Un Buen Camino

Oh, dear friends, what follows is going to be a futile attempt to concisely try to sum up some of the profound value of the pilgrimage, the Camino de Santiago. (Originally, I had typed here that I'd attempt brevity and conciseness, but that has gone by the wayside as I've written.)

First, the nuts and bolts of it...
Molly, Colin, Kurt, and I walked 112km across four full days and 2 hours of a fifth morning.
We began in Sarria, arriving via train from Madrid.
Day 1, we walked 22km to Portomarín.
Day 2, we walked 23.5km to Palas de Rei.
Day 3, we walked 29km to Arzúa.
Day 4, we walked 32km to Monte de Gozo.
Day 5, we walked 4.5km to el Catedral de Santiago de Compostela.
There, on All Saints Day, we attended pilgrims' mass and received our compostela certificates, certifying our journey on foot with our declared motivation being religious pilgrimage. Check out pictures here. (Additionally, my friend Colin's travel blog has AWESOME pictures and additional insights to the mindset of a Camino pilgrim.)

Community

Overall, walking the Way added a new depth to my understanding of community, not just due to the conversation we had toward the end of our trek in which my companions thoroughly challenged me on my attitudes toward reconciling my personal opinions with the life of the community and its greater well-being and mission.

There is a sanctity to embarking on such a journey together, knowing that your teamwork, cooperation, and support is needed not just to help one another make it 112km on foot but to  fuel each other's spirits, both mentally/emotionally and faith/prayer-wise. We couldn't just be talking and laughing and smiling - though that was important - we had to be sharing prayer and intentions and reflective thoughts to help each other have the pilgrimage we all desired.

Also, more practically, we were a family for five days. And it became that way because we weren't just choosing restaurants or ordering of menus. We did that for a day at the end in Santiago, but each night of our walk, we hit up a supermercado or fruteria, shopped the aisles, and hit the cocina at our albergue to make family dinner. Cooking together in quaint kitchens, sitting at a table with a hodge-podge of dishes, and cleaning it all up together really sews the days up and brings you together in a way quite befitting of the pilgrimage we forged.

And an extra note, sharing the path with dozens of other pilgrims of various motivations and from different parts of the world (we met some from at least USA, Spain, France, and Japan) surrounds you in this gentle bond of community with strangers, where you always at least have the universal greeting of <<¡Buen Camino!>> to share with each other. And that brings you closer together more than you might think, which brings me to my next point.

The Body of Christ

There is a beautiful enfleshing of the mystery of the mystical Body of Christ on this pilgrimage. You get wonderful glimpses of it in the hospitality that pervades the walk (with the exception of the awkward bocadillo shop, "No Camino," whose owner/counter-lady was brisk and cold). The baseline, the constant, of the walk is the seemingly simple exchanges of <<¡Buen Camino!>> between pilgrims, but it grows from there. You begin to want to say hello to each person you see, whether a shepherd moving his animals up the street, a woman hanging clothes or picking fruit in her yard, or people on their porches and doorsteps in the villages. You find the confidence to engage people in shops and albergues in their native language, embracing a humble approach and finding at least hospitality if not a deeper welcome and embrace from someone receiving you in their country and language. And most importantly, your fellow pilgrims become your friends, sometimes through conversation but often through an unspoken bond that I can only trace back to the mysticality of Christ as our companion.

So we had the chance to talk to a few people, largely through the boldness of my companions. We got the stories of a French man who was resuming his trek to make it from Lyon that had been cut short year last year and two gals from Seattle taking time away from work and business. But alongside them, we interweaved our journey with a batch of older Asian men and women who soldiered their way down the roads, a young couple holding hands ahead of us, and a Polish girl who we met 30 days into her journey and saw collapse into a pile of joy in the cathedral plaza. A bond formed among all of us, above, below, or beyond our motivations or intentions. We all were aiming for the mass, the cathedral, the communal experience waiting in northwest Spain. And on All Saint Day, we made it. We prayed at the kneeler by James' final resting place, and we hugged his statue, the one over the altar that shows him as a pilgrim, as one of the many gunning for this summit of joy. And just to cement all of that, as I walked past the queue of people moving through the stairway to the statue and down toward the tombs, I made eye contact with the guy and gal who had made it hand-in-hand, and having never spoken more then a buen camino to them, we exchanged a wave and a smile.

Pilgrimage

And running over and under it all is this vast sea of grace called pilgrimage. These are the people, the faces that enflesh what went on, and it's this idea of pilgrimage, of making a trip or vacation into a spiritual journey that is physicalized, that deepens the meaning of the whole encounter. These people walking the Way with us made up part of the journey symbolism that made the pilgrimage real to our eyes.

Starting with the first morning, we walked through morning/sunrise fog that shrouded the path ahead and limited our visibility - well isn't that face-value symbolism if I ever saw it. We would come out of the fog little by little as the day went on, but it would return in the morning. Added to the fog, we were walking a path without a map or compass or any clue of what the road should look like; we were at the mercy of milestones (well, kilometer stones) every 0.5km or so and yellow arrows that might seem suspect if we didn't know to trust them. However, at each spot were there were different directions to go, a yellow arrow appeared on the side of a house, the ground, a wall, or a stone. Each time we followed, and each time the arrows pointed us to Santiago. We had to trust the arrows as well as the pilgrims we could see in front of us that we were on the right path.

The whole thing was just saturated with beautiful discernment metaphors made concrete by the action of physically undertaking the walk. The whole thing reiterated to us repeatedly to trust. Amid the fog, the lack of a map, the ignorance about the way we'd reach Santiago, and the length of the walk (especially given I'd never hiked more than a few miles before), trust in the whole equation of the pilgrimage - from directions to food to lodging - is what sustains you. Trust in your companions, the fellow pilgrims, the hosts at the albergues, and the God that brought us the whole way enabled the journey to be a way of peace.

And now, after returning, the processing continues. I haven't quite made it to wrapping my head around it, but I know the peace endures and upholds me when I realize how the pilgrimage goes on, especially while abroad here trying to serve our Church in Ireland. I yet lack a lot of the perspective as to how the depth of contextualizing life in terms of pilgrimage will illuminate things. However, a quote from a past pilgrim included at the end of the leaflet in the pilgrims' office in Santiago de Compostela begins to shed light on this for us:

"Now that I arrived to the end, I realize that these last weeks have been just a stage in the long Way of life towards God. It is here that I can really say to St. James: 'Show me the Lord,' and then recommence my Way."