into a Word document the average April and May temps for five or six cities on the Camino…. Looks like it will be fairly cool and probably rainy. Good walking weather if it isn’t too rainy.

Well, it was moving into the rainy season in El Salvador so I could relate to the dampness but not the idea of cold rain.
Then it was onto our sleeping bags.

I got your sleeping bag out today. It does not say what it weighs, though it says it has 20 oz of fill. But unless you think it might be too hot, I think it is probably light enough to take. I don’t think it can be over 3 lbs whereas mine is between 4 and 5.

Did this make any sense? What is three pounds any way? Why would that matter? I couldn’t imagine what the difference of a pound would make even though I knew she was right. Weight seemed to be a big problem.

In another email, I read: I do want to weigh your sleeping bag and if it is not too much more than 3 lbs, I’d say it will be OK. The refugios might be cold. D emailed this morning and said she had a bag that is 3.75 lbs. It is a big heavy one but it may not make sense to pay for another one. Mine is just too huge and heavy.


My head just wasn’t getting the weight business. I knew it was important; I have hauled 30 pounds of stuff up the NH Whites, all of it necessary, but that was short bursts of putting out energy, not day after day.

Having pretty much settled on the equipment, Anne then started researching plane tickets, train schedules and anything related to ground transportation. She also started working on our calendar — how many kilometers we would walk each day, from where to where and how long it might take. That sounds easy but it meant looking up a lot of things on the web as this email said:

The current plan is to meet D at the airport. The bus to Roncesvalles leaves the center of Pamplona at 6 but it seems to me we would be better off taking a taxi. D’s friend suggested staying in Burguete which is a bout 2 miles on the Pamplona side of Roncesvalles, and walking to R for the pilgrim mass which is at 8pm, having dinner and then walking back. She said the refugio at R is cold and cavernous. So we could take the taxi to Burguete, stay in a decent place since we will all be tired, walk to R for the mass and back, and then start out on Thursday. I am thinking we might walk to Estella (four days) and then take buses to the place we chose for the last part. Anyway, things are coming together!

The next thing I need to find out is the train and bus situation to get through the parts we won’t walk. The guides have a bit of info but I want to see if any schedules are accessible on the web. If I find some I can’t understand I will send you the addresses and you can check them out.

In her research, Anne found a neat place down in North Carolina that sells maps and guidebooks and so she ordered a few. Armed with maps (gold!) she now could get down to details.

When I came back from El Salvador, she had figured out the entire walk, where we would skip by bus and train, where we would pick up again and how long it would take. It was a labour of love that ultimately made for a far less stressful pilgrimage. As the adage says The day on which one starts out is not the time to start one’s preparations.

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Preparation for an endeavour like this — walking 260 miles — is essential. Joyce Rupp who wrote Walk in a Relaxed Manner: Life Lessons from the Camino, says: ‘Reflecting back I now laugh at how needing to prepare for the Camino never occurred to me. I thought I would simply take a backpack and a pair of hiking boots, get on a plane to Spain, and start out. If I had actually done that, I would probably not have lasted more than a few days. She writes how her spiritual director said to her: “Remember, the preparation is as important as the journey itself.”’ (1)

Another Camino pilgrim, Arthur Paul Boers, in his chapter, ‘Your Pack’s Too Big,’ realises in his preparation that the key to surviving is: Simplify, simplify, simplify. He remembers the directions from Jesus to the disciples as recounted in the gospel according to Matthew (10.9-10): Take no gold or silver, or copper in your belts, no bag for your journey, or two tunics, or sandals or a staff: for labourers deserve their food. (2)

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This past week, just three days ago, we observed Ash Wednesday, a moment when we look at our limitations and our mortality. It is the first day of a season that asks us to become pilgrims in the walk of love. To become a pilgrim, we have to make ourselves humble, humble like dust and ashes. We have to understand that there is no direct way to this love, to God, we have to make the way as we walk.

In some ways, our route is already laid out ahead of us with distinct markers in place (Sundays). There’s no surprise about where we are going… or so it would seem. But not until we start walking will we find out if it is that straightforward or if God is going to write straight on the crooked lines of our paths. Part of the journey is the preparation; part of the journey is simplification. How do you prepare?

END NOTES
(1) Joyce Rupp: Walk in a Relaxed Manner: Life Lessons from the Camino (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2005), 43.
(2) Arthur Paul Boers, The Way is Made by Walking: A Pilgrimage Along the Camino de Santiago (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2007), 57.

PHOTOS
What was to go into the pack... and the pack put together.