by Rob Goodale
May you always be breaking me,
and rebuilding me to better love and serve you.
Amen.
This was my foolish prayer as I began walking the Camino de Santiago on the Monday of Holy Week. Now, never in my wildest dreams did I ever think walking the Camino de Santiago during Holy Week was a thing I would ever get to do, and I am filled to the brim with gratitude for being blessed with such an opportunity. I’m just saying, perhaps I should have been more careful with what I wished for.
Carrying a twenty-pound pack while walking 73 miles in five days would give anyone achy feet and tired legs, no matter their inner disposition. But the blisters and bruises weren’t the most difficult obstacles I faced during my experience as a peregrino. God answered my prayer, as he does every day: my five days in Spain were a consistent experience of being broken and rebuilt on a regular, perhaps hourly basis.
It has taken me a long time—and a lot of brokenness—to start to glimpse the beauty in the breaking. My abiding sense at the end of this Holy Week pilgrimage was that, paradoxically, we cannot hope to be made whole unless we are also willing to be broken.
* * *
My prayer for brokenness is not a request to have suffering inflicted upon me. At least I don’t think it is; I don’t think God does that sort of thing.1 This is something I cannot hope to understand fully, but I ask for it nonetheless. I extend an invitation to grace, a request to be shaken up by being overwhelmingly flooded with the Love of a God whose ways are not my ways, to have my heart of stone be smashed to smithereens.
This was my experience of Holy Week.
Two experiences stand out in particular as moments of being broken. One was at Igrexa de San Xoán de Furelos, a tiny little parish church on the outskirts of one of the main towns along the way. We passed the church on a little after lunchtime on Wednesday—our third day, the toughest and longest of the week. I was tired, cranky, and in a hurry to be finished walking, but one of the other peregrinos in our group asked if he could go inside the church. Begrudgingly, I dragged myself through the door behind him, and then abruptly stopped, mouth hanging open.
Hanging on the wall on one side of the little chapel was a crucifix unlike any I had ever seen before: the corpus of Christ hung lifeless off of the wood of the cross, dangling by only one hand. Eventually, I managed to move out of the doorway and onto my knees, all the while transfixed by the image across from me.
The starkness of the image on the wall sent shivers down my spine. Here was not merely a piece of religious artwork, nor even a moving symbol of God’s boundless love for us. No, this was a hauntingly graphic representation of a hauntingly graphic public execution. A man truly died a grotesque and horrific death, a man who also happens to be the Word Made Flesh. Jesus’ death is not a heroic act of valor; it is a humiliating degradation of humanity, with every shred of honor and dignity stripped away.
Staring at this crucifix on the Wednesday of Holy Week, I found myself uncomfortably aware at the irony of the final days of Jesus’ earthly life. The events of the Triduum are certainly sensational, but not in the way anyone would expect. They are not acts of grandeur; they are noteworthy because of their smallness. Jesus shares a meal with his friends, in which he washes their feet and promises to remain with them after death under the humble auspices of bread and wine. Jesus struggles in prayer with feelings of fear and loneliness. He dies a gruesome and horrific death, publicly executed as a treasonous criminal. And then he rises from the dead, not with a parade or a festival, but in secret.
Again and again, I find myself struck by how simple these actions are. I look for big things, but God, it would seem, looks for small things. The Triduum, as the culmination of Jesus’ earthly presence, implore us to see as God sees, which is profoundly new. God’s ways are unfamiliar and jarring; the notions we’ve spent our entire lives embedding in our minds and hearts are dislodged. As Flannery O’Connor wrote, “grace must wound before it can heal.”
The second moment from my time as a peregrino that has lingered in my memory took place on our last day in Spain. After celebrating the Easter Vigil at the cathedral in Santiago, we took a bus on Easter Sunday to Finisterra, on the western coast. We found ourselves in a little alcove, where grassy dunes gave way to brilliant white sand and sparkling blue-green water. Perhaps because it was Easter, or perhaps because it was “only” 70 degrees, the beach was empty.
I once again found myself staring, mouth agape, at an unexpectedly jarring sight. This tiny little slice of reality was brimming with peace, and I sat down in the sand, grinning from ear to ear and marveling at the overwhelming beauty that had been entrusted to me, a beauty that breaks my heart in an entirely new way. Even now, I can’t help but smile: Jesus is risen. He is risen indeed, and how lucky am I to have been entrusted with this precious secret. Jesus lives, and I get to know. Glory be to God.
We are the only people on a magnificent beach at the end of the world.
This was my foolish prayer as I began walking the Camino de Santiago on the Monday of Holy Week. Now, never in my wildest dreams did I ever think walking the Camino de Santiago during Holy Week was a thing I would ever get to do, and I am filled to the brim with gratitude for being blessed with such an opportunity. I’m just saying, perhaps I should have been more careful with what I wished for.
Carrying a twenty-pound pack while walking 73 miles in five days would give anyone achy feet and tired legs, no matter their inner disposition. But the blisters and bruises weren’t the most difficult obstacles I faced during my experience as a peregrino. God answered my prayer, as he does every day: my five days in Spain were a consistent experience of being broken and rebuilt on a regular, perhaps hourly basis.
It has taken me a long time—and a lot of brokenness—to start to glimpse the beauty in the breaking. My abiding sense at the end of this Holy Week pilgrimage was that, paradoxically, we cannot hope to be made whole unless we are also willing to be broken.
* * *
My prayer for brokenness is not a request to have suffering inflicted upon me. At least I don’t think it is; I don’t think God does that sort of thing.1 This is something I cannot hope to understand fully, but I ask for it nonetheless. I extend an invitation to grace, a request to be shaken up by being overwhelmingly flooded with the Love of a God whose ways are not my ways, to have my heart of stone be smashed to smithereens.
This was my experience of Holy Week.
Two experiences stand out in particular as moments of being broken. One was at Igrexa de San Xoán de Furelos, a tiny little parish church on the outskirts of one of the main towns along the way. We passed the church on a little after lunchtime on Wednesday—our third day, the toughest and longest of the week. I was tired, cranky, and in a hurry to be finished walking, but one of the other peregrinos in our group asked if he could go inside the church. Begrudgingly, I dragged myself through the door behind him, and then abruptly stopped, mouth hanging open.
Hanging on the wall on one side of the little chapel was a crucifix unlike any I had ever seen before: the corpus of Christ hung lifeless off of the wood of the cross, dangling by only one hand. Eventually, I managed to move out of the doorway and onto my knees, all the while transfixed by the image across from me.
The starkness of the image on the wall sent shivers down my spine. Here was not merely a piece of religious artwork, nor even a moving symbol of God’s boundless love for us. No, this was a hauntingly graphic representation of a hauntingly graphic public execution. A man truly died a grotesque and horrific death, a man who also happens to be the Word Made Flesh. Jesus’ death is not a heroic act of valor; it is a humiliating degradation of humanity, with every shred of honor and dignity stripped away.
Staring at this crucifix on the Wednesday of Holy Week, I found myself uncomfortably aware at the irony of the final days of Jesus’ earthly life. The events of the Triduum are certainly sensational, but not in the way anyone would expect. They are not acts of grandeur; they are noteworthy because of their smallness. Jesus shares a meal with his friends, in which he washes their feet and promises to remain with them after death under the humble auspices of bread and wine. Jesus struggles in prayer with feelings of fear and loneliness. He dies a gruesome and horrific death, publicly executed as a treasonous criminal. And then he rises from the dead, not with a parade or a festival, but in secret.
Again and again, I find myself struck by how simple these actions are. I look for big things, but God, it would seem, looks for small things. The Triduum, as the culmination of Jesus’ earthly presence, implore us to see as God sees, which is profoundly new. God’s ways are unfamiliar and jarring; the notions we’ve spent our entire lives embedding in our minds and hearts are dislodged. As Flannery O’Connor wrote, “grace must wound before it can heal.”
The second moment from my time as a peregrino that has lingered in my memory took place on our last day in Spain. After celebrating the Easter Vigil at the cathedral in Santiago, we took a bus on Easter Sunday to Finisterra, on the western coast. We found ourselves in a little alcove, where grassy dunes gave way to brilliant white sand and sparkling blue-green water. Perhaps because it was Easter, or perhaps because it was “only” 70 degrees, the beach was empty.
I once again found myself staring, mouth agape, at an unexpectedly jarring sight. This tiny little slice of reality was brimming with peace, and I sat down in the sand, grinning from ear to ear and marveling at the overwhelming beauty that had been entrusted to me, a beauty that breaks my heart in an entirely new way. Even now, I can’t help but smile: Jesus is risen. He is risen indeed, and how lucky am I to have been entrusted with this precious secret. Jesus lives, and I get to know. Glory be to God.
We are the only people on a magnificent beach at the end of the world.
It’s warm, the sun is shining, and Jesus is risen.
Amen, alleluia.
1 For a deeper exploration of the problem with the whole “everything happens for a reason” thing, and the way such a claim attributes suffering to God, go read chapter one of Doing the Truth in Love, by Michael Himes.
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