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.
