A Pilgrim's Program Notes

98: Comillas

2008-10-14T17:19:00.000-07:00

There was another tourist/pilgrim waiting in front of tourist information. I talked to him for a moment and found that he was German. I'll call him Guido.

The office opened and we went inside to get our credential stamped and to find out how to get to the pilgrim shelter. While we were busy with this, the German couple I had met earlier walked in as well. They, too, wanted to get their credentials stamped, but they did not intend on spending the night. Guido told them what a beautiful place this would be to stay, but they said they are not on the road primarily for staying in beautiful places.

This was my introduction to Guido. It turned out that he was unemployed, but that he somehow still managed to spend most of his time vacationing in various places. He had done the Camino de Santiago several times, along several trails, but he seemed very relaxed about it all, taking the bus when he didn't feel like walking, or staying several days in one place if he liked it particularly. The Camino de Santiago is becoming clogged up with people like him.

The shelter here in Comillas did look a little more attractive than many of the previous ones. There were several rooms, and kitchen and laundry facilities, to some extent. The two French sisters were there again. I took a nap and when I woke up, Lone and Anabel and Matthieu had arrived as well. It seemed sort of funny the way we kept finding each other. Anabel and Lone told me they had had to stay at a sort of pension in Santillana del Mar, which ended up costing them significantly more than they had hoped to spend. I was glad to hear that, after having spent the night behind a gas station getting barked at by dogs and yelled at by neighbors and crawled on by slugs.

I went back into town to locate the library. It was right next to the tourist information bureau. There was a sort of patio there and some benches, and a lot of people sitting around and children playing. This was one of the things that surprised me about Spain: how much time people spent outdoors socializing.

In the library I needed to wait for some time before the computer was free. I found a book of Garcia Lorca's poetry which brought back memories of high school Spanish Literature class. I also found some works of St. John of the Cross. The depth of his work always overwhelms me. These intimate encounters with God seem to me so overpowering, so dangerous and frightening, and yet in these poems it is presented as something so sweet, so sought after. It seems bold and somewhat innocent and somewhat unnatural and yet so natural as well, to read his words...

97: Steps towards grace: it's not that bad, is it?

2008-10-12T18:33:00.000-07:00

I'm not one of those Christians who frequently says "God spoke to me" or "God told me...". I can't distinguish God's voice from the other voices in my head, so I'm cautious about attributing any of them to God. But there are a handful of occurences in my life in which a thought entered my mind and filled me with such joyful tenderness that I am even more cautious about attributing it to anyone other than God.

It was 2000, and I'd had a very frustrating year and a half since finishing University. I had moved from Canada to Germany and from Germany to Ecuador, for the time being. My friend Bryan came to visit from Canada and we decided to take some time and travel through Patagonia.

I felt a little bit like I was doing something sinful. I expected that God would want me to do something useful, to get involved in missionary work or something like that. I felt like I couldn't even go and enjoy a trip like this without justifying it in some way, such as making a commitment that I would preach to people I met or something like that.

So I felt that I was going under God's radar, as it were. I felt a bit like Jonah running away from God.

How great was my surprise, then, that it was by taking a trip like this that I would have the deepest spiritual experience in my life up to that point.

It doesn't sound like much to describe it: I was sitting on the waterfront at Punta Arenas, looking out over the Strait of Magellan, when I felt as if God was saying, "come on now, Marco. It's not that bad, is it?"

Like I say, I'm cautious about attributing the thoughts I encounter to God. But something very strange happened: for the next few days and weeks I couldn't embrace the cynical, life-negating view I'd usually held up to that point. I was -- almost against my will, almost somewhat grudgingly, if that were possible -- glad to be alive. The whole trip had been a wonderful experience, and for the first time it didn't feel like something with which I tried to counterbalance the bad things in life. It felt like something simply good, simply to be enjoyed, simply to "taste and see that the Lord is good."

Of course, I managed to regain my Weltschmerz soon enough. A few months later I was working in a warehouse in England and hating my life just like in the good old days. But two things had been altered irreversibly in my grooves of thinking:

For one thing, I learned that I was capable of seeing life as something positive. This was sometimes comforting, but sometimes really alarming.

For another, I learned that I can go for decades as a Christian and still not know anything about the voice of God. I had always assumed that the voice of God was the voice that told me to be useful, to do things I don't like, to take on more responsibility and make more sacrifices and try harder. I had assumed that the part of me that wanted to escape, to travel and be a vagabond and an anonymous free spirit unconcerned with the usefulness of any of his actions, was the bad part -- the voice of temptation that I had to resist. But now I had to re-evaluate my life. The experience was too clear to have been an illusion. The result -- going from hating life to loving it -- far too positive to have come from an evil source. Maybe it had been the voice of God all along, calling me to Patagonia, calling me to be useless for once and to taste and see that the Lord is good. Maybe it was the other voice that was the false god, oppressing me with religiosity. Maybe I was finally understanding what grace means. I had been telling myself all my life that I had understood grace (Protestants can tend to flatter themselves with this compliment), while all the time I had been oppressed by the Protestant work ethic of "repayment by works". (We do not call it "Salvation by works" but it amounts to the same thing.)

This possibility grew slowly within me over the course of the next few years.

96: Cobreces and Comillas

2008-10-11T06:35:00.000-07:00

The day was slowly breaking behind me. I eventually came on another gas station, and I went in for a wash. I was still walking on the carretera instead of the trail. The kilometer markers on the side of the road gave me the idea that I should count how many steps I take per kilometer. Then I could calculate how many steps I took during the entire pilgrimage. I thought it would be fun to be able to tell someone, "yeah, I took 1.2 million steps on that particular hike."

But I kept losing count. The 15 minutes that it took me to walk a kilometer were a hard length of time to focus on counting steps. Because a number like "seven-hundred-and-seventeen" is hard to say in the space of time that you take one step (especially if you have to say it with every step), I abbreviated -- just kept the "one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, twenty... wait. Was I at twenty already, or is this thirty?"

I came to the top of a hill and found two other pilgrims, a man and a woman. When I spoke to them, I found out that they were German. I now found the trail, but because I was hungry I decided to continue along the carretera. I was now entering Cobreces, and had learned from past experience that the trail could go on for a long stretch before there would be any opportunity to buy food.

But it turned out that even walking through Cobreces didn't bring me past any food shops. So by the time I entered Comillas over an hour later, I was feeling a little faint.

There was a beautiful rocky beach with statues of boys posed to jump into the water. Then the road took a bend inland and I began to doubt that it would really lead me into downtown Comillas. I had thought the town would lie right on the beach.

But after a bit of a walk through wooded area I came into Comillas. I found the tourist information. They were closed, but a sign said they'd be open again in five minutes. I decided to take advantage of that time to shop for some food. There was a supermarket just across the street.

My body was crying out for some sustenance. As I stood in the checkout line, I had a brief moment in which I felt that I would faint. I was getting very annoyed with the people in the lineup in front of me. When I had finally made my purchase I immediately opened the carton of orange juice I had just bought and took a good draught. I needed some sugar in my bloodstream.

95: When things start seeming very petty

2008-10-03T11:20:00.000-07:00

When I was 13 my older sister moved away from our home in Quito to go to a boarding school in Paraguay. From then on I only saw her when she came to visit every year from December to February (the Southern Hemisphere's summer).

I remember the last day of one of these visits, the day before she would return to Paraguay and I wouldn't see her for another nine months. I might have been fourteen or maybe fifteen. We had had a great couple of months together as a family. One of the things we had been doing was working on some songs. My brother and I had both taken up the guitar in the course of that year. My voice had changed and was suddenly an adequate singing voice, and together with my two more melodious siblings we had learned some trios together.

Now it was the night before her departure, and I wanted to sit down with a tape recorder and make a recording of our recently rehearsed trios. But my sister was busy packing, and the household was generally in a disarray, and I saw that we wouldn't be making any recordings, and she was flying away in the morning.

I remember sitting in the darkened living room fighting my tears that night. I was angry with myself for crying over such a small thing. So we didn't manage to put a song on tape. Was that a good reason to cry? It didn't occur to me at the time that maybe my emotional turmoil was not so much due to not recording a souvenir of our time together as due to, well, the departure of a sister.

But the pettiness of things got a hold on me. Everything that bothered me -- really bothered me to where I could throw a tantrum or shed tears -- seemed so very banal and insignificant. I felt ashamed that the stupid little details of life could get to me like that, and I did not want to acknowledge them enough to let them reduce me to tears.

I did not cry again until I was 28.

94: A dead slug

2008-09-30T20:11:00.000-07:00

Should I get into all the gory details about biological and sanitary needs when you are on a pilgrimage? Maybe I should just mention that it is a good idea to bring toilet paper and a small shovel, for two distinct ways of meeting the need. Usually, where you'll need the shovel there will be enough moss and foliage that you won't need toilet paper, and where you'll need toilet paper there won't be a need for a shovel.

And you should bring soap. That part should be obvious.

Your digestion will not always wait for you to find the perfect spot. In some cases, you will wake up in the middle of the night and find yourself sleeping on a patch of grass behind a gas station, and find it necessary to put on your shoes and get your flashlight and find a patch of trees or bushes as makeshift sanitation.

I managed to fall asleep again after this incident, but not for long. I was irreversably awake long before the day was dawning. I decided to keep walking.

The first thing I noticed was that I had crushed a slug in my sleep. When you sleep outside in some places, you may notice that slugs crawl onto your shoes and sleeping bag and backpack during the night. I'm not sure what they're looking for that they can't find in the grass.

This one had come all the way to where it was right next to my head, and I must have turned around in my sleep right around then. Fortunately it got stuck between my hat and the sleeping bag, rather than getting crushed into my actual hair.

Still, it was gross. It had been one of those big brown slugs, a bit like the lower lip of a large African woman. And it was now a gooey paste on my hat and my sleeping bag.

I packed my things and started walking. I had walked at night before, and had walked through fog almost every day, but this was the first time I was walking through a foggy night. Here and there a dog barked, but otherwise the tapping sound of my walking stick and my heavy breathing were the only sounds I could hear. The street was not illuminated, and there were sometimes large stretches in which there was no house or any other source of light. I had to use my flashlight sometimes, or just walk through the misty darkness.

I took a break after half an hour to stretch. I had heard that it is better to stretch after warming up than to stretch cold before exercising.

93: The underachiever, Part 4

2008-09-29T22:04:00.000-07:00

Is a desire for success different from a fear of failure? No doubt it is, but I have a hard time seeing the difference. Or seeing how someone can tell whether he is driven by a desire for success or a fear of failure. I bet it feels exactly the same.

We tend to think of an achiever as being driven by 1. a desire for success and 2. high standards. Because if his standards are low, he is considered an underachiever even if he succeeds in reaching them.

But I wonder how many times this combination is exactly what makes an underachiever as well. The high standards mean that success will come with difficulty, or that there is a risk of failure. But the desire for success, if it is coupled with a fear of failure, may immobilize someone rather than drive him forward.

It is an interesting detail that I have noticed: when I speak to underachievers, it seems that they often have higher ambitions than the achievers and overachievers.

92: vagabond as I know it

2008-09-28T19:53:00.000-07:00

The rest of the day I walked. Much of the stretch was along a pipeline. I was listening to Johnny Cash on my mp3 player, which I did break out on occasion. I wondered whether I would make the next stop, Santillana del Mar, by night time. I stood on a bridge for a while, considering whether I could sleep under it. I decided against it and kept walking. I abandoned the trail again and went along a carretera. Another 5 Kilometers to Santillana, and it was getting dark.

I found a small gas station and decided to sleep behind it. I brushed my teeth, then went out back and spread out my sleeping bag. This kind of sacking out was more familiar to me than the regular pilgrim hangouts.

A dog was barking at me. I remembered other times when I slept outside -- in Canada or Argentina or other such trips -- and how some dogs would literally bark all night because they knew I was nearby. I always wanted to make a deal with them, that I would not move for the rest of the night if they would agree to be quiet for the rest of the night. They didn't seem to care, even if I just lay motionless all night long, the fact that I was there meant they had a right to bark, and if they had a right to bark, well darned if they aren't going make ample use of that right.

This dog eventually went away. But now a lady in a neighboring house was calling from her balcony. I was comfortably settled in my sleeping bag, had taken off my glasses and was plugging up my ears. I couldn't tell for sure if she was calling to me, so I just ignored her. I became increasingly certain that she was, in fact, trying to get my attention. Some bum going to sleep just outside her backyard.

It wasn't even fully dark yet, but I drifted off to sleep.

91: The Indifference of the Universe

2008-09-16T16:52:00.000-07:00

When I look at what people do in life and ask myself why we do them, there seem to be two ansers:

1. the fear of boredom, and
2. the indifference of the universe.

Why do I say things when I'm in conversation with other people? Because I have a viewpoint, and by voicing it I can distract myself for a moment from the intolerable lack of a difference that it makes, cosmically speaking.

Why do I write songs? Same reason.

Why am I writing this? Same reason.

Or maybe not. Maybe I just write because I'm bored. Humans aren't designed to do nothing. They'll do something -- anything -- to pass the time.

But the fear of boredom doesn't explain why we do things that we think have meaning. We do things that we think have meaning because we cannot bear to exist unperceived, to be ghosts, so to speak, who are not acknowledged by anyone and who are unable to manipulate, in any way whatsoever, their surroundings.

I seem to lack the gene which drives people to procreate. I'm told that many people want to have children because they take comfort in the idea that their name or their genetic material will live on after they are gone. I'm told that this is a major driving force in evolution. In that case I must be the evolutionary link that has realized that there's already too many people on the planet, and that has dispensed with the idea of it being in any way significant to have one's name and genetic material keep existing.

But why do children keep saying, "look, mom"? Why do people get married? Is it not in order to have a witness, so to speak? Zaphod Beeblebrox asks, "how do yo know you're having fun when no one's watching you have it?" This is actually quite funny, but it's also true. If I say that I love music, then why am I not content to just play my guitar or my piano in the privacy of my home? Why do I consider it necessary to be performing music in front of others? Why do I go to such lenghts to keep in touch with my friends? Is it all not because I need someone or something to give me the feeling that my existence is not going by completely unperceived, unrecognized, unappreciated?

What have I ever done that wasn't an attempt to get away from boredom and anonymity?

90: crossing a railroad bridge

2008-07-06T18:53:00.000-07:00

Matthieu and I kept walking together. At the pilgrim shelter in Santander there had been a "secret" tip tacked on one of the walls, describing a way in which one could save a few kilometers by crossing a river over a railroad bridge on which pedestrians actually weren't allowed. We weren't so scrupulous as to let that law stop us, and we had taken a copy of the hand-drawn map with us to make this shortcut. Once on the other side of the river, I told Matthieu to keep walking if he wanted, because I was going to take a break.

I sat down by the river and soaked my feet in the cold, cold water. My feet were in pain, although it was not as bad as it had been several days ago. All the same, I figured that maybe this would be a way to stop it from getting that bad again.

There was no real road or path here, which was hardly surprising considering that the railroad bridge was not meant to be walked on. I bushwhacked my way through some tall grass and got to a railroad station.

OK, "train stop" might be a more appropriate word. It was a platform on each side of the tracks, with a small building which was closed and did not seem to be used much at all. I tried to make myself comfortable on one of the benches, in another one of my abortive attempts to catch up on some sleep. After a while I heard voices, and looking over I saw Anabel chatting with two other pilgrims on the opposite platform. They, like me, were taking a little break in the shade. Soon they went their way. I grew restless of trying to fall asleep, and went walking as well. I found a supermarket and managed to get some yoghurt and a baguette just before the place closed down. I sat down on the sidewalk opposite to eat.

The day was hot. The sun was blasting oppressively, and the air was wavering. There was not much shade for the next kilometers. It was mostly construction zones. Here and there you could see half-finished rows of suburbia houses, but for the most part it was sand piles and bulldozers. Trucks full of earth or stones were rattling by constantly.

I eventually found a bar and ordered a glass of orange juice. I was practically alone in the place, and I asked the barkeeper if I could receive a phone call here. He said it should be fine, so I placed a call to my brother in Canada and asked him to call me back.

We had a good long conversation. My brother and I are opposites in many ways, and there is always that risk that our talks will circle around the same subjects all the time, those elements in each other's lives which we do not understand. I think he had only recently begun to realize just how deep my anger and depression at being alive really was. It alarmed him, of course, but because he couldn't relate to it, his solution consisted of moralizing suggestions telling me that it is wrong to feel this way and that I can feel differently if I try.

But fortunately there was very little of this going on. We talked as men who are forced to try to understand each other because they are brothers, and not as people who each try to force the other to understand them.

89: Fear and desire

2008-07-05T15:29:00.000-07:00

On my last night in Amsterdam before I left for the pilgrimage (or rather, the Grenoble vacation followed by the week in Taize followed by the pilgrimage) I had given a concert entitled "Songs of Fear and Desire". I played mostly songs I had written, and I gave way-too-long spoken meditations in between.

The nature of fear and desire really gripped me. Can these forces be distinguished? When are they good? When are they bad? How much do they really "exist" in themselves, and how much are they dependent on each other?

If someone wants something, is it the desire for the thing itself, or is it the fear of having to continue life without it that motivates him? If a man wants to get married, is he driven by the desire for the woman, or by the fear of being left to live his life without her? Can he even tell the difference between the two? People claim they can, but I am skeptical. It feels to me like they haven't faced the question very honestly.

To me, anyway, the answer is not clear. I can't tell if I want something because the desire is in itself a force, or if I want something because I am afraid of missing out on it.

Unless it is one of the forms of desire we call sinful. I can identify those types of desire as being a force in themselves, quite independent of fear. I can identify when I feel lust, or envy, or avarice. This is desire. When I am tempted to lust after a woman, I do not perceive that desire to be really a form of fear. I perceive the desire to be an actual something.

But when I think about my desire for God, I do not perceive that as a something. It seems to be a nothing that is the negative space around my fear.

Ambition, which is generally thought of as desire, seems to be more of a fear; it is the fear of anonymity, the fear of a life without achievement (or, in my case at least, without some recognition for achievement).

Love, on the other hand, I cannot really imagine. It is an elusive concept to me. I think about people I love, and I find that they are few. And then I wonder what it means that I love them, and I find that I don't have a very clear answer to that question. It has gotten even more complex since I have had a look into the whole emotional mess of what is called "co-dependence", that form of narcissism which passes for love in so many real-life relationships as well as romance novels, romantic movies or pop songs. It gets confusing, and even the "real item", the love that the Bible talks about, does not help me out.

88: Lousy walk out of Santander

2008-07-02T17:33:00.000-07:00

The pilgrim shelter at Santander had an early morning kick-out policy. I got out and started walking. There were random arrows on the pavement, leading generally westwards out of the city.

But what a long walk out of the city it was proving to be. Suburb after suburb, industrial sector after industrial sector seemed lined up beside a loud, smelly highway. This kind of walking is bad on the nerves. Not since the last little stretch between Gernika and Bilbao had I had such a dispiritingly urban walk.

There was a shrine beside the highway at one point. I looked in, and underneath a crucifix it had a few words from John 14: "Jesus said, 'I am the way...'".

Now that, I thought, that is something one can meditate on during a pilgrimage. Let's try that as a refrain.

"Jesus said, 'I am the way.'"
"Jesus said, 'I am the way.'"
"Jesus said, 'I am the way.'"
"Jesus said, 'I am the way.'"
"Jesus said, 'I am the way.'"

It quickly became my walking rhythm.

The way I was walking was dirty and smelly and loud. It was not attractive. Jesus is the way. This way? Oh man. What a depressing thought.

Finally the trail bent off away from the highway. It went through fields, and some quiet towns and neighborhoods.

I found a sort of park with a water pump and some benches and I figured this would be a good place to eat breakfast.

While I was eating I saw Matthieu coming up along the trail. He joined me for a moment, I finished eating and we set off together.

87: the absence of good. Or was it evil?

2008-06-30T08:25:00.000-07:00

One of atheism's great arguments against the sort of God-figure that Christians have is that there is evil in the world. God is not good enough or not powerful enough to prevent it.

There have always been Christian counter-arguments, of course. One of these says that evil is simply the absence of good; the sun is hot and bright and if there are places that are dark and cold, then that means that they are far away from the sun. Where there is evil, it is because people have distanced themselves from God.

I won't try to consider the relative merits of these arguments. I think you'll believe the one side or the other depending on which conviction you already have about God, and that this conviction will have a lot to do with what you have experienced in life and what you are afraid of.

But the assertion that evil is the absence of good has been occupying my mind. Do we really perceive reality like this? Do we see health as the absence of disease, or disease as the absence of health? Do we see injustice as the absence of justice, or justice as the absence of injustice?

I almost think that we don't see evil as the absence of good. We don't have a clear enough picture of good to think of it as being much of anything. If "good" does not have a palpable reality, then it is difficult to think of anything being "the absence of good". Evil, on the other hand, seems to be very easy to picture as something.

This is more than one of those "half-empty/half-full" questions. The fact is that evil has a more palpable presence, one that we can feel; "good", in comparison, is ethereal and almost unreal.

Brutality is "something". You experience it with your senses, it causes a reaction in your mind and body. The same with tension. But peace -- well, what is peace? Where do you localize it? Isn't it simply the absence of tension and violence?

I can't tell what comfort is unless I ask myself about discomfort; but I know discomfort without comparing it to comfort. Discomfort can be localized. Maybe the chair I'm sitting in is uncomfortable, and I can tell that because of what I feel in my lower back. Maybe my shoes are uncomfortable, and I can point to the exact place or places on my feet where I feel the discomfort.

But what is a comfortable chair or a comfortable shoe? Where can I point and say, "ahh, feel that comfort right there"? Isn't it that I can search my body for feelings of discomfort, and, in the absence of such feelings, can consider the chair or the shoe comfortable?

When I think about people I love, I have a hard time putting that feeling into any positive terms. What do I mean when I say that I love my parents? I mean, for example, that I miss them, that I'm afraid about bad things happening to them, and that I feel pity and maybe anger when bad things do happen to them.

So we got "absence" (the sense of missing someone), fear, pity and anger. How can this combination of negative emotions define a positive emotion? The positive emotion? Sure, the emotions are directed against the circumstances surrounding my parents, and not against my parents themselves. But that is like defining something by what it is not. It is a negative print. It is like drawing a horse by drawing everything around the horse and leaving the horse shape itself blank. You could, in a sense, say that you've drawn a horse. But your horse's surroundings have far more features than the horse itself.

What is virtue if not the absence of vice? When we say "humility", don't we just mean the absence of pride? When we say "honesty", do we mean something active that has its own presence, or are we talking about that which happens when the active circumstance of "telling lies" is stopped? Is "chastity" something in itself, is it a power or a force or anything tangible at all, or is it just the absence of sex? Sex, deceit, pride -- all these seem real enough. They seem like actual things we can do and have, and not like the absence of something. It is the corresponding virtues that seem like absence, like Arctic air far removed from the burning sun of passion. Sure, the air may be pure, but what does "purity" mean if not the absence of contamination?

But how could I be a Christian for so many years and yet not have any clearer picture of Christian virtues than to picture them as the absence of vices which I have a pretty clear picture of?

It seems that many Christians will argue that evil is the absence of good, but will live as if, in reality, good is simply the absence of evil. I am in the same category, but now that I have realized it, it really bothers me.

86: Evening in Santander

2008-06-23T17:45:00.000-07:00

I finished my time at the internet cafe. I walked back through Santander towards the pilgrim shelter. As I passed a cathedral I heard the bells ringing and remembered that it was Sunday and I hadn't been to a church service, but it turned out that the bells were not ringing for Mass. It was late afternoon by now. The other churches I passed were not doing anything for the rest of the day either.

I found a public phone and called my parents. Then I walked back to the pilgrim shelter. There was a shelf there where pilgrims had left things behind. There were tents, portable stoves, and other camping gear. I thought of my guitar and how heavy it had gotten after a few days on the road, even though it had seemed like such a good idea to bring it. I could easily understand why someone might bring camping gear, only to abandon it after half the pilgrimage.

I found some foot balm though. It was supposed to help feet that were worn out from walking. I'm not sure how it was supposed to do that, but I figured that it couldn't hurt to try it out, especially since it came in a small bottle that wouldn't weigh heavily in my backpack.

I ate the "pilgrim's special" in the bar just downstairs from the shelter. To my surprise, I was served by the same two women whom I had met in Somo and had asked about the pilgrim shelter.

It was a large meal for a decent price. There was a large screen television showing the Barcelona game. Later in the evening, Anabel showed up in the restaurant as well.

85: The Underachiever, Part 3

2008-06-20T08:12:00.000-07:00

For some of us, disappointment is pretty much the greatest pain in life.

Such people are frequently called "pessimists". Our fear of having our hopes dashed makes us wary of having hope at all. We prefer to imagine things to be as bad as they could possibly be, thereby leaving the door open to pleasant surprises but closed to disappointment.

Why do some people achieve a lot less than we think their potential would allow them to? Isn't it because where there is potential there are expectations, and where there are expectations there is a great possibility of disappointment?

People have told me not to fear disappointment so much, but I don't know how that is done. Our fears are usually not so rational that we can simply decide not to have them any more. And that goes for the fears that we know are irrational. How much more for the fears that have a basis in actual experience? The fear of dogs for someone who has never gotten close to a dog is different from the fear of dogs for someone who has been bitten.

It seems to me that the first step in conquering a fear of disappointment would be to learn that disappointment isn't so bad, and that getting your hopes up about things can actually be rewarding.

No doubt there are people whose life experience confirms this, but for some of us it takes great faith to believe that hoping for things is better than not hoping for them. To me it seems that whenever I hope for something (and I mean "hope" in the sense that I have a strong emotional investment in the outcome), I get punished for that hope by having it hurt me.

This is not a good way to train someone in the virtue of hope. It's a way to condition someone to be wary of hope.

Now I don't want to complain about the disappointments in my life, because no doubt it is a very minor pain compared to the sufferings that others have to go through. But even a mild electric shock is an unpleasant enough experience that it can make you avoid certain behavioral patterns that unleash it. Especially if the shock is not accompanied by some worthwhile reward.

As far as I can see, hope sucks. I have a hard time seeing how it is one of the great Christian virtues.

84: Santander

2008-06-10T20:26:00.000-07:00

I did not end up eating at McDonald's. I did, however, look up a place with an internet connection. It was a ways away from the pilgrim shelter, which gave me an opportunity to walk through Santander for a bit.

What's wrong with me, I thought. My first priority is always to find an internet connection. Maybe I need to feel that I can still have contact with my friends?

Lone was at one of the computers in the call center. Ha, I thought. This is practically the biggest city I'll visit on this whole trip, and even here I keep bumping into the same two or three people I already know.

I wrote this blog entry. I had realized in my ponderings of what I wanted to do with my life that I was most alive when I was on the road. I no longer really believed that I could make a lifestyle of this, and I was afraid that if I could I would start hating it someday. But I had noticed that it was in my travels that my life seemed most worthwhile. I remembered hitch hiking trips, and prolonged hikes, and visits to faraway friends, as being the times when I came closest to really wanting to live.

It sort of scared me.

83: So what do I want?

2008-06-09T19:35:00.000-07:00

In my teens I often considered going for a career in music. I played the piano quite well.

But I think I sort of despised the idea of ending up somewhere in between. There are few careers in music unless you "make it big". I often wondered about those who just ended up teaching somewhere. Did their ambitions desert them? Was their potential not enough? Or was their love primarily for teaching, rather than for music?

All three of these possible explanations depressed me. I knew that, realistically, I couldn't expect to get much further myself.

Looking back, I'm not sure what my standard response to that was. I remember that sometimes I was in a state of denial, assuring myself that I would in fact play the world's great stages someday. Other times I looked more towards a vagabond existence in which I'd travel the world, keeping music as a hobby but never really an ambition.

It must have been clear to me that neither of these goals was realistic. So what was my realistic portrayal of my future?

I'm not sure. But I do think that I got suspicious of taking any of my dreams or ambitions too seriously. They were doomed to fail, so it made more sense to not get emotionally attached to them.

If there is one word that summarizes what I have wanted most consistently in my life, that word would have to be "impermeability". I wanted to be out of reach of disappointment. I knew I could never be spared pain or injustice, but I thought that maybe I could become immune to it. At the very least, I could minimize it. And the best way to minimize the potential for disappointment is to expect nothing good to come your way. I am suspicious of my dreams. I am afraid of falling in love. I am afraid of having a lot to lose. I have always been sure that I will in fact lose everything, and have always tried to minimize what I am attached to.

I failed. In spite of my efforts, I did have hopes and expectations. And they were shattered.

I sort of saw my remaining decades of being alive as one long quest to remain as emotionally detached as possible. I expected everything that I became attached to to be taken away. The problem was not in things being taken away from me; the problem was in me being attached to them. You can take everything from me if I don't care whether I have it or not. That's what I wanted to become.

This wasn't working either. In spite of my efforts, I keep being emotionally attached to things. I keep having hopes and expectations. It sets me up for disappointment and pain and all sorts of nasty stuff.

What do I want? Mostly things that imply a passive state, maybe a state of being protected. I want rest. I want peace. I want serenity. I want an absence of tension. Being sentient means being in tension. This is a problem. I don't want problems. I want rest.

It sounds like the closest that I want to do is "nothing". But why do I always sabotage that? Why, when I actually come close to doing nothing, am I driven to doing something? Sometimes so driven that I do anything, anything to not have to be doing nothing? Is my desire to do nothing maybe the desire for the impossible, because I know that I am not capable of doing nothing, not able to really be at rest, not able to tolerate a lack of tension? Or do I sabotage my own desire for fear that any desire, even if it is a desire for nothingness (or let's say, especially if it is a desire for nothingness), is sure to disappoint?

If you want to be safe by detaching yourself from all your desires, then you run into a paradox, because your desire to detach yourself from all desires is in itself a desire you must detach yourself from. How do you do that? How on earth can that be done?

82: Getting to Santander

2008-06-08T20:09:00.000-07:00

The next day was only a short stretch. It was 12 Kilometers to Santander. I was toying with the idea of walking further, but I also liked the notion of spending most of a day in a big city again.

I left together with Matthieu, after Lone had already gone. The day was somewhat misty, but the landscape was beautiful and our conversation was good as well. We reached a small town in which the church door was open, so we went inside. Since it was Sunday, we were thinking of staying for mass, but when we heard that it would not begin for another hour, we just went in for a brief time of silent prayer and then moved on.

We met Lone and the three of us continued together. The walk to Somo was easy and uneventful. From there we were to take the ferry into Santander. I had misunderstood Matthieu, however, when he had said something about the shelter being "just before the ferry." I'm not sure if that's what he had said, but I had assumed that he meant that the pilgrim shelter is in Somo. So I let Matthieu and Lone go ahead to Santander, while I looked around Somo for a pilgrim shelter. I asked some women, but they told me that the only one they knew about was in Santander.

I took the ferry an hour later.
In Santander I hung around a park for a while, and found a tourist information booth. I eventually found the pilgrim shelter, and reserved myself a bed by putting my backpack on it. The man working there was strongly opposed to this gesture.

"That backpack has been all over the place!" He yelled at me. "You've probably had it lying on the ground, where it's dirty and where people have spit on. And now you put it on a bed!?"

I mumbled an apology. This seemed like obsessive cleanliness to me, especially when compared to the state that most pilgrim shelters had been in.

The shelter was closing for the rest of the afternoon, and I could come back in the evening to spend the night. I was told that there was a pilgrim's special at the restaurant downstairs. I went out into the city to walk around. I felt guilty for craving a McDonald's hamburger.

81: Reflections on James, Part 2: Trials and temptations

2008-06-03T02:30:00.000-07:00

The first thing that James launches into after a brief greeting is the encouragement to consider trials a pure joy, because they lead to perseverance, which leads to maturity and completeness.

A few verses later, he says,

When tempted, no one should say, "God is tempting me." For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone; but each one is tempted when, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death.

It's a sort of neat parallel here:

trials -> perseverance -> completeness
temptation/desire -> sin -> death

But how is this to be understood? How can there be a trial which is not also a temptation? Maybe we just need to remember that every circumstance, good or bad, put us in a situation where a new path to sin has opened up, but that this is not the same thing as calling the circumstance itself a temptation.

But, to turn it around, how is a temptation not a trial? Why should we consider trials pure joy, as they are the means to our perfection, and yet abstain from attributing temptation to God? If one verse later he says,

Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights,

then what exactly is a trial? Can we attribute those to God, since we are told that they are grounds for rejoicing and since they complete us? Are they now a good gift or not?

I am probably understanding all these terms wrong. I can agree that a trial is not, in itself, a temptation; but I can't imagine a temptation that is not a trial. And if I am to give thanks for trials "of all sorts", then that would include temptations. Do I thank God because I'm being tempted, and yet make sure not to attribute the temptation itself to Him? Should we really say that the devil does God's dirty work?

The other difficulty I'm carrying with me all my life is that of "my own desires". If my own desires lead to sin and from there to death, it would be better to not have any desires, wouldn't it?

I have been suspicious of my desires all my life, because of passages like these. But in trying to abolish my desires I did not grow closer to God. It tortured me. And my encounters with God have had with them a certain character of liberating my desires, not destroying them. What little I know about the joy of the Lord was actually recognized through my desires, and not by abolishing them.

So how to make sense of this passage? Is it simply a difference between my "evil" desires and my "regular" ones? That, too, is a distinction I'm not ready to make. Any desire in me is to some extent "normal" or even "good" and to some extent tainted, and not in a way that is easy to differentiate. Evil is mixed in thoroughly, like sugar dissolved in water, so that I cannot draw a line through my desires to say, "this line separates the normal desire from the evil one."

80: Pictures of dinner in the shelter in Güemes

2008-05-27T15:33:00.000-07:00

79: the pilgrim shelter in Güemes

2008-05-20T23:55:00.000-07:00

Long before I had started the pilgrimage, I had had vague imaginings of what I would encounter along the road. I often indulged in an image of a tavern out of an Asterix book or Lord of the Rings or whatever: Massive wooden tables, a roaring fire with an entire boar roasting on it, colorful anachronistic characters drinking and singing.

I really don't know why I kept coming back to that image. It probably had to do with the idea of being a Pilgrim, and all the medieval associations one has.

The shelter in Güemes was the first one that seemed to me what a pilgrim shelter should be. The sleeping room was nothing special, just a few bunk beds crammed into a room.

But then there was the eating area.

This included a small, rustic kitchen, an antiquated fireplace area where you could easily imagine an entire boar on a spit; a large solid table with chairs around it; and then an entire hanging out area. On the walls there were exotic posters from all over the world. There were shelves with random artifacts like fossils and mining lanterns. There were cushions around a small table with some interesting books on it. There was a puma hide on one wall. There was a great view of the valley outside from the large double door.

I was still looking for the "hospitalero". That's the person who runs the shelter. Outside in a sort of courtyard I found Matthieu, hanging out with some locals who were singing and laughing. Singing and laughing? Does that sound anachronistic or what?

I eventually got inscribed, took a shower and washed some of my clothes. In the meantime the hospitalero had gotten busy making us a dinner. Lone arrived, and two French women were already there. The six of us had dinner together. Afterwards we got a fire going in the large fireplace, and hung out talking for a while. We heard about the priest who ran this place. He was a traveling soul, and had actually taken most of the photographs and collected the artifacts that adorned the walls. He was, we were told, currently in Santo Toribio, where the year of jubilee was just coming to an end. Santo Toribio de Liebana is another one of the most frequently visited pilgrimage sites in the world, especially on the years of jubilee, like this year was. Apparently you can obtain special pardons.

This is one aspect of the Roman Catholic Church I've never understood.

78: What I Want To Do With My Life

2008-05-12T20:03:00.000-07:00

One of the monks at Taize had encouraged me to ask myself what I wanted to do with my life. I wrote down the suggestion, and I doubt that I would otherwise have remembered it now because it had been so unpleasant to me that I had forgotten it soon afterwards. But I had now spent the walking day -- which, in spite of some pain, had been significantly better than the two days preceding it -- trying to keep returning to the question.

When Jona was chilling outside of Niniveh waiting for the city to go up in smoke, a vine grew near him and gave him shade. Then the vine died, and Jonah, lying in the hot sun and scorching wind, got to where he wished he were dead.

This sounds melodramatic. Over a vine. Over a hot day. But I go through far pettier melodrama every day. The smallest inconveniences trigger the response in me that I wish I had not been born. I notice that I've double-booked my Thursday afternoon and I have to call someone and cancel with them. I notice that my shifts begin at 5:30 AM the coming week. I have to ride my bike home and it's pouring rain and I didn't bring a jacket. That kind of thing. I sit there thinking, "why do I have to put up with being alive?"

I'm so glad that bit about Jonah is in the Bible. I'm so glad that Ecclesiastes is in the Bible, with its passages like

"And I declared that the dead,
who had already died,
are happier than the living,
who are still alive.
But better than both
is he who has not yet been,
who has not seen the evil
that is done under the sun."

Without such passages, I would feel very lonely. Many people around me pretend that I'm the only one who has such thoughts, so it is comforting to see that some of the heroes of the Bible were already saying these things.

But if this is the way I feel, then what is the point of asking what I want from life? Whatever I want from life is only my secondary choice; it's like the guy who gets drafted into military service being asked what he wants to achieve while in the force. Maybe he has some goals; but maybe his greatest wish is to go home and have nothing to do with the war. How can he get passionate about any of his military goals if his inmost wish is that he hadn't been drafted in the first place?

It feels like anything I do in life can be compared to that point in a sleepless night when you realize that you won't fall asleep anyway and you resign yourself to being awake. At that point lying in bed becomes unbearable; it is pointless when you know that hope for sleep is in vain. Maybe you start reading, or doing some paperwork, or cleaning up, or watching television. But the fact is, you don't really have a strong desire to do any of these things; it is just that the thing you would like to be doing is not being granted to you as an option, so you fill your time with other things.

In this life I have resigned myself to not being allowed to rest, and I fill my time doing things that I may have some half-hearted interest in. Sometimes the interest is a lot more than half-hearted -- sometimes it could even be genuine desire, at any rate something that I bite myself into with a frightening tenacity -- but that is always embarassing. It is usually some minor issue, like getting a new lamp at my workplace; or it is something sinful, like envy or lust; or it is something utterly self-aggrandizing, like world fame.

What do I want to do with my life? Not live. But since I have no choice but to live it, what do I want to do? Well, there's Option A or Option B or Option C and so on (one of the curses of our blessed Western upbringing is that infinity of options). I could do any of them. I may have bit more interest in some than in others, but I don't really want any of them. On a practical level I'm just looking for a way to pass the remaining decades without increasing the pain and bitterness unnecessarily.

I bet that wasn't the answer the monk had been looking for when he asked me the question.

77: Walking to Güemes

2008-04-28T15:11:00.000-07:00

The German man who was already at the pilgrim shelter was a strange one. He spoke a lot, and the conversation revolved around him and what a groovy guy he was. Even though his English wasn't that good, he refused to speak German with me. He had done the Camino and was now doing it backwards, mostly by bus, but still staying at the pilgrim shelters.

The character of the Camino is suffering from people who behave like tourists. It is generally frowned upon to be staying in the pilgrim shelters if you travel by bus or car. During high season the shelters are packed to overflowing, and sometimes people who have walked all day cannot go in for a shower and a bed.

Matthieu arrived much later. He had had no luck getting the ferry across to Santoña, and so he was spending the night here as well.

We all left at separate times in the morning. I followed the trail markers for a while, but I saw on the map that there was a great bulge in which the trail led to the place where the ferry would drop you off in Santoña. I didn't feel like doing that extra distance, so I headed generally westwards along the carretera hoping that I would eventually find the trail again further along.

This ended up leading to a full day of walking random country roads. I passed the ubiquitous construction zones, and walked on highways that weren't meant for walking. I took a lunch break in a village that had picnic tables in the shade. The roads and villages got smaller and smaller, which made it feel more and more like a pleasant nature walk. I stopped in one village to ask if there was drinking water, and they led me to a small fountain just outside. I took off my shoes and bathed my feet. I drank and filled up my water bottle. A middle-aged couple drove up and the lady got out with some water containers that she filled up at the fountain. We talked a little, I told her about the pilgrimage and asked her how far I still had to walk to Güemes. She didn't know kilometers, but told me it was not far. She left me with an admonishment that I should become a vegetarian.

I did eventually find the trail again. As circumstances would have it, there was that older Spanish couple again whom I had met in Castro Urdiales. We walked together for a bit, following a trail that grew fainter and fainter until all that was left was a trail marker boldly pointing into an open field.

The man consulted his guide book. "Yes," he said, "we just walk right across this field and join the trail at the other end."

But the other end of the field did not seem to have a trail leading from it. After a few failed attempts to find it, we decided to continue on the country road.

I let them continue walking when I found a park beside the road. There were some shady spots in the grass that looked promising for a siesta. But after laying there for over 40 minutes without falling asleep, I decided to walk on.

It was late afternoon, and everything was bathed in golden sunlight. There were green hills, there were pastures and fields, and sometimes the road led through a bit of forest.

This, I thought, was what I had imagined my pilgrim walking to be like. Beautiful landscape in the cool of the evening. Ever since Gernika I had always had a bit of a fear that if I walk too late, I'll arrive at the closed doors of an unattended shelter once again. So I had not taken afternoon breaks for as long as I had wanted to.

Even now I was a little afraid that the shelter would be closed by the time I arrived. It was evening when I entered the village of Güemes. An old lady was working in her garden. "Ya casi has llegado," she called to me.

I had spent the whole day thinking about what, ultimately, I wanted to do in life.

76: Laredo

2008-04-13T19:59:00.000-07:00

Matthieu parted ways with Lone and me. He was going to go look for a ferry on which he could cross the bay. It seemed like a sketchy proposition -- the guide book said that there was no schedule, just a man in a little boat whom you had to wave at and hope that he was looking your way.

Lone and I went to the tourist information center, which was still closed. I lay down on the grass to try to sleep, but it didn't take long until the information center opened. We went in and inquired about internet access and the local pilgrim shelter.

Internet access was free in a local cafe, but only if you bought something. And they only had one computer. Lone let me go first, and I wrote this blog entry and a few eMails. When I was finished, she was gone. I suddenly realized that I had taken a long time. I went to pay for my orange juice, but the waitress said that it had been paid for by the lady that had been sitting there.

Great, I thought. Not only did I rob Lone of her internet time, she also paid for my drink.

I sat down in a small park and wrote in my journal a bit while chewing on an apple. Then I went the remainder of the way to the next town where the pilgrim shelter was. Lone was already there. I showered, punctured my blisters, and went out again. There was a store and I bought bread, yoghurt, chocolate, tuna and an apple. These were rapidly becoming my staple foods. I walked to the seashore to find a good bench to sit on and eat.

My muscles and joints were so stiff and sore I could hardly walk. I looked like a cripple. I heard one woman say something to her child which sounded like, "watch out for that drunkard." I laughed inside.

I had expected to have a nice park bench picnic facing the sunset over the water, but I hadn't counted on the cold wind. It had been so warm all day. Now I was shivering, and couldn't really enjoy the view or the food.

Something's always imperfect, I thought.

75: Pictures, between Castro Urdiales and Laredo

2008-04-10T04:05:00.000-07:00

Matthieu disappears into the distance

Matthieu and Laredo (I must apologize to him for this picture, which is not really all that flattering to him).

74: The Alibi

2008-04-06T05:32:00.000-07:00

Is the pain worth it?

Well, what am I gonna do, turn back? Life is equally lame no matter where I go.

So why am I here, of all the places in the world where I could be equally miserable? Does the experience validate the difficulty?

It isn't that I'm a burden to the world. This talk about being a burden is simply an alibi. A justification. The fact is that I don't want to live. It doesn't seem worthwhile.

But I cannot easily admit that.

And why is that? It is because I cannot point at any great pain that I have to endure. I am not an African war child who has suffered nightmares of brutality from Day 1. I have not even lost a family member, I don't have any diseases or deformities, I do not live in need, I have not had to endure anything that could remotely qualify as "suffering".

But the smallest things -- really really ridiculous things -- make me wish that I weren't alive. Moments when someone disagrees with me and refuses to see my point of view. Moments when I lie awake thinking about the work load of the next few days and wishing I could at least face it in a well-rested state. Moments when I remember random hurtful things I have done to others. Moments when I realize that I probably have to walk this planet for a few decades yet, and that the good years are over. My default response to all this is: "I wouldn't be having this problem now if I hadn't been born."

Moments when I'm walking through a beautiful landscape with blisters on my feet, an injured knee, a heavy and un-ergonomic pack tearing my back in unnatural ways, and a collection of sore and stiff muscles.

It's not that the pain of my life is great; it's just that it's not worthwhile. I don't know what I'm getting in return.

Others would see a lot that I'm getting in return. They would say my life is great. They would go through much greater pain to achieve some of the joys that I take for granted. Others have very very difficult lives, and would gladly trade with me.

I know that, and it never fails to make me feel guilty. But it does not evoke my sympathy. If others' lives are more difficult but they want to live, then why should I feel sorry for them? They are in a transaction that, in spite of the price, they consider worthwhile. They are the lucky ones.

But I do not know how to make myself consider a transaction to be worthwhile. You either feel like you're paying a fair price for something or you don't. How can you make yourself feel the opposite? All my life I've been told to be thankful for what I have, but in spite of all my attempts I have never been very good at it. I've felt guilty for what I have -- I felt like resources were being unevenly distributed to favor those (like me) who have no appreciation for them -- but that is not the same as gratitude.

It seems that gratitude consists in part of realizing that you are the recipient of something good you do not deserve, and also in part of having the ability to enjoy this good. How do you achieve that? How do you learn to enjoy something? How do you convince yourself that you don't deserve it? By looking at the misery of those less fortunate than yourself? How do you convince yourself that they don't deserve something better? How do you do that without feeling guilty, and allowing the guilt to destroy your enjoyment?

I don't know what gratitude means.

73: The Pain of Walking

2008-03-21T06:22:00.000-07:00

If I spent as much time writing about the pain as I did thinking about it, this would get to be a very boring read. It was a constant companion for much of the trip. But on this day, it was particularly bad. I had strawberry-sized blisters on both of my feet, and although I had punctured them repeatedly, they just kept coming. I wondered if maybe my puncturing them caused an extra irritation which made them worse.

Laredo was still over a few hills, but already I was cursing with every step. I sounded a bit like Homer Simpson when he falls down, for example, a flight of stairs.

"GAA! OOOh! OW! SONOFA! EEE!"

For hours.

I could only think of the pain. Was the pain worthwhile? I mean, that's a pretty deep question, and probably applicable to just about any situation in life. Maybe it is the one question that, consciously or subconsciously, determines every choice we make.

Is the pain worthwhile?

I looked at Matthieu, walking a good distance ahead of me, and I remembered Patagonia. When I was trekking in Patagonia with my friend Bryan, it was a similar scenario: him disappearing off in front of me while I was cursing and groaning under the pain and weariness.

And yet, the memory of the pain had subsided somehow. How did that happen? I know that I had been extremely unhappy during those hikes, but the memory of the pain is not vivid at all. What is vivid are the landscapes and the feeling of freedom.

How does this happen? What selection process takes place? I've heard people talk about "repressing" or "suppressing" our negative memories, but is that what is going on here? Or does beauty really outweigh pain, only that it requires some time for the process?

I tried to imagine remembering today's walk in the future. I wondered if I'd remember the scenery and forget the pain.

I couldn't imagine it very well. The pain was searing. It dominated my thinking. I couldn't really focus on much else.

72: Castro Urdiales to Laredo

2008-03-20T08:30:00.000-07:00

In the morning the pilgrim shelter was lively as people were in various states of preparation. Lone left earliest. Anabel and the Austrians were taking their time, as they were planning a short walk to a nearby private shelter for that day. When I headed out, Matthieu was still getting ready and the French ladies had just left.

I lost the trail within ten minutes. An unlikely trail marker struck me as suspicious, and I followed a promising footpath instead. This lead me uphill and into a eucalyptus forest where it promptly lost itself. After trying a few times to find it again I realized that there was nothing to find; the trail had simply ended. I bushwhacked around the forest for a while and came to a rocky mountainside. I still had enough sense of direction to know that the most direct route would be over the mountain, but I also had enough common sense not to try it. I would not have believed how strenuous it is to walk without a trail when you have a pack to carry and worn-out feet and knees. I looked from my vantage point to the nearest road I could make out, then buswhacked in that direction.

I had to trespass through one or two farms, but when I came out on the road, I practically walked right into Matthieu's arms. I had found my way back to the trail. We walked together for a while, and talked a lot. The trail went through small Spanish farming villages, through pastures and through bits of forest. Fog rolled in.

Matthieu's father had died earlier that year, with an unfulfilled wish to someday travel the Camino de Santiago. Matthieu had now taken his father's hat and staff, and some of his father's ashes, to make the trip himself.

We came to a campsite which had a restaurant and an outdoor cafe, and there sat Lone. The three of us had breakfast together, then continued on our way.

The next thing I remember was that we were on the carretera again. Why, I ask myself in retrospect, did I keep going off the trail and onto the highway? If I remember correctly, it had to do mostly with the condition of the trail, especially on days when it had been raining heavily. But I was eventually to get heartily sick of walking on highways as well.

The talking decreased; we walked in single file, Matthieu first, then me, then Lone, with the distance between us gradually increasing. We eventually reached a sort of picnic area and had lunch. I took off my boots and tried to do something to alleviate the pain in my feet. Then we continued along the carretera, through beautiful Spanish landscape on a day that had become beautifully sunny, all the way to Laredo.

71: Reflections on James, Part I: only conventional wisdom?

2008-03-18T17:30:00.000-07:00

I got back to the albergue and found Helmut sitting at the table.

"Look what I got", I said, showing him my newly acquired Spanish New Testament. "Some pilgrim reading. I only had the gospels with me so far, but I wanted to use this opportunity to study the Book of James."

"The Book of James is interesting, isn't it? It's more like conventional Jewish wisdom than distinctly Christian theology."

"Yeah, he sounds a lot like the Proverbs. Talks about keeping the tongue in check, about not being too certain about what you'll be doing in the future, and that kind of thing..."

"Of course, there are echoes from the Sermon on the Mount as well".

"For sure. But there isn't much of the mysticism, the 'not I, but Jesus' talk that you get in Paul's epistles, for example. James mentions Jesus, like, twice in his letter?"

One monk at Taize had advised me to consider using another book of the Bible for my pilgrimage theme. He said that his impression of me was that I was someone who currently needed to meditate more on God's love, and less on practical wisdom and morality.

But I was not going to change plans at that point. If I'm going to the traditional site of St. James' remains, I'll read St. James' epistle, even if it is a different St. James. And of course I was balancing my readings with the resurrection accounts from the gospels.

The other thing was that I have a habit of making my theme passages the ones that give me most trouble. For most of my life the Book of James was the most accessible of all the Epistles, but over the last few years I had had increasing difficulty with it. If a passage gives me difficulty, I try to spend more time with it and see if I can understand how it all fits together.

70: Mioño to Castro Urdiales

2008-03-01T21:19:00.000-08:00

While I don't think I slept, I did actually doze off in spite of the noise. I picked up and started walking again. A minute later I passed by a park, with an attractive lawn and a playground and some shady trees.

Isn't that the way it always goes, I thought. You try to catch your siesta on a hard bus stop bench next to a construction zone, and there's a park just a few steps further.

But the reason the park was there was, of course, because I had taken a nap on that bench. Had I walked on looking for a pleasant place to lay my head, there would not have been a park for hours.

A short while later I found myself walking through what looked like recently constructed suburbs. I was already in the outskirts of Castro Urdiales. When I eventually stopped at a gas station to ask the way to the pilgrim shelter, the attendant knew nothing about a pilgrim shelter, but one of the clients told me that it had been recently constructed, but was quite a ways away, "near the bullfight arena". He was giving me a long description of the shortest way to get there, but I had already decided I would just walk downtown and hit the tourist information office. They at least have maps.

It was a good thing I took this approach. Not only would I have gotten hopelessly lost otherwise, but I would not have gotten in to the building even if I had found it. At the information office they gave me the all-important map and circled the place where the brand-new shelter was. They also circled the police station, where I would have to go first in order to register, get my pilgrim stamp, and get a key to the albergue.

There was an older Spanish couple there who were also doing the pilgrimage. They had passed me on the pavement just a few minutes before. "Not...A...Race...!" I'd repeated to myself through clenched teeth as I tried to pick up my tempo to not lag behind a pair of senior citizens. Now I had the satisfaction of seeing them ask about hotels. For a moment I felt smug that I was doing the "real" pilgrim thing with all its gritty asceticism. Then I realized how pathetic my sentiments were.

On my way to the police station I met a few boys playing on the streets. They were impressed with my look, my trenchcoat and walking staff and floppy wide-brimmed hat. They asked me where I was from and how far I'd been walking, and those statistics impressed them as well. And I thought they must see pilgrims all the time.

Castro Urdiales is a beautiful town. As I walked towards the albergue I made vague plans of coming back after a shower and without my backpack to hang out on the beach for a bit or to shop around in the narrow streets or visit that cathedral on the hill. I met Anabel, who was coming from the shelter with, apparently, similar plans.

Immediately upon arriving at the shelter, I set about putting my plan of taking a shower into action. I took some clothes into the shower with me and washed them there as well.

Helmut and Helga from Austria were there too. There were two French sisters who I could not communicate with, and there was Matthieu from Quebec. Later on Lone from Denmark joined us, so we were a merry little pilgrim gathering.

In the end I did not have the energy to go back downtown like I had hoped. My feet felt like fire and like leather, and there were some more blisters to operate on.

But I did shop around locally and found a bookstore which did, indeed, have a pocket-sized New Testament. I also picked up some groceries.

69: Steps towards (despair) grace: I have killed Christ

2008-02-23T17:38:00.000-08:00

We are told early on in our Christian life (and usually long before our Christian life begins) that Christ died for our sins.

But "Christ died for my sins" is usually a very theoretical view. As Christians we say that "it was my sin that put Jesus on the cross" or that "we all have crucified him", but do we know what that means? It is a bit like saying that "in Adam and Eve we have all sinned": deep down, each of us considers ourselves a bit better than the rest. Whatever theological truth we may cling to, there is a part of us that believes that if we had been there in the garden of the forbidden fruit, there would have been no Fall of Man, and that if we had been there in the crowds of Jerusalem, the crucifixion would not have taken place.

I have learned better. It was me who sinned by wanting to be like God. I was afraid of the place in which He had put me, and I wanted to have it in my power to put myself in another place.
It was me who killed Jesus. I killed him because I was so angry at having been at the mercy of God, at being powerless to determine my own life and at being powerless to resist God or avenge myself on Him. When he showed up in human form, as a person that I could physically hurt, I took the opportunity.

But I also killed him because I couldn't get him to stop loving me. Now that I was finally able to avenge myself on God, he did not even strike back or resist. He absorbed all the hatred and anger that I had against Him and continued to love me. He kept taking it even as it escalated. It became a challenge to see what I could do to him, and it got to where I could even kill him, and he wouldn't stop loving. Nothing is quite as odious as killing someone who loves you in return. But perhaps I am not ready to receive love until I have hated to the point of murder. Perhaps I cannot accept forgiveness until I have done something as heinous as killing the Lord of Love. Perhaps I cannot perceive that I need forgiveness until I have realized that I hate love so much that I would rather kill it than accept it.

68: Crossing a provincial boundary

2007-12-11T03:44:00.000-08:00

We got to the other end of the beach and crossed a bridge over a river into Pobeña. After walking for a few minutes we noticed that we weren't seeing any yellow arrows. This is a common occurrence, because even though the trail is generally well-marked, there are some important stretches that are hardly marked at all. Or you lose the trail by missing a single marking because it is hidden, or because you aren't looking, or because it isn't there.

"Yes", the next man we asked said to us, "I think the path goes along the shore back there. You missed it."

I hate backtracking. "And the carretera?" I ask.

"Yes, that will bring you to the same spot. You need to get to Covarón, and then continue from there."

Anabel and I looked at each other and decided that we would keep walking. We had not gone very far, however, when we noticed that this was a bad idea. It is very stressful to walk along narrow country roads where there is traffic. We found a side road which led steeply uphill. It looked like it could bring us to a point further along the trail, so we wouldn't have to backtrack. To be safe, we asked a man who was working in his garden.

"Yes, you can get to the trail along here. You'll come to two stone pillars at the top of the hill. Walk through them, and you'll meet up with the trail."

The going was steep uphill, but the road was good. We found two decrepit wall fragments that could pass for pillars, but when we walked between them we ended up in cow pasture. There was no trail here. We heard the breakers of the sea up ahead, but a heavy fog was rolling in and we couldn't see very far. We picked our way along the grassy hillside on which the grass was a little too high and the hillside a little too steep for the walking to be comfortable. The fog rolled over us and we couldn't see more than a few steps ahead. We came to a fence. Eventually we reached a place where we could see the trail practically right underneath us. It was a difficult descent, though -- a steep cliff at some points, but even the easier bits were a difficult scramble. Anabel made it down with no major problems, but I took a while to descend, trying to be as tender as possible to my knee, but still making some whimpering sounds as it took a few jolts.

But the trail was very easy and attractive from here, more of a promenade. We met plenty of other people, but most appeared to be taking a walk along the beach and not a pilgrimage. For the third time since we had met up yesterday in the late afternoon, Anabel started getting into a conversation with a man who was walking roughly alongside us. He had done the Camino himself, and hearing him speak, I felt like a loser. He said that you are easily able to cover 35-40 Kilometers a day. On some days he had done up to 50. Me, I was having difficulty making an even 20 Km per day.

I had to keep reminding myself that it isn't a race, but apparently I did not fully believe that. Why did I feel this tinge of jealousy?

Eventually the conversation flagged between Anabel and this man, and he resumed his pace and left us behind. The fog came and went. We crossed from Basque Country into Cantabria, and had an overweight shirtless Spaniard take a picture of us at the border marker. We reached the end of the promenade, and somehow got off the trail and ended up on the carretera again. We went up and down some switchbacks and eventually got to Ontón. It was one in the afternoon, and the only bread store we could find had just closed for the siesta time. We were sort of stuck on the carretera, roughly parallel to the autovia (freeway), but with steeper slopes and more switchbacks. Sometimes we would cut corners on the switchbacks, saving us some distance but putting an extra strain on The Knee. My feet, too, were burning by now. We had lost track of where the trail should be.

We reached Mioño and there was a bus stop bench beside the road. We sat down for a break, but Anabel wanted to keep going. I told her that she should go ahead, I'd stay here and rest a while.

There was an construction work going on nearby. The whole northern coast of Spain seems to be a construction area. There was an information booth which was closed, and a building which looked like town hall, appropriately modest for a modest little town.

I lay down on the bench and reflected on what a bad place this was to try to take a nap. There was traffic and construction noise all around. I decided to try following the advice I had gotten from my German roommate in Bilbao, and listened intently to the noise.

67: Steps towards despair: A burden to God

2007-12-11T03:37:00.000-08:00

I suffered much of my life under an oppression that, I think, many Christians suffer under: the idea of being a burden to God.

The good news of the gospel is, of course, that we can be free from our sins, but this is not always perceived as good news. For one thing, "our sins" can sound too much like "fun stuff" and we see the gospel as being a proclamation that we can be freed of everything we enjoy about life. This in itself can get us on the road to despair, because we have a hard time reconciling the joy of the Lord with the idea that we must give up whatever we find enjoyable.

But an even greater burden lay in the Christian message that Jesus died to take away my sins. This translates to the view that every sin I commit has caused him pain at the cross. Since, despite my efforts, I will continue to sin until the end of my life, it follows that Christ would suffer less if I were to die today than if I were to continue living (and sinning) for another couple of decades. And that Christ would suffer even less if I had not been born at all.

Throughout my life I have heard many sermons in which the utmost was done to get me to feel sympathy with Christ's suffering. No doubt there is spiritual merit in meditating on the suffering of our Savior. But the side effect has been to make me despise my life, which, after all, was the cause for his suffering. It has made me wish I had not been born, which is another way of saying that it has led me to despair.

I was not only afraid of a regular occurrence of sins adding up; I was also worried that new sins would be born. In other words, it was not only a matter of having more years to live in which more situations would arise in which I would again fall prey to the temptation to lie. It was a fear that new situations would arise in which I would fall prey to temptations I had never known before. As a 7-year-old I had not really struggled with lust. I would have had fewer sins, and therefore inflicted fewer injuries on my Savior, if I had died before reaching an age in which I made my acquaintance with lust.

So who knows what else is coming towards me in the years to come? I imagine situations in which I am coincidentally holding a crowbar at the precise moment that someone makes my temper boil over. How easily one can take a swing in blinded rage and murder someone! Wouldn't it be better for me to die now, before I have done something so awful?

Or what if I start drinking, and over the years slowly develop a habit of drinking uncontrollably? What if, in a weak and depressed moment, I am offered a hard drug that soon imprisons me in addiction? What if someday I am seduced? What if I join a movement that seems to promote high ideals but in the end corrupts me into becoming a violent power-monger?

It could all happen if I keep living. I certainly don't trust myself to be immune to any of these temptations. Considering how far God has allowed me to wander, I don't even trust Him to keep me safe. Sure He will forgive me, but come on -- what does forgiveness from God mean to the widow and orphans of a man you have just killed? The only way to avoid further damage from sin is to stop sinning, and the only way to stop sinning is to stop living.

66: Getting to La Arena

2007-12-01T13:21:00.000-08:00

I wake up early again. My sleeping bag is wet with the dew. It is always a debate whether to get up right away into the chilly morning air, getting an early start and knowing that I'll be warmed up pretty soon, or stay longer in the sleeping bag, relatively cozy but also quite bored, waiting for the sun to warm and dry my surroundings a bit.

I wish I were one of those people who can just go back to sleep when they wake up in the morning.

I wait in my sleeping bag until that gets boring. I pull some clothes in the sleeping bag with me and get dressed before stepping out. We had left all our remaining groceries in a bag on the picnic table, hoping that no cats or mice would be attracted to it during the night. Everything still seemed to be there, and I started putting things out for breakfast. Anabel was waking up.

After breakfast we continued along the pilgrim/bicycle trail. Last night around dusk there had been a lot of cyclists, but now it was practically empty.

"Many of our best cyclists are from the Basque country," Anabel had said.

I eventually found another staff and followed her example of walking with two. My feet were getting blistered and needed all the support they could get. My knee, too, was feeling sensitive.

A man walked alongside us for a while. He found it quaint that we were traveling such a long way. He himself was not a traveler at all, he told us. But he did have to do this walk every morning because of his health condition.

Once again, I lost interest in the conversation after a while, and started lagging behind while Anabel continued talking to the man for the better part of an hour. When our ways parted we were almost at the beach of La Arena.

I had been saying that I might take a swim once we got to the beach. Anabel told me that was crazy, it was way too cold. At the time, this comment had strengthened my resolve even more, but now that we were actually at the beach, I did not have much desire to get in the water. It would involve changing clothes, and there were no dressing-rooms in sight. I took off my shoes and waded around for a bit. Then we walked across to the other side of the beach, where the trail was to continue. Anabel posed with our walking staffs for a picture.

65: Steps towards despair: A burden to the people closest to me

2007-12-01T12:54:00.000-08:00

I do not fall asleep for a while, actually. I usually don't.

As I continue my thoughts on being a burden to the world, the circles get smaller and smaller, and two uncomfortable things start happening. The first is that it gets more personal, more emotional. Saying that I am in part responsible for the death by starvation of children in Africa is one thing; saying that my life is a nuisance to my parents and my siblings is completely another. Because (and this is the second disturbance) my parents and my siblings would not call me a burden.

I have caused them so many difficulties. As a child, sick and insomniac, my parents took it in turns to carry me through the house, trying to get me to sleep, all night long. My mother once fainted with me in her arms. For years she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

But my parents have never given the impression that this was too high a price to pay for having me.

I remember as a child, pulling my sister's hair. She was crying from the pain, but she was far too good to retaliate. She just took it.

And my brother, he suffered the most. I had an unpredictable temper and beat him up regularly, all the way into my teens. Once I hit him so hard he blacked out. In my mind I can still see him staggering backwards against a wall, his eyes glazing over and him sliding awkwardly, sideways downward and collapsing on a heap. Once I threw a deodorant can at him and hit his forehead. Again, there is an image in my mind of him reeling backwards, his eyes tight shut and his mouth open in an expression of pain and holding both his hands against the blood flowing over his eyebrow.

But even worse than the physical abuse were all my other forms of lording it out over him. All of his ideas which I quenched, all the times I ridiculed a song he liked or an opinion he held, all the times I discouraged him from following a goal, all the optimism and excitement which I put a damper on. I often wonder what sort of person he would be today, how much more his personality would have unfolded, had I not throttled so many developments.

But I am loved by them all. I'm not sure how I would really know what love is if it weren't for my family. And the truth, the difficult truth, is that I am the only one in my family who believes that my family would be better off without me. And what's more, my view of myself as an unjust transaction towards those around me is much more hurtful to them than any of the other injuries and inconveniences that I have ever caused them. No one else blames me for being alive. No one else sees it as a difficulty or an injustice. But they all suffer, not because I exist, but because I wish I didn't.

It gets complex. It becomes a whirlpool. My best (theoretical) solution to every problem I've caused (or faced, for that matter) is that this problem would never have existed had I not been born. Including the problem of me hurting those around me by wishing I had not been born. Thus my theoretical solution becomes a non-theoretical problem.

But still, it persists. If I had not been born, it says, I would not cause anyone pain by wishing I had not been born.

64: another night in a picnic area

2007-11-20T07:05:00.000-08:00

Anabel and I got to one sort of picnic area after a while. It was a bit like the rest stops along a highway, but it was mostly for cyclists and pedestrians. There was a rancid smell in the air though, probably from a garbage bin or something, and so we kept walking. I did not want to eat my dinner and go to sleep in an area that smelled like that.

Shortly before dark we reached a similar parking area. There was even a gasoline station just a stone's throw away. We sat down and unpacked some food. Anabel had a baguette that, she warned me, would be "algo chicle" because it was already a few days old. I got her to try some of the pumpernickel that I had found at a shop in Bilbao, because she was completely unfamiliar with it. It seems that dark bread is not so popular in Spain. Between the two of us we also pulled oranges, cheese, chocolate, salami, tuna and yoghurt drinks out of our backpacks.

There was a view of some apartment buildings, and there were people on the street in front of them doing some sort of Basque dance. Anabel told me that she had a Basque flute with her. I don't even have a harmonica, I thought, even though I'm the one who studied music. But for the most part I was glad to be taking a break from music during this time, even though I did a lot of singing along my trek. I was thankful that I had gotten rid of my guitar, and was trying to imagine what that walk from Gernika to Bilbao would have done to my knee if I had had that extra weight on my back.

"Are you OK with sleeping here?" I asked Anabel, pointing to the grass and bushes around us.

"Yes", she said. She had been carrying an isolation mat with her for the whole pilgrimage, and had been hoping to make use of it at least once in an outdoor setting.

I was experiencing something very typical for me: the feeling that the spot I was at wasn't perfect for spending the night. In my various trips -- whether I'm hitch hiking, cycling or whatever -- I start getting into this mode where I keep thinking I'll find something better further along. This means that I usually end up collapsing beside the road around 2:30 AM, sleeping next to some junk pile or in the dark corner of a parking lot because the grass in the field that I passed four hours before was a little too long for my taste, and I had walked on into the darkness hoping to find something more ideal.

But I knew that we wouldn't be likely to find anything better than this. There was some garbage lying around, but I could live with that. I walked over to the gasoline station and used their bathroom to brush my teeth and refill my water bottle, and was again surprised that no one was charging me money for it, like they would have in Germany or the Netherlands.

A lady was walking her dog past the picnic area as I returned, and I hoped that people wouldn't be walking their dogs past my sleeping body all night long.

Anabel had spread out her isolation mat and sleeping bag beside, and halfway under, a large bush. I went around to the other side of the bush and lay my trenchcoat in the grass. It wasn't an isolation mat, but at least it doubled as a coat, cape, and a whole bunch of pockets. I crawled into my sleeping bag, stuffed earplugs into my ears, and went to sleep.

63: steps towards despair: a burden to practically everyone I've ever met

2007-11-20T06:51:00.000-08:00

I remember as a kid, looking out my bedroom window at a few other kids playing in the street. One of them was overweight and I yelled something like, "hey, fat pig" at him.

For no reason.

I remember saying "hey stupid" to a new kid in school, because he was, you know, the new kid. I remember mocking my classmates for their spelling errors or for getting questions wrong. I remember contradicting and interrupting my teachers, to the extent where I probably still hold some sort of record at my old school for number of times I got kicked out of class.

For a while I went through a lying phase. This was mostly in fifth grade. Not only would I lie in order to worm my way around getting caught (for homework I hadn't done, for example), but I had a bad case of one-upmanship whenever someone told a good story or joke. I made up some adventure of my own, unverifiable to anyone in the room.

I'm far less comfortable with lying today, but my one-upmanship remains, in some more socially acceptable forms. It isn't necessarily even one-upmanship -- my stories are not always as good or as exciting as the ones the other people tell -- but it's a form of self-validation. "Well, I guess that was a pretty good story, but I'm here too, I have stories too." Sometimes I even feel that I can only move a conversation along by contributing a similar experience of my own to it, instead of continuing talking about the other's experience. This may seem like a minor thing, but it is symptomatic of my entire life: even in my apparent attempts to connect with others, to help someone else along, it is really all about me. I live by theft.

I remember how a friend and I would wrestle with the other kids living in his building. It wasn't exactly brawling, but it was more serious than play-fighting. Once I groped a girl inappropriately during such a fight (she was just reaching adolescence). What is incredible to me in retrospect is how naive I was about it. There was no thought of getting a cheap thrill in a sexual way out of this; I simply considered it a valid move in a semi-serious skirmish with a girl.

But her reaction, the look on her face and the sound that she made, has haunted me all these years.

What is the use of my life? Some guy out there might have an eating disorder because of the way people called him names when he was a chubby kid. God only knows what psychological disorders some girl is carrying around from a grope in a hallway fight. Who knows how many of the cruelties on my part have seriously injured others. And what have I done in return? Have I done anything good of which one can say, "well, of course you'll do some damage along the way, but you're doing something good as well"?

Nothing comes to mind. It seems like so many empty words. Even the better things I have done have been like the stories I tell -- a form of self-validation. Whose life is enriched because of me? Where have I even neutralized the damage I have done? I can't even apologize to most of the people I've hurt, because I can't track them down anymore.

Part of being a Christian means that you can't drag this stuff around with you all your life; you must accept God's forgiveness for it and move on. But far from uplifting me, this discourages me even more. For one thing, even in my more willing moments I can't surrender it, and so I continue to feel like a failure for carrying this around with me anyway. For another, it often seems like such a scumbag's way out;I'd like to pay back the damage somehow.

But of course I can't. Even my most determined efforts to do some good in order to compensate for the bad I do have only resulted in more bad.

And that, too, is a miserable realization. Where else can all this lead but to despair? What conclusion can possibly follow other than the conclusion that the world would be better off if I hadn't been born?

62: Leaving Portugalete

2007-11-13T15:26:00.000-08:00

It took a long time for the photo store to get Anabel's pictures from her digital camera. During that time I went to two different bookstores, neither of which had a pocket-sized New Testament which I could take for the rest of the pilgrimage. I had a small booklet containing the four gospels -- a Spanish man at Taize had given this to me -- but I wanted to read around in the Epistles as well.

As the process in the photo store was delayed and delayed, we met a man who immediately began to talk to us about the Camino. He was one of the "Amigos del Camino", who dedicate themselves to promoting and improving the pilgrim ways to Santiago. He said there was another pilgrim shelter near Muskiz, but it wouldn't be open in April, and to walk it would take more hours than we still had daylight for. He walked with us until we were out of town, talking incessantly to Anabel with a million words of advice for a pilgrim. I was starting to tune out what he was saying, but Anabel kept asking questions.

Once outside of Portugalete, we started off at a brisk pace towards the lowering sun. Anabel had two large walking staffs, which looked sort of funny. There was something spider-like about the way these slender legs helped her walk.

"So why are you taking this trip?" I asked her. I asked this of every pilgrim I met along the way, although I eventually learned that it was not such a good idea to start a new acquaintanceship with something so personal, even though it would seem like the most natural question two pilgrims might ask each other.

"Turismo ecologico," she answered. "This trail has the infrastructure of essentially one long series of nature hikes. Also, I thought that crossing the entire country on foot would be a great way for me to do something, you know, get a feeling of achievement, to be able to believe in myself."

The words "believe in myself" usually just bounce around inside my head looking -- unsuccessfully -- for some meaning to attach themselves to. They must mean something, or people wouldn't use them, but I don't know what they mean. I've always "believed in myself", in the sense that I've never doubted my existence. What more can it mean to believe in oneself? People talk about it as if it were a sort of validation for one's existence.

I once wrote into my journal: "Even in my darkest hours I've believed in myself. That's part of what made them so dark."

"And you?" She asked.

It was only fair for her to take revenge by asking the same question. It is a difficult question, but I had the answers that I had been working out, even if they weren't the complete reasons for my doing this.

"Well, I wanted to travel again, see some new part of the world, but I hate traveling in countries where I can't communicate. I haven't been in Spain before, but I do speak Spanish, so this is ideal. And, as you say, it's a great infrastructure for walking, which is a travel mode I wanted to explore a little more. And I wanted some away time to come to peace and learn how to pray."

"So you're a believer?"

"Yes. Aren't you?"

"Well, I'm Catholic, but I don't believe any more."

"Yes?"

"When I was a child, my cousin became very sick. My mother told me to pray for her, so I was praying, praying, trying everything, you know, but she just kept getting worse. And then," her voice started failing her a bit, "and then she died. But my mom said I should keep praying, so that her soul would be set free from Purgatory, and I continued praying..." she was fully weeping now. "I'm sorry..." she said, trying to breathe normally again and wiping her eyes. We walked on for a while. I was experiencing the helplessness of every man who is confronted with a crying woman. The natural impulse is to put your arms around her or something, but I've learned that giving in to this impulse is not always a good thing. "Don't hold on to me" and all that.

"And then," she said a little more calmly, "later on I saw what this whole thing had done to me, and I decided that there is no one up there. No one who cares, anyway."

We walked in silence for a while. The evening sun made everything golden. The pilgrim trail here went alongside a bike trail, and cyclists in training raced past us.

This, I thought, was the kind of Catholicism I've grown up being taught to reject. This idea of appeasing God by praying enough, of spiritual blackmail and perpetual uncertainty. Every brand of Christianity can play such power games, but what is it about the Roman Church...? I was fully intending to discover my own spiritual connections to Roman Catholicism on this pilgrimage, the ones that I had never known as a child because I grew up in the sort of context in which Catholics aren't even considered Christians.

"Have you tried telling Him?" I finally asked.

"Telling whom?"

"Telling God. Tell Him He doesn't exist. Tell Him He's not fair. He can take it."

"Why should I do that?"

"Well, what can you lose? If you are angry at Him, you're not making it better by keeping your anger to yourself. Even if there is no God, any psychologist can tell you that there's value in releasing your emotions. But if God is there -- well if He's really unfair then you can at least tell Him so, but if He really loves you then He'll be glad to communicate with you, even if you're afraid that He won't like what you say." I started babbling. I often get this way. I tried to explain to her that God actually likes us. I told her of how long it had taken me to understand this, because I had been told all my life that God loves me, but had taken that to mean that He's forbearing with me, gets frustrated at how hard it is to change me, suffers when I do bad things, and is just generally burdened by my existence -- everything except the most obvious characteristics of love, such as "enjoys spending time with me" and "is more interested in freeing me than in controlling me". I tried to say that Jesus loves our friends even more than we do, loved Anabel's cousin, loves us more than we can love ourselves.

I don't remember what I said and how trite it may have sounded, but I remember the feeling. I'm not sure what it means that I become a babbling idiot when I speak about the love of God. It is interesting that in those moments I have so much conviction -- not pretended conviction but true, deep confidence -- in what I am saying. I can wrestle with God all night long and accuse Him of everything, can blame Him for creating me and thwarting me and tormenting me, can ask Him to take away my life because I have no desire to keep going. But when I start talking to someone about the love of God, I believe strongly and passionately in the love of God.

What does this mean? Does my own talking convince me? Does my conviction awaken in time for me to talk to others, and then wane again when I am left to myself? Is the love of God more credible to me when I am in the presence of someone who I wish were experiencing it? Do I subconsciously force myself to believe something because I want someone else to believe it? Or do I live in the conviction, but forget about it too often and need reminding? Do my words to others serve as a reminder to myself?

Many things I do not understand.

61: Meditations on the resurrection, Part 7: "Do not hold on to me."

2007-11-12T02:13:00.000-08:00

When Mary Magdalene rushes to embrace the resurrected Jesus, he says, "do not hold on to me, for I have not yet gone to be with the Father." What strange words. I think the Greek text in the gospels can even be translated as "stop touching me."

One of the monks at Taize had spoken to us about this. He talked about how it is our instinct to hold on to the things that are dear to us, but how this then deprives these things of their essence because in holding on to something by force, we do not allow it to be itself. We end up clinging to a hull, or a shadow, or a past reality.

Jesus speaks a similar language throughout the gospels. He says that "he who tries to preserve his life will lose it". Many passages in the Sermon on the Mount seem to be variations of the principle that "you get what you want by learning not to pursue it in too immediate a way." And he tells his disciples that it is good for him to go away, because otherwise the Comforter wouldn't come.

But how is that "good"? Which disciple would have voluntarily gone through the transaction of having the Master removed from among their midst, even if he were replaced by the indwelling of the Spirit?

As I picture Mary Magdalene meeting Jesus in front of the empty tomb, I think I can understand, but I'm pretty sure I can't explain. Somehow the natural reaction of embracing someone who you thought had been taken away from you would not give you the same closeness in this moment. Somehow a much more intimate (and certainly more lasting) spiritual bond could be formed only by relinquishing the more immanent connection. Somehow a part of her heart was awakened that could only be awakened through the denial of a more immediate desire.

If walking with Jesus is nothing else, it is the progressive awakening of ourselves. He makes complete persons of us, awakening individual areas whose existence we had no idea of, areas which we cannot have any idea of unless we are deprived of our acquired habits of navigating around them. This can be a very painful process, but it is this which makes our walk with Jesus so joyful and worthwhile.

60: Portugalete

2007-11-07T08:27:00.000-08:00

The rest of the walk was through one city after another. We wanted to find a good place to take a rest and have some lunch, but even when we did find a park there was construction work going on a stone's throw away.

Coming into Portugalete, we saw the famous suspension bridge. Built in 1893, it was the first significant example of a transporter bridge in the world. It is essentially a ferry that doesn't touch the water. I looked at the monumental work and imagined it being built in the 19th century and wondered why they didn't just put a rope ferry across the river.

We asked around for the pilgrim shelter. Many people didn't know, others directed us through town to a hall that was apparently used as a sort of school. There was no one at the reception. We asked some of the people passing through, but no one seemed to know whether Portugalete had a pilgrim shelter. We tried to ask our way to the city's information center, but that had moved recently, so we walked around through the city. Eventually we found it, but, like almost everything in Spain, it was closed for the afternoon. Lone sat down on a park bench. I found another bench, removed my boots, and lay down to rest. An hour later the info center opened.

As we walked in, a petite redhead with a backpack walked in as well. I had already noticed her at the hostel in Bilbao, partly because she walked around with two staves. It looked quite funny, since these were sticks picked up in the woods and not "professional" nordic walking sticks. She was another pilgrim also looking for a shelter. Her name was Anabel.

The receptionist at the info office told us that Portugalete's pilgrim shelter is a seasonal thing; during the summers one can spend the night in that hall where Lone and I had first been led to. But, as it was still April, we would have to spend the night in a hotel. We asked about price, and she said the cheapest was 22 Euros.

Lone decided she would go with that, but I thought I'd rather continue walking and spend the night outside somewhere. Anabel seemed undecided. "You'll sleep outside?" she asked me.

"Yes," I said. "I don't feel like paying for a hotel, and the weather report said that it wouldn't rain." I had made sure to catch the weather at the Bilbao hostel.

"But then where do you sleep?"

I shrugged. "A patch of grass somewhere. Or a beach. I've done it a few times on this trip already."

"I think I'll try that too."

"Great."

I still wanted to see if I could buy a Spanish New Testament, and Anabel wanted to find a photo store where she could dump the pictures from her digital camera onto a CD. Lone had a few things to buy as well, so the three of us went roaming the streets together.

Anabel

Portugalete is the only city I know that has motorized walkways on the sidewalks outside. There were many steep streets, so it was helpful to not have to walk all that way. But it did feel strange.

Anabel and Lone on a conveyor sidewalk in Portugalete

59: Meditations on the resurrection, part 6: Mary Magdalene

2007-10-29T17:55:00.001-07:00

Mary Magdalene, it seems, understood a lot more about Jesus than the disciples did. No wonder the relationship is such a source of fascination and bad romance novels.

But the Bible doesn't tell us much about her at all. Some equate her with the adulterous woman who was almost stoned to death, and some with the one who anointed Jesus' feet. It becomes more confusing because it seems that two-thirds of the women in Jesus' life were named "Mary".

Easter morning finds Mary Magdalene sobbing before an empty tomb. Others had already seen it and gone home scratching their heads, but she couldn't just get over it like that. Two angels ask her why she is crying. In possibly the least astonished reaction to an angelic appearance recorded in the Bible, Mary tells them that her Lord has been taken away.

Jesus appears on the scene and asks her the same question. She does not recognize him at first, but when he says her name, she gives a cry and, apparently, embraces him. He tells her not to touch him (I think his words could even be translated as "stop touching me").

The resurrected Jesus was frequently not recognized immediately by those who knew him. The moment of recognition, when it comes, seems to have some personal significance for each of them.

Mary Magdalene recognizes him when he speaks her name. The Bible tells us that he had driven seven demons out of her. She recognizes the voice that had called her, by name, from out of the darkness of demonic possession. Was that moment a reminder of her first contact with the Light? Did it go back even beyond that -- was it originally maybe not so much a "calling by her name" as a "giving her a name"?

Many people tell us we have a choice as to whether or not we want to follow Jesus, but sometimes I wonder whether all of us really do. I live my day-to-day existence as if I had a choice in the things I do, but when Jesus called me, did I really have the possibility of rejecting the Call? I don't really feel that I did. I found, I think, what the Book of Common Prayer refers to when it says, "Your love compels us to come in." Compels.

The moment of being called. Was this what Mary Magdalene was re-living, or remembering, when she heard her Master call her by her name in front of the empty tomb?

58: Walking out of Bilbao

2007-10-24T14:25:00.000-07:00

I had taken a full day's rest to allow my knee to recover. The second night at the hostel had cost me more, since my pilgrim's pass only got me a discount the first night. I called my parents in Germany again, then set out to continue the walk to Portugalete.

It immediately started with a long flight of stairs. A long flight of stairs. Great, I thought. My knee is going to love this.

This picture does not show the whole thing.

From Bilbao to Portugalete there is practically only a series of cities and suburbs lining the coast, but the trail occasionally dipped behind a ridge so that the cityscapes weren't visible and one could walk among greenery. There were many ramshackle huts of the rural poor, and a lot of garbage was lying around. It reminded me of some parts of Ecuador.

As I was puffing up a steep hill I saw the Danish lady I had met at dinner the night before. She was resting on a bench. I stopped and we spoke for a bit, and then continued on together. She had a pair of nordic walking sticks. We talked about why we were taking the pilgrimage and about where we lived and worked. Her name was Lone, and she lived in southern Denmark just north of the German border. She had four children and a few grandchildren. She said she needed some space to air out her mind, so she came on this pilgrimage.

Some sections of the trail have apparently been there since Roman times.

We passed a point where the trails divided. One led to Burgos and the Camino Frances, the other one continued along the coast. A trail marker helpfully indicated that it was still a good 730 Kilometers to Santiago.

We came to a small chapel. Since I was on a pilgrimage and all, I tried to stop at each of the chapels along the road and enter for a bit of prayer and silence, but I hadn't been very successful because most of them were locked. It was the same with this one. We drank some water and walked on.

The trail returned into suburban landscapes. We eventually lost track of the trail markers. Lone read from her guide, and I saw a road that could be the one we were looking for. It started going steep uphill. For some reason I always speed up when I walk uphill, and Lone was having trouble with the incline so she was lagging behind. We hadn't seen trail markers in a long time. Eventually an old car came down the hill. I flagged the driver to stop and asked if one could get to Portugalete by following this trail.

"Dear me, no," he said. "This keeps going up, and up, and when you get to the top of the hill, there's no way to go but down again. You can go down the other side, but Portugalete is that way." And he pointed.

"Well, you'll see we came off the trail a bit here," I said. "If you're heading back down the hill, could you take us with you to where the trail continues?"

He hesitated for the briefest of moments, then opened the passenger door. Lone was just coming into view at that point (it must have seemed strange for me to be talking about "us" when there was no one but me in sight). We were given a lift back down the hill and got off at a traffic light. It ended up taking quite some time until we were all out, with our backpacks and Lone's nordic walking sticks and my pilgrim staff and trench coat, and the driver explaining to us what our options were to continue our walk to Portugalete. The light changed several times and the car just stood there, a line of cars forming behind it. I made an apologetic gesture to the woman in the first car, but she laughed. I guess she enjoyed the sight.

57: Steps towards despair: a burden to humanity

2007-10-23T01:16:00.000-07:00

Of course we all know that if you have a roof over your head and three meals a day, you're more fortunate than about three-fourths of the world's population, depending on what sort of statistics you're going by.

We probably all try to be grateful for it, but many of us who try to feel thankful end up feeling guilty and then defiant. Guilty for getting the long end of the stick without having done anything to deserve it, and of course defiant for being made to feel guilty when it's not really our fault either.

In my case this line of thinking also had the effect of putting me under pressure to make my life count -- to compensate somehow for the imbalance that I was causing by being. But this depressed me as well. It seemed like I would, in order to stop burdening the world, have to get used to the idea of having to live in asceticism and service. Mother Teresa was pulling her own weight, and then some. I could become like her, or be like everyone else and burden the rest of humanity.

This is depressing. I preached asceticism and planned it for my own life, but all this self-denial made me wonder what I even exist for. I like nice things as much as the next guy does. Why should I be the one who goes without them for the sake of easing the burden I put on the world? I wondered on the one hand why it was so difficult for me to embrace the joy of the Lord, but on the other hand I did not really allow myself to enjoy a whole lot. During my teens I felt vaguely guilty if I was taking joy in anything other than talking about the Bible or some sanctimonious activity like that. I felt too self-indulgent, and angry at myself for being self-indulgent, and angry at God for forbidding my self-indulgence, and angry at the world for being so imbalanced that my every desire for myself meant a curtailing of someone else's desire.

Asceticism as an end in itself can easily lead to despair. If a man who eats only one bread a day in order to discipline himself and help others is doing more than a man who eats three square meals a day, then it is easy to conclude that the one who eats nothing at all is doing even more. If self-denial is the purpose of being, then it would follow that not existing would make you (if one can speak in such terms) even more purposeful, because the self would be denied to the point of oblivion. It would be my best contribution; it would save me the excruciating toil of constant self-denial, and save the overpopulated world the space and food and air that I was taking up by existing.

56: Second day in Bilbao

2007-10-17T22:09:00.000-07:00

I woke up and went down for breakfast. Then I called my parents in Germany from the card phone at the hostel. This was a telephone to which I could receive calls as well, so they called me back and we talked a long time on the lower rates.

I spent the rest of the morning in the nearby hospital waiting to have my knee looked at. My Dutch insurance card had worked its magic again, and I was not charged anything, and didn't even have to fill out any paperwork to speak of.

When the doctor finally had a look at me, he immediately sent me to X-ray. After waiting outside the X-ray room and then having the plates taken, I returned to the doctor. He said he couldn't see anything, but prescribed some pain medication and recommended that I rest for the remainder of the day.

"Pain medication" I thought as I walked out of there. I saw in my mind's eye how some tendon or cartilage in my knee was being torn to shreds over the next few days while I walked along blissfully drugged to feel no pain. I decided I would not take any painkillers.

The procedure had surprised me anyway. I know nothing about medicine, but it seemed to me that X-rays show you what's going on with the bone, and that a knee injury you sustain from walking would be more likely to be related to cartilage or ligaments or whatever. But an X-ray might show that too, for all I know. It seemed unlikely that someone who spent about a decade studying medicine would fail to have a grasp on what the most likely causes of knee pain on a long walk would be, and how to detect these.

I went to an internet cafe to catch up on my eMailing and blogging. I found an Aldi and did some grocery shopping. They even had pumpernickel, which I had not yet seen since coming to Spain.

The rest of the day was spent relaxing in the hostel. I did my laundry. I talked with an Argentine immigrant. I met more pilgrims: a Danish woman in the cafeteria, a French-Canadian guy in the laundry room. In the evening I saw the Austrian couple Helmut and Helga again.

55: Steps towards despair: a burden to other lifeforms

2007-10-16T18:45:00.000-07:00

When I try to trace my thoughts back to their origins, I usually find my earliest memories of them to be on my way to or from school. Most of my school years were spent in Quito, and most of the time we lived within walking distance of our school. In the mornings, my father would usually walk us to school, and in the afternoons we would sometimes walk together and sometimes separately. We had great conversations during our times together, and but I also enjoyed walking by myself and pursuing my thoughts.

It seems that it was on these walks that my thoughts on the nature of the world and my role in it began to take shape. Looking back on it now, I find it remarkable how soon I came to see myself as part of the problem.

In a South American capital city you can see the growth from day to day. Hills that were forested last year are now another suburb, or expanse of slums, or combination of the two.

I knew I was a burden on the world because I knew two things: 1. Natural habitats are being destroyed and species are going extinct every day. 2. The human population on earth is increasing.

I did hear that the destruction of habitat was not caused directly by human population growth, but by greedy landowners, ruthless oil companies, and poorly educated farmers on the edge of rain forests. I also heard that the billions of people sharing the planet had not yet reached numbers at which one could talk of "overpopulation". I wasn't qualified to dispute either of these, although the "not yet overpopulated" arguments never sounded very convincing to me, and didn't seem to take into account that overpopulation -- by anyone's definition -- would be reached soon.

But I considered how I lived. We lived in a fourplex with a small garden. It was not luxurious, but I wondered how much of the earth's surface would be taken up if everyone in the world had as many square meters as we did. In some areas of the world there are three families living in a place like ours.

We had a car. We did not use it much, as we were within walking distance of school and work, but still, it needed gasoline. How much gasoline? How much gasoline would be needed if every family in the world had a car like ours? How many toxins and greenhouse gases would they all pump into the atmosphere? How much oil would need to be pumped out of the ground? How much rainforest would need to be destroyed to get this oil?

I ate three meals a day. How much land was being used to grow the wheat and potatoes and to provide pasture for the cows that went into my meals?

The electricity I used for my reading lamp, my computer, my radio -- where did it come from? Where was some reservoir flooding an ecological habitat, or some coal generator pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, or some nuclear power plant creating radioactive waste?

I did not know the answer to these questions. I always wished that someone could give us exact figures on what an equilibrium between humans and the rest of nature would look like. How much fuel can we burn before we're taking more than is replenished, and sending more toxins into the air than can be absorbed again? Given the world's population, how much land would each person be entitled to before plant and animal life would suffer irreparable damage? My suspicion was that we were already taking a lot more than our share. This was certainly true for the "wealthy landowners and greedy oil companies" we always liked to blame, but I couldn't help thinking that, to really achieve ecological equilibrium, everyone above the poverty line would have to downsize. But since most people weren't doing so, and certainly not voluntarily, even the more minor contributions of those below the poverty line were upsetting the equilibrium.

"Upsetting the equilibrium" is what I am doing. I am a breathing, eating burden on other lifeforms. No matter what efforts I put into this, I cannot become a positive or even a neutral force. I'll have to settle for being a less destructive force, but still destructive, because I cannot stop contributing my part to a massive force that is creating an imbalance which is disfavorable to most species and fatal to many. They would be better off if I didn't exist.

How can life possibly be lived when you have this knowledge? Apparently, everyone around me was doing just fine. What I could never figure out was whether people weren't seeing it, or saw it but had found a way to live in spite of it. There is amazing power in the optimistic idea of counterbalancing the damage we do by doing some even greater good someday. Fatalism, too, is powerful. So is the willful blindness of greed. I know this because I used these three methods myself in staving off despair.

54: the hostel in Bilbao

2007-10-15T19:55:00.000-07:00

The bus reached its last stop and the driver showed me how to walk the rest of the way to the hostel. It was a huge building on higher ground overlooking the city of Bilbao. Several of the major cities along the Camino de Santiago do not have pilgrim shelters, so pilgrims have to stay in normal hostels. This one at least gave me a discount when I showed my pilgrim's pass. It still came to over 13 Euros, but it did, after all, include much more than my accomodations so far had. There was a cafe, several vending machines, laundry facilities, lounges and payphone. My room was shared with only one other person, and there was a great view of the city.

My roommate turned out to be an elderly German man. I took a shower and went to the cafeteria for some dinner. I tried to write while I was eating. Trying to sum up at the end of the day what had been going on in my mind all day long was always a difficult task. I was very tired and my knee was in pain. I decided I should go to a clinic tomorrow and have it looked at before continuing my walk.

Back in my room, I asked my roommate if I could keep the window open. The traffic noise was loud, but I had earplugs and I preferred having a breeze blowing through the room.

"No problem," he said. "I can sleep through anything. I can fall asleep on a bus, in an office chair, anyplace, any time."

This intrigued me. The man had the ability that I most wanted to have.

"How do you do it?" I asked.

"Well, I took some endogenous training, and that helped. You just close your eyes and relax, and listen intently to every sound that's around you. Then you focus on the rhythm of your breathing, but I'm usually already asleep by that time."

This was one of the most counterintuitive things I had heard. I usually plugged up my ears and tried to ignore all the sounds around me. Could it be that I could fall asleep if I tried to focus on them instead?

About an hour later I did put my earplugs in. Listening to the traffic noise in a darkened room had failed to put me to sleep.

53: Steps towards despair: burdening the world

2007-10-14T16:50:00.000-07:00

My Weltschmerz, or my oppressive Weltanschauung (or depression, or melancholy, or pessimism, or whatever we want to call it) began early in life. As I try to remember just how early, it becomes difficult. Apparently I am genetically predisposed to melancholy. Apparently I was a very difficult child, sleeping very little and crying a lot.

This sleeplessness followed me my whole life and may have a lot to do with depressing me. You start developing a dim view of life if you never feel like you've slept enough. If rest is your most treasured and most elusive goal, you start despising your waking moments, and from there it is not such a large step to despising your living moments and wishing for a deeper, more lasting sleep.

But the question of purpose haunted me as well. I remember asking my dad why we are alive, and not finding any answer to be satisfying. I don't recall at what age I started asking, but I know it was long before my teens. It struck me that a God who would consider the human race to be a worthwhile project must have a strong sense of slapstick and some sadistic tendencies as well. But I didn't say this out loud.

I figured if I wasn't given any direct understanding of why I existed, I might as well try to leave the world a better place than I had found it. I guess you need to have some sort of purpose, and you could do worse than making this your purpose. It sounds so noble.

The problem, as I saw it, was that my very existence was putting a burden on the world, making it worse instead of better. This meant I would first have to undo the bad I was doing, and then do some good in addition. Implicitly, it also meant that everyone would be better off if I had not even been born.

Even though you can manipulate your thinking and distract yourself from it, it is only a matter of time before your thoughts reach their logical conclusions. And while I may have had my strain of melancholy all my life, the youthful optimism which once had counterbalanced it wore thinner and thinner until all that was left was the despair. Simply because I had been born, I was a burden to the human race, to all life in my planet, and to God.

52: Getting to Bilbao

2007-10-11T09:59:00.000-07:00

I arrived at Lezama and asked a jogger which way it was to the pilgrim shelter. He pointed vaguely without breaking his stride. It struck me that it must get really annoying for people here to have to deal with such questions all the time from pilgrims. For the most part they were very polite and hospitable with me.

The next person I asked was able to point more precisely, but she added that the shelter wasn't open until May. I asked one or two more people, and they all confirmed this.

I stopped in a bar and sat down with some apple juice. Great, I thought. Another ten or twelve kilometers to Bilbao, where the next pilgrim shelter was. That would probably take me three more hours to walk. I wondered if I would find some good place to sack out for the night, and whether I would take it if I did.

When I continued the walk, it seemed to go endlessly along a major street through semi-urban area. Then it went up a hill. My left knee was starting to send stabs of pain at every step. I was cursing to myself. I could see the cathedral I had walked past, hours ago it seemed, not that far behind me. I could see the airplanes coming in for landing at the airport outside of Bilbao. The city itself was still on the other side of the ridge. The hillside was actually not as overgrown as much of the country had been, so I was thinking of just spending the night lying in the grass. It was only late afternoon, but I was tired of walking and last night had taught me that the pilgrim shelters can't be expected to be open after sunset.

I finally reached crested the ridge and saw the city of Bilbao stretched out before me. There was a sort of park here, with picnic tables and water fountains and such. I held my knee under cold water for a while.

I asked some men about Bilbao's pilgrim shelter, but they didn't know. One said there was a pilgrim shelter just at the bottom of the hill, "only about a fifteen minute walk."

Almost one hour later I was in the city. The sun was setting. Everyone I had asked about a pilgrim shelter had told me it was on the other end of Bilbao. Two ladies told me there was a convent in the neighborhood, but when I asked there the nun told me that she had no idea about a pilgrim shelter.

I took the bus across town to the hostel which serves as Bilbao's pilgrim shelter. I felt like this was cheating a bit, but I was having some serious concerns about my knee by now, and I wasn't gonna walk all the way across the largest city I'd encounter on this pilgrimage only to stand in front of closed doors and be left to find another bench to lie down on.

I also figured that this morning's extra kilometers I had amassed by walking around in a circle would compensate for the bus across town.

These were my boots on the 8th day of walking.

51: Have mercy on me, a sinner.

2007-10-09T16:10:00.000-07:00

"Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner."

This prayer had become the rhythm of my walk. It has become my favorite prayer since I first tried it after reading that Orthodox monks pray it continuously. I later got the idea (reading Anselm Grün) to adjust the prayer to my breathing rhythms, and that was so internalized now that I could hardly start the prayer without inhaling for the first part and exhaling the second.

I also had plenty of songs that I would sing to the rhythm of my staff and my footsteps: Taizé chants, but also hymns like Be Thou My Vision, Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing, Ich Bete An die Macht der Liebe. It was great to have songs in 3/4 time, because my staff would hit the ground on every third step. That helped me to support both my legs alternately while I walked.

But usually I would just repeat the Jesus prayer.

The first time I had tried this prayer was on a bus in England. I was soon filled with so much light, such a feeling of a cleaning up of my inner self and a strengthening of a wall against chaos, that I began to weep silently.

I knew this feeling. I had already experienced it, in a much more intense and lasting way, a year before. It is difficult for me to try to describe that, but the words "I once was blind but now I see" would apply, with all the depth of meaning that they could entail. From then on all spiritual truth I encounter seems to be more like a reminder of what I saw at that moment than like a new discovery.

I know people who would consider the prayer to be theologically unsound. "We are not sinners" I heard a pastor say once. "We are saints. It's just that we still sin."

This sounded to me a bit like saying that we are vegetarians who still eat meat. But I have since stopped caring so much about how we use such words. I understand that whoever is justified by Jesus can no longer see his primary identity in his sinful nature even though he still falls daily, and in that sense I am "a saint who hasn't stopped sinning yet." But in so many other ways I can still not "go home acquitted of my sins", as the publican in the parable, unless I call myself a sinner and ask Jesus to have mercy on me.

The meaning of any sentence will change over time if you repeat it often enough. But not every sentence will uplift you and build you up as you repeat it. A prayer like the Jesus prayer may go through a thousand different meanings, but I could feel how it searched my soul and mended bits of it little by little. I could feel how sin is not so much something I do, but something I am. And how Jesus' mercy was a timeless constant; in asking for it I am not only asking to be shown mercy now or tomorrow, but also asking for the mercy that has accompanied me yesterday and last year; and at the same time thanking him for the infinite mercy he has shown me, and thanking him in advance for the mercy by which I would continue to live tomorrow.

At many times I have found it to be the only prayer I am even capable of praying.

50: "You should get an umbrella."

2007-10-07T14:12:00.000-07:00

I was very happy to arrive at a village, because I was feeling weak and hungry. I went into the "Tabacos" shop. The smaller the village, the more you find in these shops, because they are more likely to be the only place where a villager can buy anything. Often they'll also have a small bar or cafe attached.

I got a baguette, a bar of chocolate and an apple. This combination was to become central to my diet for the remainder of the pilgrimage. I could eat all three in alternate bites so that the bread wouldn't be too dry. Butter, jam, honey, and even cheese are not very convenient to eat on the fly or transport in the backpack; oranges are a mess and bananas are usually sold before they're ripe.

There was construction on the road as I headed off toward Lezama. It was still going to be a good 15 Kilometers.

One of the things that surprised me about the Basque country was how Basque it was. When people said that there are parts of Spain where people speak Basque I had assumed that they meant something similar to what we mean when we say that there are parts of Nova Scotia where people speak Gaelic. I had expected maybe a few of the old people in the villages to have memories of their language and culture. I had not expected everyone, old and young, to speak Basque as a first language -- a default language. I had not expected all the roadsigns and advertisements to be in Basque.

Another thing that surprised me, but that was to continue long after leaving Basque country, was the amount of construction work going on. Apparently Spain's northern coast was becoming a fashionable place for people to move to. There were large generic Legoland suburbs being plunked down everywhere.

Two other pilgrims caught up with me right as it began to rain. They had large umbrellas, and one of them held his over me while the other helped me as I struggled with my raincoat.

"You should get an umbrella", he said. "We're doing this walk for the third time now, and umbrellas are the way to go. You sweat too much in a raincoat. Besides, water just drips right off of it onto your pants and your boots." I had my doubts as I pictured myself trying to maneuvre an umbrella through some of the foliage of the forest trails or on the windy coastal ridges, but it was hard to argue with their experience.

"What's your name?" one of them asked.

"Marco."

"Well, I'm Julio, and that's Antonio. Ha, we're all named after Roman Emperors."

"Are you still going far?"

"To Bilbao today. We'll stop at Lezama for a meal."

And they were off. Fifteen minutes later I couldn't see them any more, but I could locate where they must be in the scenery ahead by the sound of dogs barking.

What a pain it must be to live along the Camino de Santiago, I thought. If you have a dog, it's just barking at pilgrims all day long. The dogs were annoying enough for me, but what must it be like for the owner? Especially to see all these (let's face it) tourists walking by, in many cases right through your property. The locals were surprisingly friendly about all this.

I felt somewhat defeated because these two men had just breezed by me like that. I kept telling myself that this wasn't a race, but it was still hard not to notice that my pace must be abnormally slow. I tried to push myself for a while, reasoning that I would be happy to be at the pilgrim shelter a little earlier for a nice shower, but my knee started hurting again and I lapsed to my accustomed tempo.

49: Meditations on the resurrection, Part 5: Peter and John

2007-10-06T13:56:00.000-07:00

In theory, it sounds quite easy to say that you will take a 40-day pilgrimage and meditate on a few things. You think you're going to be bored stiff if all you do is walk, and you'll need things to think about. I had said that I would use the time to learn to pray, and to meditate on the book of James. I also wanted to really let the resurrection accounts of the gospels sink in.

I was still having trouble focusing on these meditations, but I assumed it was because I had only been walking for a week at this point. I was trying to think about Peter and John's encounter with the empty tomb, but it wasn't easy to come up with any insightful thoughts on it.

We know Peter as the ever-impulsive one, and on hearing the women tell the story of an empty tomb, he immediately runs off to see for himself. John went too, but what surprises me is that there weren't more who went. Was it fear? "We're the gang who followed that man who was executed as a criminal. Maybe we don't want to be seen loitering around his grave, especially if the grave is indeed empty. The Roman authorities have some persuasive ways of discouraging that kind of activity."

But it does seem strange that you can give yourself the luxury of disbelieving a story about an empty tomb, when all you have to do is go have a look for yourself. The disciples simply didn't believe the women, even though evidence was there for the having.

Peter and John don't give themselves that luxury. They go look for themselves. Even though John beats Peter to the tomb, he seems a little nervous about going in there by himself. But once Peter goes, John follows, sees the grave clothes and the absence of a body and believes, "for", as he tells us, "he had not yet understood the scriptures that he had to rise from the dead."

Strange conjunction, that word "for." It seems to imply that, had he understood the scriptures, it would not have taken a look at an abandoned shroud to believe.

Strange experience all around. What do you do now? What's next? Any suggestions?

It seems to be the ultimate head-scratching moment.

48: The broken moped

2007-10-03T19:16:00.000-07:00

I don't know how many hours I had been walking through a dripping, foggy forest when I saw a broken moped lying in a garbage heap in the middle of the forest.

For the second time.

For a moment it struck me as strange to find two broken mopeds in one day's walk. Then I had that "oh, no" reaction of realizing that I'd been walking around in a circle.

Where the forest trail met up with a paved road I had searched long and hard for the yellow arrow that was the trail marker. Not finding one, I had taken out my compass and tried to at least follow the road in a westerly direction, but at this place it ran north to south, and in both directions it bent westwards further down. I eventually tried one direction and, when I finally hit another yellow arrow, thought I was back on track. But I was back on a part of the trail I had already done.

I had gotten lost a few times before due to what I considered ambiguous or missing trail markers. I always thought ruefully that this would never happen to a real outdoorsman, remembering the hikes in Patagonia with my friend Bryan Ward.

The second time I hit the paved road I went the other way, and sure enough, there was a yellow arrow on the pavement quite close to where I should have been looking last time.

I was angry with myself for this waste of time and energy. I was also feeling hungry. Since yesterday's late lunch at the taverna, I had only eaten a few cookies which I had bought at the Cenarruza monastery. They were all gone now, and my blood sugar was running low.

47: "That Sounds Wonderful"

2007-10-02T15:57:00.000-07:00

I once heard an atheist repeat that worn-out argument that people believe in an afterlife because they can't handle gazing into the void. "The void", it seems, is like sleeping, only deeper, with no dreams, and you don't wake up.

This sounded wonderful to me. I still have no idea why this view would be harder to handle than the various religious visions of the afterlife are.

I once talked to my sister about all the things that weren't worth the risk to me and she said, "Well, if you wouldn't have some ups and downs, then you'd just be floating around through an eventless life,..."

Floating around through an eventless life. This sounded wonderful to me.

The Stoics were accused of going for a sort of happiness that was "like the happiness of a stone."
This, too, sounds wonderful to me.

Jesus said of Judas that it would have "been better for him not to have been born."

Not to have been born, I thought, and the words sounded wonderful.

Paul Simon says in one of his songs "I am a rock, I am an island, and a rock feels no pain, and an island never cries."

I know he's being satirical, but taken at face value the words sound wonderful.

You'll notice that I'm interpreting all these things in exactly the way they weren't intended.

What sounds somewhat threatening and scary are Jesus' words: "I live, and you too shall live." They sometimes make me shudder. To me they open up a curtain upon a long, long road full of danger and suffering and loneliness and hardship and getting beaten again and again and again until anything one has learned to call one's "self" has been shattered. Sure one is clothed with a new self in the end, a shining and radiant and joyful self. But I still find that there is nothing in me which considers the exchange worthwhile, and that the only thing (in me) that holds me to this image is a fear of what God might do if I reject what He intends to give me as a gift. (Outside of me, the Grace of God also holds me to this image, but that's without -- possibly even against -- my will.)

I think you get the picture. I knew before I had started on this pilgrimage that I would be confronted with this fundamental conflict in my life. Call it Weltschmerz, because there are several ambiguous meanings to words like pessimism, depression and despair.

We all know that feeling where it seems that the world is upside down, and we find to our dismay that it is we who are upside down, and have to be turned right. This may be easy the first few times, but it can get extremely difficult.

It takes no astute observer to note that my general attitude towards life is inconsistent with my Christian beliefs. However, I rarely meet someone who can understand just how deeply rooted this attitude is in me, and how impossible it is for me to surrender it. For every time I tell myself, "Hush, you mustn't talk that way," an inner voice rebels, "but it's true!" I understand that it must be me who is upside down, but I cannot relinquish the perspective that it is in fact the rest of the world which is inverted.

46: leaving Gernika

2007-09-30T16:27:00.000-07:00

It usually happens when I sleep outside: I wake up at the crack of dawn. My sleeping bag has drunk in all the dew and is sopping wet, but my eyes are sticky and dry.

I was lying on a bench in Gernika. I was actually surprised that I had only woken up two or three times during the night, and gone right back to sleep again. Usually the hardness and narrowness of a bench means that I spend most of the night in that state in which I am not fully asleep, or asleep but still aware that my hip is resting against something uncomfortably hard and that I can't just turn around because I'll fall.

I packed my things and went to the water pump. I loved these water pumps in the Spanish villages. In Germany it's an ordeal to find drinking water. Here it was available at every little plaza in every little village. I had a good wash and a drink and set out into the forest.

It was another wet and foggy day. The trail was uneven and there was nothing but forest for the first few kilometers. I reflected on how close I had been to attempting this stretch in total darkness late last night and was very thankful that I had decided to stay in Gernika. I think my flashlight batteries would have run out about an hour's walk into the woods, and my first hour did not present me with any sight of a good place to lie down. Sleeping in the underbrush would have made for a much worse night than lying on a bench did.

45: a monastic calling?

2007-09-27T14:52:00.000-07:00

I pulled my wool cap over my eyes. I cannot sleep well unless I go into sensory deprivation. I usually plug up my ears as well as covering my eyes.

If I hadn't taken that bath in the river, I thought, I might have arrived in Gernika on time to get into the pilgrim shelter. But what's a pilgrim life if you don't sleep on a bench now and then?

I was thinking about the monks. I was thinking about Helga's comment and about my calling. What draws me to monasticism? There's plenty that I fear about it -- mostly that vow of stability, that lifetime of staying in one place, singing music that becomes very familiar after a few years, being at close quarters with people, living a life of short nights and frugal meals. But there's so much to love as well. Mostly the silence. I don't know much about silence -- I'm a talker -- but it has always fascinated me.

When I was an adolescent, I made a private vow of celibacy to God. I pretended it was in order to be more available to the service of God, but the real reason was that I was afraid of turning into a guy who wanted to get married one day, and I figured that this vow would at least keep me from such a foolish move.

If I were to try to explain the background to that fear, it could take a while. There are many causes. But it seems to me that my large and small vices, fears, sins and weaknesses are all overshadowed by one giant fear: the fear of living.

Of course, since I am alive already, this fear often takes the form of resentment. Resentment about being alive.

I am aware of course that this will have to go, and that God will change this about me. For the last few years, it has become a more and more frightening and real possibility that God will cure me by getting me married. There's no devious method I would put past Him: he'll make my sexual desires unbearable; He'll make me lonely and miserable; He'll make me fall head over heels in love; He'll get me drunk. In short, He'll do whatever it takes to make me end up eternally betrothed to a woman in order to give me a reason to live and a reason to start enjoying it.

It will work, of course. But it will be a long and painful process, and not just for me. But hey, no one promised that this life would be easy.

But is my attraction to the monastic life nothing more than the flight from this? I woke up to it one day and thought, that's all it is. I'm just driven from behind. I'm not drawn to monasticism because it is my calling, my pearl of greatest price for which I sacrifice everything; it just happens to be a place where I can flee from my greatest fears.

But sometimes I think it isn't. The very idea of spending my life in silence and contemplation makes me less afraid. Not that I'm any good at it. But I found, to my surprise, that my one week at Taize left me with a feeling of purpose. I had almost forgotten what that felt like. I had settled for finding something to ease the agony of being, but I suddenly found myself thinking that I would risk much, and sacrifice much, to attain the inner strength of silence and the charisma of contemplation.

This scared me.

I know that I cannot get away from what I fear by entering a monastery, but it seems that I would be submitted to a much more gentle and compassionate process of falling in love with life there. But when I pray about it, I still feel that it isn't meant to be. God is more interested, it seems, in turning me into a person who wants to get married.

Why am I making this pilgrimage? I don't know. But if you were to ask me if there is something I hope it will accomplish, I'll tell you that I hope it will resolve this battle.

44: Arriving in Gernika

2007-09-25T17:13:00.000-07:00

I enjoyed the walk. I enjoyed having a pilgrim's shadow accompany me along the way.

I also enjoyed not having the guitar on my back. I took a scenic detour along the hiking trails, which was something I had meticulously avoided when I was still carrying more weight.

At one point I came to a river, and wondered if I should have my bath here. From a distance I had planned to rough it as much as possible -- sleep outside, bathe in rivers, etc. -- and I was wondering how committed I wanted to try to be to that. But I figured what the heck, I'm sweaty and there's water, so I went in for a bath.

The last bit I walked on the country roads, using the Kilometer markers to gague how fast I was going. I found that my normal pace was 4 Kilometers per hour. I could do a 12-minute Kilometer (5 km/h) but only if I pushed myself and ignored the landscape. I decided that that wasn't the point of this walk.

The sun was low when I arrived in Gernika (officially Gernika-Lumo, formerly Guernica for non-Basque Spaniards). I eventually found the pilgrim shelter, only to be greeted by a sign saying that it is closed after 6, and leaving a number to call. I went around looking for a public phone. I eventually ended up in the center of town (it did not occur to me that most bars have public phones, I was looking for the booth variety). I got into conversation with one man who offered to make the call for me from his mobile.

Mobile phones have made public phones obsolete, unless you don't own one.

The lady at the other end said that they were closed for the night.

Well, I thought, good thing I had my bath at the river, because worse than sleeping outside is sleeping outside when you're covered with dried sweat.

I kept walking with no particular plan. It was fully dark now. I thought maybe I'd make my way out of the city and find a field to lie down in, but when I got to the edge of the city I saw only a construction zone and the trail disappearing into the woods beyond that.

I wasn't in the mood to go into the woods at night, not knowing how long I'd be tramping along with a small flashlight before I'd find a place to spend the night. I decided to backtrack and find a park bench.

I found a bench in between a bunch of high-rise apartments, but even though people were walking past me, no one paid me any mind as I took out my sleeping bag and wrapped myself into it. It was a cold night, and I put on my wool cap.

43: Steps towards Grace: "You are the Faith that I need."

2007-09-21T17:43:00.000-07:00

Years ago I went on a hike through the Italian Alps with two local women. One had brought a devotional book, and during our break, as we sat and munched on sandwiches and enjoyed the landscape, she read out of it. It was one of Watchman Nee's works (I don't remember the title). He was saying that as Christians we have the tendency to pray that God will increase our virtues -- humility, chastity, faith, etc. -- whereas the core of Christianity lies in the recognition that it is Christ who is to be all in all.

On a practical level this would mean that instead of praying, "Lord, increase my faith", I can pray, "Lord, I thank you that you are all the faith that I need."

This offended me. I very much viewed the Christian life as a transaction, an example of lived-out reciprocity. God does something for me, I do something in return. There is no doubt that what He will do will always be much more momentuous, but that's because He's God. I certainly shouldn't come to Him expecting Him to do for me what I could be doing for myself.

And faith -- virtue in general -- I considered something that I should be able to achieve, with a bit of willpower. Sure I would say that I needed God's help in this. But it struck me as ungrateful to try to make God "do all the work." It sounded exactly like the sort of fluffy talk that people use to try to worm their way out of the austere difficulties of attaining virtue.

Grace always offends these religious sentiments of ours. The fact is that when Jesus offers to "do all the work", it isn't just a polite offer. It isn't like someone saying, "can I help you?" to someone who could also handle it alone, or who maybe needs a hand. Jesus in fact has done all the work, and the best way for me to both glorify him and, as it were, "return the favor", is to not try to do it again.

I had thought of the essence of Christianity as being, "you died for me, and in gratitude I'll try to live a virtuous life."

It took me many years to understand that my own virtue, and my attempts to increase it, were a larger obstacle between me and God than even my sins were. I think I did not understand the essence of Christianity until I was able to pray, "you died for me, and in gratitude I'll surrender my attempts to live a virtuous life."

Because a virtuous life turns out to be something we can only achieve by surrendering our efforts to achieve it to the One who has achieved it. If I could get there myself, I would not need Jesus. Glory be to Him! By being the faith I need, He counts Himself to be the faith He requires me to have.

42: Walking to Gernika

2007-09-17T21:48:00.000-07:00

The Mass was beautiful. The bishop was there, and it was the ordination service of one of the monks as a deacon. The church was packed. Some parts of the Mass were in Basque.

After the service I started walking. I did not expect to make Gernika that evening, but had heard that there was a pilgrim shelter closer by.

But it turned out to be a beautiful day, and I was feeling stronger than I had expected, so I decided to just keep walking. I stopped along the way for a full meal at a tavern (a luxury I was declaring to reserve only for Sundays). I enjoyed the sunshine and the beautiful fields and the friendly people wherever I asked for directions.

41: The pilgrim's first Sunday

2007-09-16T16:07:00.000-07:00

The monks had to be up at some ungodly hour for their morning prayers, but no one woke us pilgrims. We had breakfast brought to us around eight, after which Mathieu and Camille headed off to Guernica.

I decided I would stay for the church service, and Helmut and Helga had the same plan. We had a relaxed morning, since the service didn't start until noon. Helmut was a retired deacon of the Catholic Church, and this interested me. He explained which sacraments he was allowed to administer and what the role of a deacon was and how it resembled that of a priest with fewer rights but more freedoms (like the freedom to get married) and how that itself caused tensions in some churches. We spoke of the Church in Austria and of ecumenical movements.

I asked him about partaking of the Eucharist without being Roman Catholic. One of the unique features of the monastery at Taize is that the Catholic and Protestant monks celebrate their communion services together without anyone being excommunicated. I have never understood how this works, because Roman Catholics are allowed neither to invite outsiders to the Eucharist, nor to partake of other churches' Eucharist services. I once hitched a ride with a Protestant in Bavaria, who told me he went to the Catholic school and was given the Eucharist just like all the other boys, even though the priests and monks at the school knew that he was Protestant. When the monk I talked to last night told me that he would be administering the Eucharist, I asked him if I could participate even though I was Anglican, and he said he saw no problem with it.

Helmut made a good-natured dismissing gesture. "If the Catholic church really enforced all these dogmas that it holds, we'd be in a lot of trouble," he said, which I couldn't help thinking was a curious thing for a deacon to say. But I couldn't really consider his view hypocritical either. He seemed to believe in a very organic relationship between the dogmas and the way they are lived out in practice, but this belief was coupled with a strong love and faith in his church.

The bells started ringing. As we walked towards the main entrance to the church building, I told them how much the monastic life fascinates me. "I often wonder if I'll end up as a monk myself," I said. "Even as a child, I was telling people that that's what I wanted to be."

"That could be a strong indication that this is your calling," said Helga.

In a way, this was exactly the sort of comment that I had long been hoping to hear. But even though I had not even been fishing for it exactly, it struck me with all the dissatisfying falseness of hearing someone say something you've tricked them into saying. Her comment had been sincere enough -- it even had that off-the-cuff sincerity -- but she had inadvertently touched a nerve. I became a little sullen.

"One would hope so," I murmured.

40: the Cenarruza monastery

2007-09-12T16:38:00.000-07:00

It was evening when I arrived at my next pilgrim shelter, which was the monastery at Cenarruza. I had been walking down a muddy trail for the last bit, through a town called "Bolivar" where they actually had a statue and a little museum devoted to the South American liberator. (I wonder if there's a similar commemoration of George Washington somewhere in Britain?)

When I was almost there I was overtaken by the young French couple I had met outside of Orio a few days earlier. A monk came to receive us and showed us the pilgrim shelter. We were able to shower and could even hang our clothes up to dry on an indoor clothesline with a small heater/fan blowing on it. We attended the evening prayer service, and then the monk brought us a fantastic dinner. We were joined by an elderly couple from Austria. After dinner we went to the compline service. One of the monks stayed up far past his usual bedtime to hear me talking about my own darkness and heaviness.

There was peace there. I slept well.

French couple Camille and Mathieu with one of the monks. It was cold, so we were wrapped in blankets.

My first blister of the pilgrimage. There would be many, many more.

On the outside, Helmut and Helga from Austria. Inside, Mathieu and Camille from France.

39: surface and solidify, please

2007-09-11T21:27:00.000-07:00

I spent the rest of the day walking to the monastery at Cenarruza. I was glad to be rid of the extra weight, but I had digressed from the trail and was walking only on highways and country roads, some of which had heavy traffic and no real shoulder to speak of. It was somewhat stressful to have to be dodging traffic.

I was six days into my pilgrimage, and the habits were beginning to form even though I didn't consider them to be habits. For one thing, I was still procrastinating some of my pilgrimage goals to a later date. But for the most part I figured that the first ten days or so were not to be regarded as typical, as they would be the time in which I would be finding out what it means to be a pilgrim.

But there was one thing that I was already noticing. A few days into a new schedule, a schedule that consists mostly of walking and solitude, I was realizing that my thoughts were trying to materialize. There was a lot of murky seaweed in my mind that was trying to come to the surface and solidify into a recognizable shape. I was only getting vague hints, but I was getting far more than I do on a "regular" day. You can hide from yourself easily enough when you have all the distractions that we surround ourselves with in our lives; it becomes a little harder when you are walking alone for most of the day.

I knew that it had something to do with my insomnia, something to do with my Weltschmerz and with my fear of achievement. I thought that there was a misdiagnosis somewhere -- that what I had been doing to myself was the equivalent of telling an overeater that she would look much better if she were slim, or of giving a bowl of sugar to a hypoglycemic because it just seems logical that low blood sugar would be rectified by increasing sugar intake. Reality does not fit these forms of "logic": overeaters usually suffer from their condition because they are obsessed with the slim-body ideal, and hypoglycemia is exacerbated by sugar intake.

Something similar to this must be going on inside of me, and part of me at least is aware of it and has been trying (for who knows how long) to communicate it to the rest of me.

Not that I was aware of all this on Day 6. It was all murky seaweed yet.

38: Getting rid of the guitar

2007-08-29T03:03:00.000-07:00

I asked a few passersby if they wanted a guitar, and they declined -- probably finding this just a little too weird. I thought that perhaps the best option would be to donate the guitar to a local church. I went to tourist information and asked what churches there were in Ondarroa. Obviously, there were several Catholic ones, but I had the feeling that they wouldn't have as much use for a guitar. I asked if there were any Evangelical churches in Ondarroa, and got a somewhat blank stare. She looked in her files and said that there was a Jehovah's Witness temple, is that what I mean? Oh, and there's also a lot of African sailors, and they have some spiritual get-together of some sort every so often.

Africans, I thought, and I asked where I could find them. She pointed me to a call center nearby.

After getting lost in the narrow streets a few times, I found the call center. The place was packed with dozens of African men and women placing calls to their families back in Ghana or Senegal or wherever.

I sat down with one of the men and asked him if he wanted a guitar. He seemed half-interested and half-suspicious, and I broke the guitar out of its case and sang a Bob Marley song. People gathered around and sang along.

When I was finished, I held up the guitar and said, "See? She's still pretty good. It's just that she's too heavy for me to continue carrying on this pilgrimage. If anyone gives me ten Euros, you can have this guitar."

One man gave me twelve Euros for it, and I walked out of Ondarroa feeling ten pounds lighter.

37: pilgrim or busker, that is the question

2007-08-22T22:27:00.000-07:00

I sat down on a bench at the entrance to Ondarroa. I needed to think.

What sort of trip was I making? I'd been cursing the weight on my back since the second day of this walk. I hadn't really used the guitar at all. My knee and my back seemed to be sustaining injuries from the feel of it, and it was only the 6th day. The guitar bag was falling to bits.

It is interesting to see what sort of expectations we bring to something, even when we try not to bring any at all. I had vague images of trotting from one Spanish town to the next, spending summer evenings playing the guitar on their plazas and making a bit of extra money and maybe doing some of what people sometimes call "connecting with people through music".

This was looking less and less like the trip I was actually taking. To be a busker means to be under no time constraints, to be flexible enough to spend some more days in one town if the pickings are good.

Certainly one could make a pilgrimage that was also a busking trip, but it would have to be a different pilgrimage than what this one seemed to be. This pilgrimage had me spending more time on muddy mountain and forest trails than in any towns. It had me hoping to walk at least 20 Kilometers a day. But with the walks, the scrounging for food and the constant weariness, there was not much time for making music.

So what was it going to be? Was I going to spend a summer wandering around Spain in a vaguely westward direction, hopping from town to town and playing my guitar in public places? Or was I going to concentrate on walking the Camino de Santiago?

Being a guy who hates either/or scenarios, I had been reluctant to make a final decision on this. I was still sure that I could do 20 Kilometers in a day even with a guitar on my back. I still speculated that these initial difficulties would get easier, and that eventually I'd find a routine in which there would be plenty of spare time to make music. I even considered that the extra weight on my back might enhance the pilgrim experience by being a form of asceticism -- like the pilgrims that carry a cross on their back. The guitar certainly served as a good symbol for the weight of music in my life.

But now the strap on the guitar bag had snapped off. It was certainly something that could be repaired, but with every new thing that had to be done in order to keep both options open I was getting more motivated to make a decision one way or the other. It was becoming clear that 20 Kilometers of trail every day with a guitar on my back would get to be a miserable experience after a while. I could cut down the distance and keep the guitar, and plan in more time for the pilgrimage. This is what my "free spirit" self wanted to do.

Or I could get rid of the guitar and concentrate on walking. This seemed less romantic. But I had to admit that I wasn't as good at busking in practice as I was in theory. I'd had some great times making music on the streets in the past, but that was almost always with someone else. Being the lone guy with a guitar always made me feel self-conscious, like I was impinging on people, putting mediocre music into their lives that didn't really enhance their day, and in fact served as an annoyance. It was a louder but not much more dignified version of panhandling.

I decided to get rid of the guitar. I pulled it out and sang one last song, then headed into town to see what options I could find for losing it.

36: Pictures of Ondarroa

2007-08-21T17:07:00.000-07:00

There's also a cool bridge in Ondarroa, but I didn't take a picture of it.

If you look closely, you can see some separatist Basque graffiti on the pier. You see a lot of that in this region of Spain.

There was a festival going on in town, and these huge puppets were dancing around in the streets.

35: the walk to Ondarroa

2007-08-20T17:08:00.000-07:00

I did sleep better than I had since leaving Taize. This was hardly surprising, as it was the first night of the pilgrimage in which I didn't sleep either outdoors or in a cottage belonging to a sect that nurtures a habit of singing outside your window at 5 in the morning. One of the French pilgrims had already gone, and the other was packing up his things.

I took it easy, trying to get my clothes as dry as possible in the little centrifuge dryer. It was a tricky business, that dryer. Slight imbalances would cause it to jump around and hit walls and generally act like a merciless killing machine.

My guitar bag had a strap that kept coming loose, and I had had to mend it repeatedly over the last week. I tried to reinforce it with dental floss. I still mulled over the idea of getting rid of that guitar. It was proving to be a lot of unnecessary weight and hassle.

I ate the rest of last night's groceries for breakfast and eventually headed out. After yesterday's hike I felt that I needed a break from muddy mountain trails, and started walking along the carretera. I was going towards Ondarroa, which I had heard was a beautiful town but which wasn't on the regular pilgrim route.

The walk got annoying pretty soon, as I was on a twisted road that had no shoulder, where trucks would come barelling around corners and I, with my staff and my large pack, would feel like I was taking up too much space on the edge of the road. Maybe muddy mountain trails weren't such a bad idea after all.

Just as I was coming in to Ondarroa the guitar strap finally snapped off. Great, I thought. I was having enough trouble trying to carry the guitar in an ergonomic way even before this. This was something I would need to think through.

34: shopping in Deba

2007-08-18T10:19:00.000-07:00

I was starting to learn a few things about shopping while being a pilgrim in Spain. For one thing, the shops were all closed for several hours during the afternoon, so as not to disrupt the traditional siesta time. This meant that they were open later in the evening.

But there was another difficulty. As a pilgrim, I was traveling light. I had no cooking utensils, and I did not want to weigh down my backpack with food that would spoil or become an unnecessary burden. This meant that my eating options were limited. I realized, walking through the supermarket in Deba, just how creative and/or frugal I would have to be over the next month.

Yoghurt was only sold in four-packs, leaving me with the option of either overeating on yoghurt or carrying some of it in my backpack, where it made for a somewhat hazardous load. But I figured that buying it in the evening would be the best option, since I could finish two yoghurts tonight and two in the morning before heading out.

I also bought bread, and a tuna can, and a bar of chocolate. Fruit were to eventually become a problem. There were basically three categories: those that had to be washed (like apples), those that were a sticky mess (like oranges) and those that are sold before they are fully ripe (like bananas). Bananas were the most infuriating, since the other categories can be easily enjoyed wherever there's a water source around. But bananas are sold when they are still green, the idea being that you leave them in your fruit plate at home for a day or two before eating them. But of course if you don't have a fruit plate, you have to either eat them while they're green, or you lug them around in your backpack, which is another risky proposition for the rest of your backpack's contents.

The local library offered free internet access for a full hour, so I caught up on my eMailing and blogging. I spent some time looking for a shop where I could buy a hat, since I did not relish the idea of exposing my face to sunlight for the rest of this pilgrimage. I eventually found a Billabong hat that, for all its Australian outback look, also had that distinct floppy look of a traditional pilgrim's hat. The saleswoman seemed to be having trouble getting rid of these, because she let me have it for 12 Euros, even though the price tag said 18.

I returned to the shelter, tried to wash and dry some of my clothes, ate half of my food provisions, and tried to get back to sleep. I was still not happy about how the day had gone -- the very short night's sleep, the long walk through mud and rain and constant promises of rest "around the next corner", the mangling of my sleeping bag in a malfunctioning dryer, and being awakened from deep sleep by a pair of inconsiderate roommates -- but I was not really angry any more. I only hoped that tonight, for once, I'd be able to sleep well.

33: the underachiever, part 2

2007-08-15T15:17:00.000-07:00

Some people seem to be at a loss as to why such a high percentage of intelligent people end up working boring jobs and living mostly uneventful, anonymous lives. There are three theories I usually hear when this topic arises:

1. Intelligence comes in various types, and it may be that some of those who have an inordinate amount of one kind of intelligence can never fully put it to use because they lack another kind of intelligence.

2. Someone who is always told that he or she has great potential may start feeling a great degree of pressure, and may end up bottoming out and sabotaging the whole idea of achievement in order to be able to "breathe".

3. The joke is on everyone else. The real surprise is not that you have geniuses who work as bus drivers or school janitors, but that you also have perfectly intelligent people who opt for high-stress, high-responsibility careers and consider this more desireable.

Perhaps the primary thing that a pilgrimage does is to force you to face the questions you can keep brushing aside in everyday living, and the question of underachievement is one I've been brushing aside for years. I'm not a dramatic underachiever -- I'm certainly not a genius -- but there is no denying that I could be doing "better" than cleaning hotel rooms. But the fact is, I'm really not sure that I want to. I'm not convinced that doing something "better" would really be better. I hate having to explain it. And I hate thinking about it, because it gets me lost in the hopeless maze of trying to answer the question "so what do you really want from life, then?"

Nevertheless, this annoying question was on my list of questions to ponder while I walked.

32: a rude awakening

2007-08-15T14:37:00.000-07:00

I was in a deep, dark place.

Then there was a voice. Oh no, I thought. Shut up. It was distant and I was still very deep, but I knew what it was and what it would do.

It was a man's voice, speaking French. Relentlessly, as he spoke, my consciousness surfaced, in spite of all my attempts to keep it down.

It was too late. I was awake now. The two older Frenchmen were having an uninhibited conversation in spite of the fact that I was sleeping right there in the same room.

In my mind I was showering them with curses and insults, but I think my face and body only communicated a sort of aloof dignity as I climbed down from the bunk, got dressed, and walked out into the streets of Deba.

31: Making Deba

2007-08-14T08:07:00.000-07:00

Not too long after walking on from the place where the shelter wasn't, I met a man coming up the trail with a yoke of oxen. They were beautiful animals with magnificent horns, and he was shouting and poking them with a stick. They were dragging a huge tractor tire. I assumed that he didn't have a vehicle big enough to transport something that large up to his farm, but I found out weeks later that he and his oxen were prize-winning competitors in such events.

We talked for a few minutes, and it was a strange meeting. He had a small but violent dog barking at me, and there was something anachronistic (again) about a man with a yoke of oxen talking to a pilgrim. But it was not just that; he seemed to be a sketchy character as well, so much so that I was on my guard and did not take such risks as taking a picture of him with his photogenic bovine friends. He asked me about the woman in my life, and I told her there was none, so he asked if I prefer men. This exact conversation takes place every so often, but it usually does not end well. I told him I do not prefer men, and apologized for not prefering men, and felt like I needed to say something more to assuage the confusion of a poor man who does not know what to do with a guy who has no woman in his life but doesn't like men either.

The rest of the walk to Deba was miserable. I trudged on in that "exhausted and dejected hiker" mode where you step into every puddle and mud-wallow in the trail, no longer making the slightest effort to keep yourself moderately dry and clean. It was raining again. My prayers were occasionally interrupted and gave way to cursing. On steep uphill slopes I didn't even say the full Jesus prayer any more, as I didn't have the breath for it. I just said, "Sweet Jesus, remember me..."

I stopped at one shop and bought a large bar of chocolate. I figured that I needed not only the energy, but also the endorphins.

I was in a somewhat trancelike state as I stumbled into Deba, but the surreal quality suddenly increased as the yellow trail markers pointed me right into an elevator door. I was on a height above the city, and there were elevators down into the town center.

I found the tourist information office, where I had been told that I could pick up the key to the local pilgrim shelter. The lady was very kind, and explained everything I needed to know. As she was talking, another pilgrim walked in. He, like the man I had met earlier on the trail, was an elderly Frenchman.

The pilgrim shelter looked a bit like you'd imagine a red cross shelter in a war zone to look like. There were steel bunks with green mattresses three beds high reaching towards the ceiling. There was a sink and a small centrifuge to dry your clothes in, and a bathroom and shower. The first French pilgrim I had met that day was already there.

Now I noticed how very wet and muddy I really was. I carefully took off my boots and socks, and I rummaged around in my backpack for some clothes that were moderately dry. The wet beach sand of Zarautz still clung to everything. I tried to wash the sand off of my sleeping bag, which I then put into the centrifuge for it to dry a bit. The centrifuge was an irresponsible affair, however, and a cracked part of the frame snagged on my sleeping bag, tearing a gash into it and flinging its white synthetic innards around the room. I immediately turned it off.

I took a shower and climbed to one of the top bunks with my mangled sleeping bag. I stuffed wax plugs into my ears, blindfolded myself with a shirt, and fell asleep.

30: where does a pilgrim shelter hide?

2007-08-13T08:34:00.000-07:00

It was raining again, and I was walking on muddy roads between fields. Sometimes it hardly qualified as a road, it was just a stretch of swampy grass. At one point I noticed that someone was walking a ways behind me. He had a staff and a backpack, so I assumed he was another pilgrim.

He eventually caught up with me. He was an elderly Frenchman, and we soon saw that there would not be much communication between us, as we lacked a common language. He was walking faster than me, which was a little embarassing, considering that he was probably around 70.

The trail eventually led to a paved road. After a steep uphill climb, I saw a yellow "A" inside of a house symbol painted on the asphalt. This was the symbol for a pilgrim shelter, and I was excited. It had an arrow and the words "300 M" painted next to it.

About three hundred meters later, however, the road split. There was a building there which I assumed would have to be the shelter, but it was not marked in any way. I knocked. There was no answer. I put down my backpack and my guitar, and walked down one road for a bit to see if there was anything further down which could be a pilgrim shelter, but found nothing. I tried the other road. When a car finally came by, I stopped it and asked the people inside if there was a pilgrim shelter around here, and they said there wasn't.

I couldn't believe this. It was marked on the map I had received yesterday in Orio. It was marked by a yellow sign on the pavement. Where does a pilgrim shelter hide itself from a weary pilgrim? What is a weary pilgrim to do when the shelter has hidden itself?

For a while I stood in the rain and agonized. Then I decided I'd keep walking to Deba. I was already in a sufficiently bad mood, sufficiently exhausted and sleep deprived, sufficiently drenched by the rain, and sufficiently aching in my joints and muscles, that I felt a certain masochistic zeal to keep this going for a while yet. I also indulged in the pleasure of grumbling about it.

29: Continuing thoughts on sleep deprivation

2007-08-11T06:36:00.000-07:00

I once heard that even insomniacs get as much sleep as they need, and that really all their problems are psychosomatic. I'm not sure I believe that, but even if it were true, a psychosomatic problem is not simply solved by repeating "I'm just imagining this" to yourself.

Watchman Nee said that he had a lot of trouble sleeping until he came to the realization that we are created to need sleep.

"Give us this day our daily sleep."

Of course that kind of a realization has to be an internalized -- one could say a spiritual -- experience, because the fact itself is one that we all recognize intellectually. But how often must I reflect on the fact that I am created to need sleep before I will fully free myself from the pressure of needing sleep?

The worst thing about the problems we obsess over is that they can often only be solved by no longer obsessing over them. But as long as they're not solved, we continue obsessing. Even if we know that that's the exact way to leave them unsolved. And then we obsess over our obsessions with our problems.

I just need enough sleep, one night at a time...

"Give us this day our daily bread."

Hasn't He been giving it to me? It hasn't been as much as I wanted, maybe not even as much as I needed to function at my highest potential, but certainly enough to survive? Why do I need to function at my highest potential anyway?

Ultimately it's the "daily" thing, isn't it? I'd like to rest. To rest. It is perhaps my greatest desire of all. It is probably the reason why I'm so depressed and even despairing in this life, and so ready to move on to the next one, and even having blasphemous wishes like a desire for a naturalistic universe in which death is simply oblivion rather than some Great Praise Band Gig In The Sky. I don't like praise bands. I just want to rest.

Sometimes I get to where I see all the joys and tragedies of life primarily as things that stand in the way between me and perfect rest. Sometimes I'd rather sleep away my remaining life than have even the most glorious adventures. But God obviously wants my life to be something other than rest; apparently rest is a means, not an end. He just gives me a daily share, and it seems so meager...

"Give us this day our daily bread"

My spiritual growth consists in large part of discovering in just how many areas I have not made my peace with God's methods.

28: Accomodations near Zumaia... or not

2007-08-10T04:18:00.000-07:00

Amidst prayers for daily bread and and thoughts of sleep deprivation I arrived in Zumaia. I asked around if there was something like a hostel there. They told me about hotels and pensions, but when I asked if there was something cheap as well, they told me that there was one hostel up on the mountain ridge. One man eventually pointed it out to me. Fortunately the Camino de Santiago went up to this ridge as well, so I wasn't making some unnecessarily difficult detour.

Along the way I asked one or two more people, and they confirmed that yes, that building up on the hill (or maybe not exactly that one, but one like it up in that area anyway) was indeed a hostel.

When I arrived, I found out that it was simply a farm.

"Isn't there also a hostel nearby?" I asked.

"Well, not really nearby", said the farmer. "Follow that tractor path and it will turn into a trail. About... maybe four or five more kilometers, and you'll be at the hostel."

"Really? Down in town they told me it was on this ridge here."

"Well, it isn't." He said with a sort of finality that indicated that he wanted me to shuffle on.

Well, that's that, I thought, and continued walking. My knees were not doing well, especially on the downhill stretches. I was becoming increasingly convinced that I was carrying too much weight. I had washed my clothes the day before, but it had been intermittently rainy, and so they had not had a chance to dry. I was feeling the extra weight of the wet laundry. But most of all I was just feeling the desire of finding a bed and falling asleep. I had not gotten a full night's sleep in over a week, and last night had been only about two hours of sleeping on a windy beach.
I continued my interrupted thoughts on the nature of sleep and depending on God for daily provisions.

27: Our daily sleep deprivation

2007-08-09T11:00:00.000-07:00

"Give us this day our daily bread.
Give us this day our daily bread.
Give us this day our daily bread."

The thing with repeating a prayer is that your mind starts wandering after a while. But my mind wanders no matter what kind of prayers I offer, unless I stop praying after a minute or so.

"Give us this day our daily bread."

But while your mind may wander, it keeps coming back to the prayer you're repeating. It's like you suddenly become conscious of yourself saying something again, and you listen, "what the heck was I saying? Oh yeah, that."

"Give us this day our daily bread."

I suddenly realized that I was talking about sleep.

I've been a sort of insomniac from birth. It comes and goes in no discernible pattern, but I spend more time trying to fall asleep than anyone I know. I am also more fragile, more offset by a sleepless night, than most people I know.

"Give us this day our daily bread."

It seems I have a knot in my intestine, and if I sleep badly for two or three nights in a row, I get such a pain there that I sometimes can't walk straight. My digestion goes wonky. I start losing my ability to concentrate. I get headaches and I lose my voice. I get irritable and angry and depressed and unfair.

Most people have these or similar symptoms when deprived of sleep, but "deprived of sleep" can mean different things. I know people who can go three days straight without any sleep. I know people who can survive for months on end on four hours a night.

At least this is what they claim. I've done no rigorous research on these claims.

"Give us this day our daily bread."

The point is, I can't be guaranteed to get enough sleep to function well, and it ends up being a large and frustrating time-eater. And I pray about it -- it may be the single thing I have said the most prayers about. Usually around 3:30 in the morning, lying awake in bed and having surreal thought-dreams and saying, "God, what do you get out of this? How would it hurt you to just allow me to sleep?"

My mind comes up with uncomfortable answers. Either God is so set on having me to talk to Him that He will even settle for these sorts of accusations (and therefore provokes me to them), or He is somehow opposed to me sleeping.

"Give us this day our daily bread."

Indeed, much Christian tradition talks about sleep as if it were a bad thing, or at best a necessary evil. "Watch and pray", wasn't it? Like sleep being the soldier's worst enemy, and we're all soldiers. Sloth is one of the seven deadly sins, and a slothful person is associated with one who sleeps. The Old Testament wisdom literature already talks as if we have to do things "right" in order to "deserve" a good night's sleep -- and even then we better not try to take it too far!

Today's performance-driven Christianity is of course fraught with the sort of sentiments that make you feel guilty if you want to sleep. But the traditional church isn't much help either, with its ascetic monks and Saints who rise at 3 AM for morning prayers and practically try to outdo each other in finding ways to deprive themselves of their biological needs.

"Give us this day our daily

[rest]
bread."

At the same time, rest is vital, one could almost say central, to the Christian faith. It's what Christ promises us if we come unto him; it's what we combine with repentance for our salvation, according to Isaiah; It is one of the great promises of the life to come, and our first prayer for departed souls (Requiem aeternam dona eis...); and it is one of the ways in which the Christian can, paradoxically, be most active and productive.

"Give us this day our daily sleep."

I was on the fifth day of my pilgrimage, and very sleep-deprived.

26: Our Daily Bread

2007-08-07T17:36:00.000-07:00

I had already gotten used to saying prayers to the rhythm of my walking and breathing. Most of the time I was saying the Jesus Prayer:

"Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner."

You may think that a pilgrimage is a good time to say long prayers, and to bring before God all those things and people and issues that you keep thinking you should spend more time praying for. I did do some of that, but surprisingly little. For the most part I would just repeat the short prayers and make them my meditation.

I had also been working through the Lord's Prayer, in bite-sized pieces. Today I was saying, "Give us this day our daily bread." Over and over. I was breathing to the rhythm of my walking and walking to the rhythm of my praying.

"Give us this day our daily bread."
"Give us this day our daily bread."
[inhale, left - right - left - exhale, right - left - right]

I'm a novice at these methods of meditating, so I won't talk about it very much. I can tell my own story, but there are plenty of experts who can tell you much more.

[inhale] "Give us this day" [left foot - right - left]
[exhale] "our daily bread" [right foot - left - right]

It was daybreak of day 5, and I was already feeling the beginnings of what a pilgrimage can do for the soul -- something similar to opening windows and letting fresh air in, and also something similar to defragmenting a computer drive.

[inhale] "Give us this day" [left foot - right - left]
[exhale] "our daily bread" [right foot - left - right]

I had never suffered hunger. My grandparents on both sides had been refugees, and they knew hunger. My mother tells me that by the time she was born things were looking much better for the Mennonite settlers in western Paraguay, but that many of her parents' generation had already died of malnutrition-related causes by then.

"Give us this day our daily bread."

But to me personally the line about bread had never had that depth and urgency. I'd try to reflect on the millions of starving poor in the world, try to make myself feel more grateful and fortunate, but usually ended up feeling guilty instead.

"Give us this day our daily bread."

My father had known hunger, although he never told us so. What he did tell us was that when he was a child, living as a refugee with two brothers and a widowed mother in some post-WWII farming village in central Germany, they had once gotten a dead rabbit somehow. They had kept it in the space between the window panes until Christmas.

"Give us this day our daily bread."

It was a sort of refrigerator. And back then they would do anything for a bit of pocket money. They gathered wool off barbed-wire fences and brought it to the factory for a bit of spare change.

"Give us this day our daily bread."

Many parts of God's creation don't make much sense. Why are we so dependent on food? It's easy when you grow up like me, with never a hungry day in an entire lifetime. But such a large percentage of humans are not so fortunate. Meanwhile there are millions of people who throw away food regularly. I can never get used to that sight, and I can never help feeling offended by it. I think I once heard something like a sermon about how this part of the Lord's Prayer is meant to be a call to asceticism -- we ask for bread because that's all we need to live, and so the prayer should be accompanied by the throwing out of the non-essentials in our lives.

"Give us this day our daily bread."

When I worked with homeless people in Vancouver's red light district I wasn't even dealing with abject, Africa-style poverty, but I was still made aware of how limited these people were by their dependence on food. They had few options in life, because they had to be back in the soup kitchen by the next mealtime. They could not afford to miss the meals, because they were already on the brink of malnourishment and would be burning plenty of calories during their night on a park bench. They could not get very far in that time, because they had no money for transportation. Their job options were severely limited -- how impressive could their CV/resume be? Who would hire someone without a home address? Someone who shows up to the job interview wearing rags?

"Give us this day our daily bread."

These people were really dependent from day to day. There was nothing saved up for a rainy day somewhere, no possibility to have today's ration keep you going for a few extra days.

"Give us this day our daily bread."

There are some things that God does that I, frankly, have problems with. He creates us so fragile that we need to depend on Him every day. And it sounds so inspiring during our testimony times to talk about how God does provide for every day, but many who truly do depend on Him on a day to day basis still die of starvation. I guess God wants us to solve this problem ourselves, but He seems not to be above letting poor children in Africa suffer and die for their leaders' corruption and our Western World's incompetence at shipping our dinner leftovers across the ocean, so to speak, or coming up with a more viable solution.

"Give us this day our daily bread."

It also sounds inspiring to talk about how God is on the side of the poor and the oppressed, and how He will eventually vindicate them. But even this does not necessarily make sense of the situation.

"Give us this day our daily bread."

But my real issue in all this is not bread. This is all an extension of the general problem of suffering. I am not personally affected to any great degree -- except for a vague feeling that I should be doing more to be personally affected. But what I am personally affected by is another need we have that also has us in the vice grip of day-to-day dependence.

25: walking on a rainy night

2007-08-06T17:12:00.000-07:00

Shortly after the lights of Zarautz disappeared behind a bend, the streetlights stopped as well. It was a rainy night, and all was pitch black, apart from the faintest white ghosts of the breakers on the rocky coastline to my right below, and the faintest ghosts of white lines on the pavement. I myself was a faint white ghost as well, I reflected, being clad in a huge plastic covering. I was hoping I wouldn't scare anyone driving this stretch of road at this hour of the night.

One lane ended. I had hit a construction zone. There was a construction fence down the middle of the carretera, and the vague shapes of large machinery behind it. Great, I thought. It's pitch black, I look like the spook of a KKK member, and now I'm having to share one lane with two-way traffic.

But there was practically no traffic. I occasionally turned on my flashlight to see where the heck I was going. Eventually I reached Getaria. I took a breather in the shelter of a bus stop before beginning to walk out of town. I got myself lost on some roads that looked promising but came to dead ends.

They had told me that the next pilgrim shelter was near Azkizu, and getting there involved taking a side road from the main carretera along the coast. But after groaning and sweating my way uphill to this little village, I couldn't find anything resembling a pilgrim shelter.

I looked around for a while. I thought. The first light of dawn was beginning to show. Probably an ungodly hour to knock at a pilgrim shelter anyway, even though I'd been practically walking through the night.

But with the daylight increasing by the minute, I was able to find the trail markings, and decided to keep walking. The rain had stopped, or at least given way to a light drizzle.

24: Symptoms, Causes, Treatments, Diagnoses. Or vice-versa

2007-08-04T10:56:00.000-07:00

Sometimes things that look like opposites are really symptoms of the same thing. Look at eating disorders. You see that an anorexic is trying to starve herself. You find out that this is because she is obsessively trying to lose weight. You see an overeater stuffing herself. But if you were to conclude that she is obsessively trying to GAIN weight, you’d be wrong. In fact they are both obsessed with an ideal image of slender beauty, but their obsession takes opposite forms.

Sometimes things that look the same are opposites. Someone with high blood sugar shouldn’t eat sugar. This makes sense. It would also make sense to conclude that someone with low blood sugar SHOULD eat sugar. But that is not the case. Some of the symptoms of having too much sugar in your blood are very similar to some of the symptoms of not having enough sugar in your blood. The causes are opposite, but the effects are much the same.

Sometimes we think someone needs more of something when they actually need less, and vice versa.

It would make sense that if you overeat you need someone to tell you about the advantages of being slim. It would make sense that low blood sugar means you need to eat more sugar. But sometimes the things that make a lot of sense are simply false.

Keep this one in mind. It's not like I've hit some deep hidden truth here, but a whole lot of what I learned during my pilgrimage was how the causes, effects and remedies I've been seeing in my life made all the sense in the world, but were still mistaken. If nothing else, the pilgrimage showed me some more areas of my life in which I had been mistaking the poison for the cure, the illness for the therapy, and the cause for the effect.

I needed to reverse some of my thoughts, but since the problem was that the thoughts were already reversed, I guess you could say that I needed a process of "unreversal". I don't think that word normally exists, but I invite you to use it. It rolls satisfyingly off the tongue.

23: Leaving Zarautz

2007-08-02T15:12:00.000-07:00

Sure enough, it started raining after I had only slept for about an hour. I wrapped myself, my guitar and my backpack into the plastic coverings I had brought, and tried to get back to sleep. But after about another hour I realized that nothing would come of this. I was lying on the beach, in the rain, in a plastic bag, in the middle of the night.

I took my things from the beach to one of the buildings along the beach promenade. There was an overhanging roof, and a bench. The place was littered with broken glass and the smell of alcohol. I wasn't about to spend the rest of the night here, tired as I was.

A little ways away, someone was sleeping under a bridge. Maybe this was even another pilgrim.

Hmmm. Concrete floor.

I decided I'd just start walking again. It was 4 AM. I would not be able to keep on the trail on a rainy night like this, but I could walk along the carretera. The beach promenade seemed to continue for a while along the road out of town. It was well-lit and there was hardly any traffic.

I put on a raincoat, then the guitar and the backpack. I covered it all with the huge plastic covering that made me look like a spook, and set out walking on what I would remember as the most difficult day of the pilgrimage.

22: Meditations on the Resurrection, Part 4: The Women at the tomb

2007-08-02T02:07:00.000-07:00

The first real experience of the Resurrected Jesus (since the Roman guards didn't actually see him) was given to a few women who had been close to him and came to embalm his buried remains. It is the only resurrection account recorded in all four gospels. Like the other events which were important enough for all four evangelists to write about, the discrepancies are infuriating to someone who wants to make a clear and precise picture of the scene. Was there one angel or two? Was the angel or angels already there when the women came, or did they appear afterwards? Did Mary Magdalene stay behind, allowing Jesus to appear to her by the tomb but also to appear to "the women" as they were on their way to find the disciples? Or did she return to the tomb after that appearance? Couldn't the writers have put a little more effort into making sure the details harmonize?

That would of course be a different essay. The fact is that you can make the stories harmonize, which is what you'll probably do if you believe the story, or you can make them contradict each other, which is what you'll do if you don't believe it. In that way it's like any other event being described by several witnesses.

Many of us have heard it emphasized again and again that one of the strangest aspects of the Resurrection appearances was Jesus' choice of witnesses. Again, he does not seem too interested in creating a credible groundwork of convincing evidence for his resurrection. Instead, he first gives the message to women, in a time and culture in which a woman's testimony would not be considered valid in a court of law. Is there some purpose or design in this? Is he intentionally going for the least weight of evidence? It may well be. It would not be the first time that the Bible emphasizes the role of the weak and insignificant in bringing forth God's power.

But there seems to be a more pragmatic reason. Like the Roman guards, the women get to be witnesses of the resurrection simply because thery are there. Any of the disciples could have been the first to see amazing sights and hear incredible news that Easter morning if it had occurred to him to go to the tomb.

And what brought the women there? Hope of the restoration of God's kingdom? A strong faith in the words that Christ had spoken about his own resurrection?

Hardly.

It was something far less dramatic. It was the earthy, practical consideration of displaying a final act of decency to the body of the deceased. While the disciples were trying to pick up the pieces of their shattered dream, the women still had the presence of mind to perform a final -- and, as far as Messianic hopes go, somewhat useless -- act of service.

I can't count how many times I have seen this in ministry work. You see people who are "involved" in the great mover and shaker stuff, but meanwhile, somewhere in the periphery, those who are truly experiencing Grace are the ones who remain faithful in simple acts of service. I've seen the hard-bitten heathen being engaged in argument and discussion all the time, only to be won over by the Christian who shows him the common decency of listening to his views without feeling pressured to make a reply. I've seen the hopeless addict who spent years in and out of recovery centers and who, on the verge of suicide, gave life another chance after one of the soup-kitchen workers noticed that this homeless junkie had gone to the trouble of ironing his shirt. I've seen God surprise me with deep spiritual encounters when I wasn't expecting them or even looking for them at all. I've also seen myself drift furthest from God during the times when I was most involved in ministry and spiritual disciplines.

The momentuous spiritual events are often not witnessed by those who have the highest hopes or the greatest faith. Often the privilege goes to those who faithfully perform the commonest acts of service.

21: a Basque Mass

2007-07-31T10:12:00.000-07:00

I still had a few minutes until the mass would begin, so I took the time to pray for a bit. Then a priest went to the front and started talking in Basque. The sparse congregation responded. The priest said something else, and again the congregation knew what to say. The talking was fast, and they were almost interrupting each other.

I was a little disappointed. I could not understand Basque, and I wasn't familiar enough with this liturgy to follow it in my mind. The speaking was mechanical, not like anyone meant it so much as like they were trying to get through it as fast as possible. And even though we were in a monastery, there were no monks anywhere to be seen.

I stayed and observed for a while, but then I got tired and restless. I took my pack and snuck outside. I went to the beach, spread out my trench coat, and lay down to rest. I was hoping to be able to fall asleep early tonight, but I lay there on the beach for several hours, taking turns trying to sleep and trying to think about something. There were dark clouds gathering, and the sea-wind was getting cold. Great, I thought. Get some sleep before it rains.

20: a side note about liturgy

2007-07-29T11:09:00.000-07:00

Like many people, I gave myself the luxury of holding certain views for much of my life without really knowing much about the issue. Growing up in a mainstream Evangelical missionary setting, I was taught early on that Roman Catholics have it wrong because they're trying to earn their salvation and because their doctrines and traditions are additions to the Bible and whatnot. I not only held this view, I defended it as well, even though I didn't know many Catholics, didn't know much about their theology, and had never been to mass in a Catholic church.

Then I experienced liturgy.

Most of my life I had assumed that a church service consists of two things: songs and a sermon. There were of course other elements, like an offering, a communion celebration, maybe a time for announcements or testimonies, but the main course, the indispensable bit, was the singing and preaching.

I had a hard time finding a church in which the music and the sermonizing really moved me. I brought my standards down to "one out of two ain't bad". Then I stopped expecting to get anything out of going to church at all, telling myself that it is a fleshly and not a spiritual attitude to go to church in the expectation of "getting something" out of it.

Then I experienced liturgy.

The Anglican Church in Amsterdam was not my first exposure to liturgical services, but it was where I started "getting it". The sermons were hit and miss and the hymns were difficult and obscure (though I loved them because they were challenging), but that was secondary. I saw that sermons and songs did not have to be the main part of a church service at all. And I experienced that God met me and lifted my spirit week after week in the repetition of the liturgical "dialogue". I would seriously spend much of the week looking forward to hearing the priest say "lift up your hearts" and replying with the rest of the congregation, "we lift them to the Lord." I know this sounds a little bit pathetic, but I had really stopped expecting to have spiritual encounters in church, and this moment (among others) could touch my spirit in a way that made me giddy.

Like many Anglican churches, ours then got rid of much of the liturgy in an attempt, I assume, to be more "relevant". Since then I viewed the Roman Catholic Church in a different light. For all its faults, it could at least be counted on to not try a trick like that (or so I thought), and maybe that would be a place where I could still experience the Spirit of God. So as I walked past the Franciscan monastery in Zarautz and saw that Mass was about to begin, I went inside.

19: Zarautz and a tick

2007-07-27T08:12:00.000-07:00

The descent into Zarautz is much like the descent into many other towns on Spain's northern coast. After walking through mountainous terrain and rugged shorelines for a while, the view opens up to show a beach right beneath you, with a city to its left and the blue waters of the Bay of Biscay to the right of it. There was a beach promenade further down, and a golf course as well.

I soon found the clinic. I was getting heartily sick of the weight I was carrying, though. Even though I'd only been walking for four days, I could already tell by the feeling of my pack whether my water bottle was full, half-full or empty. I wondered for the umpteenth time if I should get rid of the guitar.

I walked right into the most positive experience in a clinic of my entire life. The people were friendly and forthcoming. My Dutch insurance card got me in completely hassle-free -- not only was I charged no money, but I did not need to fill in any paperwork. I did not have to wait more than five minutes in the waiting room.

The nurse was friendly and we chatted about my pilgrimage. She had done part of the trip herself and was going to do another leg this summer. She removed the tick with a pair of sterile tweezers and killed it. I had felt a little self-conscious, going to a clinic because of a stupid tick, but that was put in order. I told her it's been over ten years since my last tetanus shot, so she gave me one then and there. This was great, because it meant I wouldn't have to worry about this every time I scraped my knee or whatever.

At the end she gave me a lot of advice for my pilgrimage. She told me to wear two pairs of socks to avoid blisters on the feet (I had been doing this already) and to get another pair of shoes or sandals or slippers or whatever (which I was reluctant to do, since the weight on my back already felt excessive). She remarked on my sunburn.

I headed out. I followed the signs to the Franciscan monastery. I saw that there was a church service about to take place, so I went in and sat down. I had never been in a Catholic Church for mass before, and had been hoping to remedy that for a long time. I decided this would be a good opportunity to stop procrastinating.

18: Silence, Part 1

2007-07-26T10:00:00.000-07:00

I crossed a bridge and took to the trail leading to Zarautz.

I was thinking about silence. I had started thinking about it when I was at Taizé. Taizé's prayer services include a silent time that usually lasts 5 to 10 minutes. The first two times I went, I found that to be an uncomfortably long period of silence, but after that I felt that the silence could be even longer. I started realizing just how long it takes me to gather my thoughts.

But I was very annoyed by the lack of actual silence during these silent times. There were thousands of young people from all over Europe, and thus there was a constant concert of coughing to be heard. It was like the pianissimo sections of a Tchaikovsky symphony: you can bet your life that those will be the moments when several people in the audience will find it necessary to cough.

"And it's funny," my friend Ryan had once told me, "that people don't normally cough. Like, listen for it in restaurants or wherever. It's when everything is quiet that you get that itch in the back of your throat…"

So it is. I almost suspect that the coughing in these cases isn't really a throat irritation so much as a subconscious unease. It is as if we have some need to assert ourselves. We rebel against being forbidden to make a sound.

Even as we entered the Taizé sanctuary, there were people with large signs which read "Silence" in several languages. These signs had little to no effect on many of the conversations taking place between the people who were entering. Even an usher coming and "hushing" the people who were making too much noise was not taken seriously. People hate being hushed. Even those who are well-meaning will usually just drop the volume of their conversation, but not stop it completely.

But just as they hated being hushed, I hated the fact that they didn't fall silent. The person seeking noise is always at an advantage, because he can generate the noise himself; the person seeking silence has to count on the co-operation of everyone within hearing distance.

Why did this annoy me so much? I got to where I couldn't even concentrate on my prayers because I was so angry at everyone who insisted on coughing and clearing their throat during the silent times. But surely one must learn to accept certain sounds as being a part of the silence? Our own breathing, our own heartbeat, will not go away.

But how much sound can be accepted as being "a part" of silence?

The true contradiction is this: I talk a lot.

Part of it is that I'm fastidious -- I try to get things precise and exact. This is the same quality I've mentioned before in connection with not making mistakes graciously. When I listen to myself speak, I constantly feel that I am telling half-truths. Ambiguities and slight inaccuracies bother me, and I feel compelled to correct or qualify them, to make room for disclaimers and exceptions. These parentheses-within-parentheses make whatever I'm saying longer, less interesting and more confusing. Even if you've never heard me talk, you can see that characteristic in my writing.

[The other contradiction is that I can't pay attention for very long if someone else speaks this way.]

But while this characteristic may account for the length and nature of my discourses, it does not explain the fact that I feel compelled to speak in the first place. Why is it that I get so annoyed with people who can't maintain silence during a prayer time or a symphony, and yet am also the most likely guy to break the "uncomfortable silence" in a table conversation?

Well, the clearest reason is of course that a prayerful silence and an uncomfortable, conversation-stopping silence are two different things. But there are other things I find in myself: I suffer, for example, from the delusion what I have to say is too important to keep to myself. I also find that I somehow feel personally responsible for the awkward lulls in conversation -- as if everyone were feeling uncomfortable and it was my duty to relieve them of their discomfort by resuming the conversation.

Yes, I certainly feel that responsibility. Where on earth could this come from? This is something I'll need to meditate on.

17: Igeldo to Orio

2007-07-25T08:57:00.000-07:00

I remember the walk from Igeldo to Orio as a pleasant one. The guitar weighed heavily on my back and gave me something to think about, but it was an otherwise enjoyable hike. I was pleasantly surprised that it took me less time to get to Orio than I had thought. There is a little chapel shortly before you get into the town, but it was closed. I saw a young couple walk by with raincoats and large backpacks. We got to talking a little bit. They were from France, and also doing this pilgrimage. They took a picture of me.

A little further along there was a pilgrim shelter. The place looked good, and had atmosphere. I asked how much it was, and the lady told me 10 Euros. I asked if I could just hang out and rest a bit before heading on, and she said sure.

At the campground they had asked me if I had a pilgrim’s pass. I didn’t even know what that was. I asked this woman if I could get one here. Yes, she said. She would just need to see my passport.

I was slowly learning about what it means to be a pilgrim on this road. There are many shelters along the road, where you can stay for cheap or even for free if you have a document showing you to be a pilgrim. This document gets a stamp at every stop along the way. Everybody knows this, of course, but I was the pilgrim who had come without doing any research.

Poem on the wall of the Orio pilgrim shelter.

The lady gave me a map and explained where the next three shelters were. I thanked her and went on my way. I was thinking about that tick in my side, and hoping to still find a clinic or something to remove it before it would spread some disease, or whatever the heck it is that ticks do. But it turned out that there was no such place in Orio. The tourist information office was open though, and the woman at the desk told me that I should go on to the clinic in Zarautz, a few kilometers further.

16: The interconnectedness of things

2007-07-23T05:58:00.000-07:00

I still didn't have much of an idea of what it meant to be a pilgrim on the Camino de Santiago. It was only my fourth day, and I had met no other pilgrims and no real pilgrim services or shelters along the way. This was OK with me, because my plan was to learn these things as I went along. This turned out, I think, to be a good plan, even though it meant making some mistakes along the way.

I knew that the pilgrimage was becoming a trendy touristy thing. I had intentionally planned to avoid pilgrim shelters for this reason. I had wanted to rough it as much as possible, but now I was starting to have doubts about this. My previous experiences of roughing it had always been a few days only, and they had been different. They had usually been hitch hiking trips, which normally don't involve walking great distances on mountain trails.

Spending the whole day walking had not become a routine yet. It still felt like a sometimes arduous, sometimes exhilarating weekend retreat. My thoughts were fresh but scattered. I wondered what sorts of things I'd be learning over the next weeks. I looked at landmarks on the horizon and wondered how many hours I'd have to walk to reach them. I wondered if I'd be able to gauge distance well by the time I'd been doing this for several days.

I knew there would be plenty of time to meditate while walking, and I'd brought plenty of things to meditate on. I was meditating on the resurrection accounts in the gospels. I was meditating on the Lord's Prayer. I was meditating on the Efche (Jesus prayer). I was meditating on two or three hymns. I was meditating on some of the things that the monks at Taizé had said to me during Holy Week. I was meditating on the Epistle of James.

This was probably too much, and too disparate. And, not being very experienced in meditating, I found my thoughts wandering around a lot. Sometimes I let them wander, following them curiously to see where they were going. It wasn't until the last part of the pilgrimage that I would start to see how interconnected these various strands were. Maybe it means that God was guiding my thoughts to one point. Maybe it means that I don't have a large arsenal of original thoughts. Maybe I have only one, and, given enough time to trace my thoughts to their origins, I'll see that they all came from that one.

Most likely there were a handful of things on my mind, and my brain was following the trend of all human brains to associate everything with the things that are preoccupying it anyway.

You can connect any thought with another, if you give yourself enough time. To me, 40 days were enough to show me some surprises.

15: A morning at the campsite (Day 4)

2007-07-22T13:17:00.000-07:00

I woke up unwillingly. I’ve always envied people who can go right back to sleep if they wake up before they have to.

I had to check out of the campsite by noon, so I was in no hurry. I took all my clothes and went to the wash basins. I hadn’t found an ideal piece of travel soap yet, but what I did have worked just fine. I washed my clothes and hung them up.

The problem was that my clothes would not dry in time. I should have done them last night, but I had been too tired.

As I showered, I noticed a tick in my side. Great, I thought. I didn’t know much about ticks, but I did know that they spread disease, and that you should remove them without getting their head stuck inside you. I had recently read that the traditional ways to do this – holding a match against the tick or drowning it in oil or something – were not such a good idea after all. There were apparently special tweezers that were the best way to get this done.

I had all morning to hang around the campsite. I called my Mama in Germany and we talked for a bit. I mended my guitar bag, which had a strap that was coming loose. I sat on the outdoor tables writing in my journal and eating some overpriced bread and yoghurt from the campsite grocery store. It started raining lightly, so I hung out under an overhanging roof.

Eventually I did pack my damp clothes and headed out. I would need a hat, I thought. My nose was quite sunburnt. I tied a wet shirt around my head like an Arab head covering, and it kept my head cool, but did not really keep the sun off my nose. I packed my things and started walking.

14: The underachiever, part 1

2007-07-21T04:14:00.000-07:00

At school, my teachers seemed convinced that I was a bright kid. They saw that I was barely passing my classes and not doing any work, and they wanted me to make use of my intelligence. I thought that I was making use of my intelligence. I saw that I was passing my classes without doing any work.

I guess we just had different ideas of how best to make use of an intelligent mind.

13: Camping in Igeldo

2007-07-20T13:30:00.000-07:00

Shortly out of San Sebastian, the road started going steeply uphill. It was a beautiful balmy evening. I talked for a while with a man who was walking his dog. It felt like it had been a long time since I’d had real human contact, even though I had talked to the members of the Twelve Tribes commune that same morning. The solitude of walking had produced so many thoughts in these last three days that I felt like I had a lot more to say than would be polite in conversation.

I knew there was a camping place further up. It was mountain terrain again, but this time it was a road instead of a narrow hiking trail.

I wondered whether I should camp at the campsite or beside the road. I didn’t really have a tent – just a pair of large plastic coverings for bicycles. I could get into those if it rained during the night. The campsite would probably charge me money.

As I walked, I kept a lookout. Where would I be able to spend the night?

I was already starting to see the difference between this type of travel and the kinds that I had been used to in the past. I had done a lot of hitch hiking, and that had frequently included sleeping outside. But I now noticed that this pilgrim road was something completely different. There weren’t service stations to crash behind, and no good fields either. Right now the area was semi-residential. None of the patches of grass were very good – I’d be in full view, and besides they usually sloped steeply.

It was getting dark when I arrived at the campsite at Igeldo.

When places like this have made money from me, it was almost always because of That Feel. Probably not the exact same That Feel that Tom Waits named a song after, but very similar. It is when the sun is setting and you still don’t know where you’ll spend the night. It’s a melancholic time. You think of people going into their homes, hanging out on their sofas watching TV or whatever. And for a moment you’re almost tempted to strike up conversation with someone, convince them you’re harmless and you could keep them company for that evening, help them with their dinner, swap some stories, and sleep on their sofa, with a roof over your head.

But of course you don’t do that. Or maybe you’re the type that does that, but I’m not. I once met a guy traveling across Canada in his car, spending his evenings in bars and talking to people, ultimately managing to get himself a place to sleep every time.

That Feel. I had been keeping a lookout for a good place to sack out for the last hour now, and nothing very inviting had presented itself. I could go on, into the darkness, and no doubt I’d find something. No doubt even many of the places I’d seen and rejected would look very feasible if I were tired enough. In this state I usually keep going until I’m too tired to remain standing, and then just crash in some unlikely place.

But I was now talking to the receptionist at the campground. There was hot water there. I’d be able to shower and wash my clothes. She found it somewhat strange that I’d be inquiring about a camping place when I didn’t have a real tent. I asked about the cabins, but they were out of my price range. Oh well, I thought, if it rains, I can always spend the rest of the night under a piece of roof, like the one by this office, or in the laundry area.

12 Euros for that though. And I paid it. I paid 12 friggin’ Euros for a patch of level grass and a chance at some hot water.

Some pilgrim I was turning out to be.

12. Steps towards Grace: straining out a gnat

2007-07-17T05:22:00.000-07:00

I’m not good at making mistakes graciously. When I play soccer, for example, every bad pass, every fumbled play and every wide shot is accompanied by an apology and a self-deprecating remark or gesture. In music, if I make a mistake while performing, there is always a facial twitch that accompanies it.

I think I’m too self-conscious. I’d hate for people to think that I’m under the impression that I’m doing all right. I feel in those moments that the only thing less forgivable than making a mistake seems to be to continue apparently unaware that I have just made a mistake.

This is, of course, very unprofessional. Even the greatest will make mistakes, even completely unforgivable mistakes, but they need to have the inner fortitude to continue without a public display of regret or self-chastisement, to let the past be the past and be willing to appear the fool.

Now imagine how it is in larger areas of my life – sins, injuries, injustices I commit. I feel that I have a moral obligation to refuse to simply pick myself up and move on after failing.

Any quality we have can be made to take on the appearance of virtue to ourselves. I lived for years believing that at least I hadn’t gone completely to the dogs – at least I was hard enough on myself to not simply shrug off and justify my mistakes. I lived as if it were my duty to kick myself around. I feared that if I didn’t do that, it would be a sign that I don’t take my sins seriously enough, and next thing you know I’d be living the debauched life.

Many people live this way. They understand that no crime is so bad that remorselessness can’t make it even worse, so they nurse their regret as a prized treasure and safeguard against evil.

So the same force that causes me to lose my temper with myself when I play a wrong note condemns me much more severely for, say, breaking my word. I considered this force to be one of the best things that I had, and I was right, because it is our moral sense. I would not simply ignore it – I was too proud of my standards and too afraid of becoming a bad person. I would feel like a weasel if I tried to worm my way out of this condemnation. But I could not bear it, either. I could not live under it and still enjoy life.

Since we have to live with ourselves, we undergo strange compromises. You’d think that someone who’s hard on himself with his errors in a soccer game or a piano recital will be hard on himself in the important moral and ethical issues of his life. But it turns out that as you grow more meticulous about little things you can start to ignore large and real faults. We can only bear self-condemnation to a certain point. Our threshold lowers as we become more exacting with ourselves, and when that threshold is breached, we must deflect the self-condemnation to remain alive.

Jesus said that the Pharisees “swallow a camel and strain out a gnat.” When moralists warn against numbing your conscience, they usually imply that it is by swallowing enough gnats that you desensitize yourself to the prospect of swallowing camels, but they neglect to point out that sometimes it is by straining out the gnats that we lose sight of the camels we swallow whole. You can numb your conscience by listening to accusations just as you can numb it by ignoring them. I cannot live with the unmitigated force of my conscience. I have to numb myself to it to survive.

This is where legalism leads. It is the Catch-22 of trying to live a moral life. It is the reason why every uncompromising attempt to live a life of justice and virtue must end in either hypocrisy or despair.

At first glance it does seem like the remorseless have it easier. And, if once you recognize your own despair and self-condemnation as a sin and not a virtue, it seems that the remorseless (who are free from this sin) even have the moral high ground. Is that what really lies behind the professionalism involved in moving on after messing up, behind the sanctity required to "forget what lies behind and press on toward the mark"? Or is it, in the end, just a question of lowering your standards, of being easier on yourself?

Again, if you were to assume that, you’d be wrong. We all know that this can't be the answer. The real answer lies elsewhere.

11: A chill day

2007-07-16T03:36:00.000-07:00

That day I did not get very far. I was sunburned, and my muscles were sore from the unaccustomed exercise. And above all I was feeling the strain of not having slept very well for the past three nights. I felt that I had time to kill anyways. It had taken me only a few hours to get from Taizé to St. Jean-de-Luz, and I had expected to spend a few days hitch hiking that stretch.

It was a pleasant walk into Donostia San Sebastian.

I found a café in which to eat something and write in my journal. Then I went to the tourist office to ask a few questions about the Camino de Santiago. They gave me a brochure (in German, no less) which had a basic map and some pointers for the entire stretch. It was not specific at all, and (as I found out later) quite outdated, but this served as my rough guide for most of the path.

I hit an internet café and caught up a bit on blogging and eMailing.

The rest of the day I spent lying on the beach. I was really hoping that I would be able to fall asleep, because I have a bad habit of getting sick if I go too many days without sleeping well. That would not be a good way to start a pilgrimage.

I thought about my guitar. She was the single heaviest object I was carrying. I had originally planned to make the whole pilgrimage with only the guitar bag strapped to my back. Since it was meant for a larger guitar than the one I was carrying, I could fit a few extra clothes into its recesses and pockets. I also had my trenchcoat, which was too warm to wear in the daytime of a Spanish spring, but which provided me with a good cape, blanket, and even mattress. It, too, had plenty of pockets.

And yet, I found that I needed to pack a small backpack as well. I was won over by the self-consciousness of knowing that it will be hard to keep yourself and your clothes smelling nice if you only take what you can stuff between a guitar and a guitar bag.

But I had made sure to take only what I could bear to part with. Apart from my digital camera and my mp3 player (both being gifts from my father), my documents and my journals, I could throw away anything I was carrying with me if it got too heavy.

And the guitar was getting heavy. She was an old, beat-up instrument I had bought for 10 Pounds in a Salvation Army Thrift Store in Bournemouth 7 years ago. But she was robust and had character and a sound that was ideal for busking and campfire singing. I could, of course, bear to part with her, because she had served me well these years, and I had already suspected that this pilgrimage would be our last trip together.

I was lying on the beach, in the shadow of some beach club building, but I wasn’t able to fall asleep. I dug out the guitar and played a few songs. Should I do this “right”? Should I find a street corner and see if I can make any money with this? That was, after all, one of the reasons for bringing the guitar.

But I was too lazy and self-conscious. I spent the afternoon like a beach bum, chilling in the sand, singing a bit, reading a bit, lying down for a while. I thought vague thoughts about how to continue the pilgrimage. I tried to do some praying and meditating, but this was harder when I was just sitting there instead of walking.

Eventually I did manage to fall asleep for a bit. When I woke up it was late afternoon. I gathered up my things and started walking out of town.

10: Meditations on the Resurrection, Part 3: "Wasn't this what you've been waiting for?"

2007-07-13T16:28:00.000-07:00

The chief priests

The truly scary lesson here is one that is, in a way, impossible to learn: the chief priests hear of the supernatural events at Jesus’ tomb, and their first (and only) thought is, “how do we prevent this word from spreading?” The idea that a stone-rolling angel, an earthquake and an empty tomb might be indicators that the crucified man was indeed the Messiah didn’t even occur to them.

I wonder how many of these same chief priests had been present three decades earlier when some astrologers from the East came to Jerusalem asking where the newborn king was. The priests could answer that question all right – questions like this were the substance of their lives. But why did it not enter any of their minds to walk a couple of miles to Bethlehem and see what the heck is going on? Most likely because, in their world view, the Messiah would come from the Jews for the Jews, and whichever Jew was most versed in Scripture would be the first to recognize His coming. The idea that a couple of uncircumcised magi with their God-condemned divination practices would be given the word while the chief priests would remain ignorant of it was one that, again, did not occur to them.

Of course it is easy for us to condemn them, but this “did not occur to them” is actually pretty scary. How can I prevent a similar error? Open-mindedness alone is not enough. An open mind is one that does not immediately reject something it is presented with, but it cannot accept or reject ideas it is not presented with. So how do I know which possibilities aren't presenting themselves, which ideas I can neither accept nor reject because they simply do not occur to me? I can rack my brain all I want; an idea that doesn’t occur to me will not be found. That would be a contradiction. But what may be impossible for my brain to even think up may be perfectly obvious to an outside observer. After all, we think, how could the idea really not have presented itself to the priests? Didn’t they hear Jesus’ claim to be God? Wasn’t that the precise reason for his execution?

The only answer I have found is one that has implications which offend many Christians: in order to be open to the truth, the chief priests would have had to allow themselves to doubt what was most sacred to them. I really do not think there could have been any other way for them to recognize Jesus as the Fulfillment of the Law that they loved so dearly and had devoted their lives to. From our angle we can see that clearly enough, but you’ll notice that you get uneasy when it comes to putting this into practice. It's easy to go on a little intellectual foray you call a "journey of doubt", but genuinely questioning what's sacred to you is an almost impossible undertaking no matter what you believe. This is why it usually takes some major trials in life to get you to really submit to the process.

It is easy to see that the priests should have been a little less sure of themselves when you already believe that they were wrong; but it is another matter to attack your own certainty where you believe you are right. You can tell someone that their image of God needs to be re-evaluated, but you’ll learn that you can’t really re-evaluate your image of God without feeling to some extent like you’re doubting God.

But we must not be too alarmed by this. We may have been taught that faith is the absence of doubt, but it isn’t. The absence of doubt is foolishness, not faith (MacGyver’s grandfather already knew this). You cannot learn, cannot be corrected, cannot grow without doubt; these things require you to let go of what you think you know, which is another way of saying that they require you to doubt. And without that, you can't have true faith either. The most frightening heresies are usually not taught and followed by people who doubt, but by people who have convictions which they are literally incapable of doubting.

So how is “questioning what is most sacred to us” different from those detrimental forms of doubt, the many ways one can waffle around or flirt with the sacrosanct or avoid committing to any certainty or get completely lost? I’m not exactly sure. I suspect that when they have paralyzed us, our doubts may have become what is most sacred to us; they may have become our religion. And when that happens, they in turn need to be doubted as well. I don’t know. What I do know is that some religious scholars missed the World’s Greatest Event because they refused to question their most sacred ideas.

9: Coffee With the Twelve Tribes

2007-07-12T07:29:00.000-07:00

I had just been resting beside a trail from which only mountains and ocean were visible and only seagulls could be heard, but less than 15 minutes later I found myself walking down an increasingly suburban street. There were large houses with large yards. One of these had a sign which read something like “welcome pilgrims”. There was a man standing in the yard.

“Excuse me,” I asked him, “is this a pilgrim shelter?”

“No, it’s a commune.”

This immediately interested me. “What sort of commune?”

“Well, we … hey do you want to join us for coffee?”

“Sure.”

I was going to have coffee at a commune!

Coffee was taken on an outdoor table and included some cake and ice cream. The man told me his name, something very Jewish-sounding which I promptly forgot again. I’m terrible with names. His wife joined us as well. They looked more or less like you’d expect members of a commune to look: he was tall and strong and had a bushy beard which was showing some grey. His hair was tied back into a small pony tail. He wore a plaid shirt and a dark vest. His wife had long hair and wore a long, plain dress. A few children came and went during the course of the next few minutes, and they too had names which sounded like words someone had pinched out of a Hebrew dictionary.

“So what sort of commune is this?” I asked again when we were settled. The man still seemed reluctant to say. He sipped his coffee languidly.

“Well, we’re a community of believers…”

…Yes? I wondered to myself. But nothing more came.

My body language must have betrayed my desire to know more. The woman interjected, “Yes, but the question you’ll be asking is, ‘what kind of believers?’”

That was indeed the question I would be asking.

The conversation picked up from there, and little by little I learned that their commune was part of a larger religious group called the 12 Tribes. Their central teaching is based on the two passages in the book of Acts in which it talks about the church in Jerusalem being a community in which no one had any property to himself, and where everything was shared. The 12 Tribes group believes that unless you follow this model of community, you are not a follower of Jesus.

I did not learn very much of this at that conversation, however. They mentioned a few times that the shofar was about to summon everyone to evening prayer. When the shofar blew, they invited me to join their prayer time.

It was all very quaint. In addition to their “normal” Gypsy-Amish clothing the women wore head coverings for the prayer time, and the men wore leather headbands. They sang some Jewish-sounding songs and they danced while they sang. They read a Bible passage from a standard Spanish Bible translation, but they substituted “Yahshua Messias” every time the word “Jesucristo” (Jesus Christ) appeared. They had a time of testimony in which they all said how great it was to belong to this family and of how God was healing them of many difficulties. They had a time of prayer for which the women and children huddled together in the center, and the men stood around them with their hands upraised.

After prayer time they invited me to dinner. All the food was organic and ecologically grown. Their own sustenance as a commune came from an on-premise bakery in which they also adhered to strict standards of all-natural recipes.

After dinner they invited me to spend the night. I think we could both see where this was going. I saw that they were showing old-fashioned hospitality, but that they also hoped that through their testimony and their conversation I might be won over. I’m pretty sure they saw that I had seen this and deemed it a worthwhile price. I helped them bag some of their bread loaves to be delivered in the morning. They showed me where I could shower and brush my teeth. They showed me where there was a bed for me, the bed which Kephas (whose birth certificate, I’m willing to bet, lists his first name as “Pedro”) made available for me while he went to sleep on the sofa.

All this time and until I left the next day I was being proselytized. They took it in turns to talk to me about how deep the errors of the Catholic and Protestant churches are; of how it is impossible to please God as long as you live a selfish life in which you own things, rather than sharing everything with the members of a commune; of how the end times were coming and their movement was a fulfillment of prophecy; of how I had misinterpreted Nebuchadnezzar’s dream all my life, because I had failed to grasp that the feet of iron and clay represent not the Roman Empire, but the Protestant and Catholic church (the Orthodox church went unmentioned in all this); of how following Yahshua was not “some mystical thing”, but a practical day-to-day attitude of loving the people in your commune.

For the most part I was able to listen to all this without feeling like I needed to argue. I knew how futile it was to try to reason with ideas such as these, and I did not want to abuse their hospitality by challenging their theology. But the last point was difficult for me. I feel that to know God at all is already “a mystical thing”. To know the God of Christianity is even more so, because there are all these complications like a Triune personality, and a Last Adam who somehow lives in me and absorbs the wrath but channels the grace, and to whose likeness I am being conformed through His Spirit, and all sorts of other stuff that cannot be conceived of, much less experienced, in any but mystical terms. What convinces me about Christianity is not that its morality differs greatly from that of other moral systems; it does differ, but not much. What convinces me is that it alone seems to have a radically different, and radically spiritual, answer of how to live the life that all moral systems teach and yet all also admit is impossible to achieve. And this answer lies in a mystical union with the Creator of the Universe and the Redeemer of humanity. Following Jesus means you can maintain a practical day-to-day attitude of loving all humans because you have “some mystical thing”.

After a very short night’s sleep, I was awakened by singing voices. It was 5 AM, and morning prayers were beginning.

It was easy to feel a lot of things for them. I felt pity, in a way, because my brief contact with them had already shown that they were very closed. In their theology, heaven would contain only themselves and the members of the 1^st-century church. They seemed to be trying to re-invent the wheel, as it were, ignoring the many communes and communal movements that had existed, and still exist, within the Church. In fact they ignored most of Church history except for the messy bits which their own 30-year-old movement could be favorably compared to (when your movement has only existed a few decades, it is guaranteed to look more wholesome and together than after 2,000 years). They forced some strange interpretations on many Bible passages. They kept their world small and simple. They were very friendly and hospitable. Very friendly and hospitable. Think of the most friendly Mennonites you’ve ever met, and you’ll get the idea. But they were also narrow and legalistic. Legalism always feels a little alarming to me.

But I also felt happy for them as I heard their stories of how they had found a home here. And they were certainly very committed to a hard spiritual school – submitting to an entire life of extreme community. This may lead them to much deeper “mystical” things than they expect. As I watched them during their prayer times, I suspected a deeper kinship than we might have acknowledged to each other. It struck me that it is ultimately the Parent, and not the sibling, who knows all the members of the family.

The "Twelve Tribes" commune outside of Donostia San Sebastian. I'm thinking that I should have taken pictures of the commune members, but I didn't know how to do that without appearing rude. (The "Welcome Pilgrims" sign did not make it into the picture.)

8: Meditations on the Resurrection, Part 2: They did WHAT?

2007-07-09T22:01:00.000-07:00

The Guards at the Tomb

No one witnessed the actual event of Jesus’ resurrection, but the Roman guards were the ones who came closest. They were only a few steps away when the angel came down and rolled the stone aside.

Curiously, the impression one gets is that the tomb was already empty. Jesus did not need the stone to be removed before he could get out; the stone rolling away was the like curtain rising to show the stage for the next, and even more breathtaking, act of God’s unfolding drama.

Not much is said about the guards, and three of the four Evangelists don’t mention them at all. Understandably, they are in a state of shock. Maybe they are lying on the floor; neither the angel(s) nor the women seem to take any notice of them at all. Only Matthew gives them a few verses in his gospel, and these verses are among the most hilarious, and the most tragic, of the entire Bible.

The guards have the front row seat in the theater, and maybe we can learn from their experience that “front row” can be too overwhelming. But privileged seats or no, they are the misfits in the resurrection accounts. Not only do they get the unmitigated scare of their lifetime, not only are they ignored by everyone in the story; they don’t seem to be planned into the story at all. Between Easter and Ascension the resurrected Jesus is witnessed by people who feel a great joy at seeing him again, people to whom he had meant something.

And by the guards, in a way.

It doesn’t mention that Jesus himself appeared to them, but it seems that they can be counted as witnesses to the resurrection – earthquakes and angels and an empty tomb and all that. But this seems purely coincidental, an accidental byproduct of a last-minute decision by the chief priests to have the tomb guarded.

The guards are just ordinary blokes doing their job; they have no hopes of a Messiah, no apparent connection to this Jesus. By contrast to the other people Jesus appeared to, there is no sense of Jesus seeking them out; it would be highly unlikely that Jesus would have given these Roman guards a Resurrection experience if they had not happened to be in a particular place at a particular time.

The guards had a simple task: guard a tomb from a handful of provincial fishermen. And failure at such a simple task carried the death penalty. And while they had not exactly failed the task of defending the tomb against some fishermen (who didn’t even show up), they did fail the task of defending the tomb against God and His angels.

Of course, someone who believes in God and angels may let them off the hook, may conclude very rationally that there is no way a troop of guards, even the best Roman guards, could reasonably be expected to keep the upper hand against such odds. But the Roman superiors probably wouldn’t believe the story. So in addition to having received the scare of their lives, the guards are also scared for their lives.

In such situations there is a great need for friends, and friends are easiest to find among people who have something in common with you. With unerring instinct, the guards run to the chief priests; at least they have in common with them the wish that this hadn’t happened, and the desire that no one finds out that it has happened.

And here’s where the story takes its tragicomical turn: these priests, men who have spent their entire lives studying Scripture and waiting for God’s Messiah, do not feel the least desire to find out what these supernatural events are all about. What they do feel is that their reputation is at stake. Since the lives of the guards are also at stake, there is significant potential for mutual blackmail in the situation.

I cannot decide whether their solution is brilliant or lazy. They bribe the Roman superiors into sparing the guards in return for the guards pretending to be the most incompetent jackasses in the empire. The priests save face and lose some money, the guards lose face but get away with their lives. Brilliant.

Or just lazy? Did no one bother to think of a plausible excuse, so they preposterously claimed that the very thing they were sent to prevent was what had happened? Why would the guards sleep on the job if their life was at stake? And, more hilariously, how can a sleeping guard recognize a Galilean disciple, to claim afterwards to know the identity of the bodysnatchers?

I’m not sure of the spiritual significance of the guards’ resurrection experience. It could be said that in this story, God put the guards’ life in danger, and the priests and Pharisees saved their lives. But there are two obvious points:

1. God doesn’t always reveal Himself only to those who are looking for Him, and
2. Even if you’re the one who is closer than anyone else in the world to a momentous spiritual event, it does not follow that your life will change. It does not even follow that you’ll be aware of the significance of the occasion.

7: First real day on the trail

2007-07-08T17:00:00.001-07:00

Once again I woke up with the crack of dawn, but I remained in my sleeping bag to keep warm and hopefully fall asleep again. This attempt did not last long; I was feeling self-conscious, lying under a stage in a picnic park behind a church in daylight. I got dressed and went to one of the picnic tables. Last night I had gotten a 2-for-1 deal on a pair of pizzas in Irun, and I finished up their cold remains for breakfast. The park service came to maintain the lawn, so I packed my things to get out of their way.

It became immediately clear to me that my expectations of pilgrimage would undergo a few alterations. I had tried to have no expectations at all, but that is simply impossible. I now noticed that I had not expected to be hiking. I had not expected trails like last night’s, and I saw that it continued this way. A narrow path led up the mountain and along the ridge. My friend Bryan defines the difference between traipsing and hiking as “hiking is where there’s an actual risk of you falling down and breaking something”. There did not seem to be such a risk here, but it still did not feel like I would be able to walk 5-6 hours a day for 40 days with a guitar on my back if the trail was going to be like this the whole way.

I was on Jaizkibel, which is more of a high ridge than a mountain. It reminded me a lot of where I grew up. To the East of Quito there is a similar ridge, collectively called Pichincha, which affords a similar hike. Today there was fog in the lower elevations, and only occasionally would the fog thin enough for me to catch glimpses of the valley to my left, and the sea to my right. That is, the sea itself was not distinguishable, but outlines of ships were visible.

I remember that day as a long walk, even though I covered less distance than on many of the following days. Most of it went along mountains by the sea. At one point the yellow arrows pointed me to a small pier where a ferry picked me up and brought me across an inlet. The ferryman had virtually no voice; he half croaked, half whispered that I had to pay 60 cents for the fare.

This was Pasaia San Pedro. The town was charming enough, but I was surprised at the hostile graffiti on some of the walls. I did not understand most of the words themselves (almost everything was in Basque), but one can get a feeling of the sentiment behind them, especially when there are symbols and illustrations to accompany the written word.

After Pasaia San Pedro the trail went up to the mountains again. There was a large lighthouse which dominated the view for a while. The trail continued, offering a view of a rugged shoreline.

I started worrying about water. In my hikes in the Alps, there had been fountains everywhere; today I had walked mostly through mountainous areas and hadn’t found any fountain. Twice I had asked a local if I could have some water. One lady was not accommodating at all, but the other one gladly complied. In fact for the rest of my pilgrimage I was to encounter a disarming hospitality again and again.

My half-empty water bottle was not the only problem, though. I began to realize that my idea of sleeping wherever I laid my head was not going to work out very well. There hadn’t really been many places to lay one’s head. It was the hot hours of the day, and I had not slept well the last few nights. It would have been great to find a shady place in the grass and just lie down for an hour or two. But no such place was to be found. There were rocks, there were bushes, there was a steep slope, and there was a trail.

Eventually I did come to a spring. I had a good long drink of water, and I washed my hands and arms. I took off my shoes and washed my feet and legs. This felt so good that I undressed and got myself completely under the stream of water.

Of course, a handful of hikers chose that moment of my solitary day to walk by. I sort of hid behind a rock and we all laughed. I washed a few of my clothes in the fountain and sat down nearby to rest a bit.

When I finally found a place where there was some grass and shade, it was almost 6 in the evening. I laid down for a bit, and started wondering whether or not I should spend the night there. Was I likely to find anything as good within the remaining two or three hours of daylight? True, I had no food left, but I did have water. I did not really need to eat again until morning. I could just drift off, fall asleep here, to the sound of very distant breakers and not-so-distant seagulls...

...but of course it did not work that way. After less than an hour of failed attempts at falling asleep I was feeling restless, and decided to keep walking, and to find something else before it got dark.

6: Getting to Irun

2007-07-07T17:00:00.001-07:00

I was resting at a little chapel or shrine called “Notre Dame de Sokorri”. I attempted to take a nap in the shadow of a tree, but my attempt was unsuccessful. I shouldered my load and went on walking.

I must have taken a wrong turn soon after, because I found myself on a road that was going down into a generic upper-class suburb. I tried to find a way to go west, but couldn’t find one until I was back on the carretera.

For the entire remainder of the day, in fact, I ambled about trying to find a good walking road that would lead me westwards. I ventured onto field roads and forest roads, but most of the time these led back to the carretera. Others ended up going any direction but westwards, or they ended on someone’s private farm, or dwindled into dirt roads and trails which suddenly ended with thick underbrush or a barbed wire fence. More than once, after backtracking out of a dead-end and landing on the carretera again, I had to suppress my urge to stick out a thumb and hitch a ride.

“No”, I reminded myself. “You’re a pilgrim now, not a hitch hiker. You’re walking. Get used to that.”

Eventually I made Hendaye. It started raining heavily, but I was prepared. I had packed a lot of plastic bags to keep all my things dry, and even two large white bags which were really bicycle coverings. These were to be my surrogate tents and umbrellas along the way. I took out one of these and draped it over myself and my backpack/guitar bag somehow.

As I was crossing the bridge into Spain, I felt that the reactions I was getting from people seemed to indicate that something was odd. On the other side I caught my reflection in a shop window, and I noticed that I looked a lot like a member of the Ku Klux Klan, with a towering white hood formed by a corner of the bicycle covering and the top of my guitar bag.

In downtown Irun I sat down in a café to drink something warm and to write in my journal. It was the first day of a new adventure, and on such days your thoughts are many and jumbled and somewhat inspired. Even in retrospect, the beginning of the trip is much more vivid in my memory than the weeks following.

I finished a coffee and croissant and headed out to the streets again. The people I asked did not seem to know where the Camino de Santiago was. They told me to head out to San Sebastian, but they pointed me towards the carretera. This put me in the uncomfortable position of asking for directions and then not going in the indicated direction.

I followed my instinct instead. The sun was already going down behind the Jaizkibel. I figured that a trail leading westwards would probably go over that mountain, or maybe pass it to the north.

But the road took me to swampy land first. I was wondering about the wisdom of spending the night in a swamp, but I noticed what looked like an information stand. It turns out that I had wandered into a natural preserve. There was a map on the information stand, and it showed some of the trails through the park. Among them was one trail that came from outside the park and led back out again, labelled “Camino de Santiago”.

Hooray, I thought. Finally. Fifteen minutes later I was on the trail, marked by a somewhat worn-out sign with the yellow arrow and the symbolic seashell that I would see so many more times during the next few weeks.

The sun had already gone down, and it was getting dark fast. The trail was well-marked with yellow arrows, and I followed it out of the park, and up past some houses towards a forest. I had to take out the flashlight now.

I had seen a church tower in the distance for about an hour, and it seemed that this path was leading in that direction. Once I was there, I thought, I’d find a place to spend the night. I occasionally saw it through the trees, illuminated by floodlights and looking like it could be a monastery. Who knows, I thought, maybe someone is still up and about and ready to give some hospitality to a pilgrim.

Yeah, right. As if one can just encroach on the hospitality of monasteries. But to tell the truth, this was all very new to me. I’d been a pilgrim for only a day now, and on the actual pilgrim path for only a few minutes. I had done no research. Pilgrimage seemed like such an anachronistic idea, and so did the idea of finding shelter for the night at a monastery, so maybe the two ideas co-existed in this context.

It was very dark. The path became a steep muddy trail into the thick of the woods. This would be impossible without my flashlight, I thought. I was breathing hard, and the load on my back felt heavy. Would this be the kind of walking I would have to do for the next 39 days?

The yellow arrows pointed deeper and deeper into the woods, and the trail got rough. It consisted mostly of large stones, gnarled roots and puddles of mud. I suddenly felt like someone in a horror movie, lost in the woods at night following markings that had been put there by some sociopath who lures innocent pilgrims into his lair in the thickest part of the forest.

I shook that off and even laughed at it. But I still did not feel at ease. As a child I had been pathologically afraid of the dark, and even though I learned over the years to confront the fear, or to act in spite of it, I have never completely conquered it.

I was relieved when the forest finally cleared. Beneath me to the right were the lights of Irun, Hondarribia and Hendaye. To the left was the cathedral, flooded in light.

There was something of a picnic park around the church, and in spite of the late hour there were several cars parked there. People were enjoying the nighttime view or hanging out at what seemed to be a tavern a little further along.

I set about looking for a sheltered place to sleep. Behind the church there was something like a stage, perhaps a remainder of a recent wedding or some other function. I spread out my sleeping bag underneath the stage and tried to go to sleep.

There were trees that looked like giant multiple amputees. I would see these trees again many times during the pilgrimage, but I hadn’t seen them before. I woke up repeatedly during the night, and as I saw the odd trees illuminated by floodlights, and heard the owls calling to one another, I felt a strange eeriness that continued to haunt me into my dreams.

I don't know what kinds of trees they are or even if they look like this by nature or as a result of trimming and pruning, but I saw them again and again on the pilgrimage. At night they could look pretty spooky, and I'd fancy that they were talking to each other.

5: Meditations on the Resurrection, Part 1: Let's Give 'Em Something To Doubt!

2007-07-06T00:22:00.000-07:00

The Bible contains some strange passages, and it would be difficult to pick the strangest one of them all. But the gospels’ accounts of the 40 days between Jesus’ resurrection and his ascension would definitely be high contenders.

The resurrection is Christianity’s great feast. It marks the triumph of life over death, of good over evil, of whatever epic struggle you want to insert here. It is the epic epic. It seals Jesus’ identity as the Son of God, and our identity as overcomers in him. Without Christ’s resurrection, as St Paul reminds us, “our faith is futile”.

Considering all of this, it seems that the resurrected Jesus goes about things in exactly the wrong way. He’s the walking, talking Body of Evidence to silence all his critics and detractors, to convince skeptics and convert unbelievers. Also, he’s got the ultimate last laugh.

But he doesn’t silence critics or convert unbelievers, and he only convinces those skeptics who, in easier times, were already convinced. And he doesn’t ha-ha anyone. He is usually not immediately recognized by the people he appears to, and he does not hang around for very long once they do recognize him. The first witnesses of his resurrection are people whose testimony would be considered invalid in a court of law at that time. He is apparently doing his best to make the accounts of his resurrection as unbelievable and discreditable as possible.

Is this the same Jesus who told us not to hide a light under a bushel, and not to bury the talent we’ve been given? Why is he treating his resurrection like classified information, like an inside joke, like, like… well, like a light that he’s very effectively keeping under a bushel?

He had said it himself: unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains only a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces great fruit. He may have been talking primarily of his own death and resurrection, but it is a fundamental principle of his teaching, and of our lives, especially as this death and resurrection becomes our guiding spiritual reality: we lose what we try to hold on to, and we gain what we voluntarily forfeit. And we gain it hundredfold.

Jesus voluntarily forfeited his life to find it again, but he also voluntarily forfeited something else: the most logical means by which to “bring great fruit”, to draw the great masses of humankind to himself. He knew the nature of doubt better than the doubters themselves did. He knew that “if they do not believe Moses and the prophets, neither will they believe when someone rises from the dead.” He knew that the sort of people who would shout “Hosanna” one day would shout “Crucify him” by the end of the week. He knew that true faith would have to make a much more subversive entrance, that the most valuable treasure would have to be carried in earthen vessels.

But this may be even more important: Jesus knew that faith is not what you have before you doubt, just like hope and joy are not what you have before you fall into despair. Faith, hope and joy are the Promised Land, and doubt and despair are the river, the desert, and the sea that must be crossed to get there. He knew that what skeptics and doubters often need is not less doubt but more. Doubt to the point of unbearable discomfort. He knew that the sort of openness we need to arrive at if we are to step out of ourselves even for a moment will never be achieved as long as we have the luxury of “letting facts speak for themselves.” He knew what he was saying when he told Thomas, “blessed are those who believe without seeing.”

Glory be to you, O Christ! “Surely you are a God who hides himself.”

4: getting out of St. Jean

2007-07-05T00:44:00.000-07:00

I get off the beach and go into town. I buy a baguette at the first bakery I find, and sit down on a bench for breakfast. I still have a few small packs of jam left over from the Taize meals. Many of the young people who were there for the week were throwing away a lot of food. I wonder if the people who throw away food are aware of how offensive it is. I mean, we’re all told it’s sort of a thing you don’t do, like throwing glass into the paper recycling bin. But do they know it’s offensive?

After breakfast I walk over to the tourist information office. It is still closed. The internet café is open, but it is very expensive.

Too bad. I haven’t been online for over a week. Gotta update my blog so that people at least know that I’ve started the pilgrimage safely. Gotta see if there were any important eMails.

After a short internet session I return to the tourist office. The woman behind the counter speaks practically no English, and only broken Spanish. I ask her if I can get a pilgrim’s stamp in my passport.

Not that she knows of. I’m thinking of St. Jean Pied-de-Port, she says.

No I’m not. I’m intentionally walking the Camino Norte because I’m trying to avoid the big crowds. I was told that the Camino Norte begins at St. Jean-de-Luz. The man who picked me up when I was hitch hiking in Luxembourg told me that they give you a stamp in your passport here.

But it’s OK. I only need a stamp to show off with later on, right? (I didn’t know about the “pilgrim’s passports” yet. I had done no research.)

She couldn’t even tell me where the trail began, so I just started walking westwards. I bought some peanuts and some roasted corn on my way out of town.

The walk was frustrating. There was a sort of highway or busy country road (in Spanish the generic term is carretera) leading towards Irun. There wasn’t much of a shoulder to the road, and the traffic was disconcertingly close as I tried to walk there. I walked in the roadside ditch for a while, which was not a happy experience either. When a trail appeared to the right, I gladly got on that, figuring that there would probably be some back roads to get me to the Spanish border. Two goats were tied to some nearby bushes.

I met an elderly couple out for a walk. They gave me a friendly greeting and immediately asked what language I speak: French? English? Spanish?

“No French,” I replied. “The other two are not a problem. Also German.”

“Ohh, a polyglot”, said the man.

“Well, hardly. You’re speaking English, and you most likely speak French and Basque as well, and Spanish, too?”

He nodded.

“See? You speak more languages than I do.”

“But where are you from?”

“I’m German. But I grew up in South America.”

“Ah. Alles klar.”

“And Basque, what is it like? I was reading the street names last night, and it looks to me a bit like a Slavic language, but I heard that it’s closer to Gaelic…”

He was shaking his head.

“No, it’s not like any other language.”

“But where did you Basques originally come from?”

“From Heaven,” he said, and smiled. “Direct out of Noah’s Ark into this beautiful country. See that fortification there? 11th Century. But the Basques have been here long, long before that.”

I was pretty sure I had heard that the Celts and the Basques had roots in common, but I couldn’t remember if it had been a reliable source. Besides, even the connection between Celtic and Gaelic was foggy in my mind.

“And now I’m trying to walk the Camino de Santiago. Does this path lead anywhere?”

“Oh yes. You’ll find it takes you to the top of a little hill, where there’s a pretty little chapel. It keeps going on the other side until you get to Hendaye. Then you can cross the bridge into Spain.”

“Thank you very much.”

“You’ll be walking along the north coast of Spain?”

“Yes.”

“Make sure to visit Ondarroa. It’s a beautiful little coastal town. Beautiful.” (Here he kissed his fingertips in the way that Italian cooks stereotypically kiss their fingertips when talking about extra delicious pasta.)

“Well, thank you very much. Have a good day.”

They waved goodbye and continued their walk. I soon found the chapel and rested a while in the shade. I took some time to pray, some time to write, and some time to read through the gospel resurrection accounts. Those, and the Epistle of James, were going to be my themes for meditation on this pilgrimage. The Epistle of James because I was walking towards the traditional site of his remains (although this was probably not the same James), and the resurrection accounts because it was that time of year. For my pilgrimage I was hoping to spend forty days walking, the forty days from Easter until Ascension Day, the same forty days during which Jesus kept appearing to people who had known him.

Every Monday I took a picture of my shoes. This is what they looked like when the journey began.

3. St. Jean-de-Luz on Easter Monday (April 9th, 2007)

2007-07-04T00:01:00.000-07:00

As always, it took me a while to find a place to sleep. I considered a church doorway, then I went to the beach. It was actually a very good setting – the lights from the promenade sort of illuminated the beach, but it was dark enough that if you laid down in the sand, you’d be almost invisible to anyone walking by. But there was someone apparently walking his dog further down the beach. I decided to hang out until he had passed by, but after a while it became clear that he wasn’t really walking his dog anywhere. What the heck were they doing? They appeared to be walking, even running, but they remained on the same stretch of beach about 100 meters away from where I was. Were they playing fetch or something? At 3 in the morning?

I’m always suspicious of people doing things at 3 in the morning. Of course, I’m up at 3 AM myself here, and I’m a guy with a trenchcoat, a guitar and a backpack, so I guess I inspire suspicion as well.

I decided I’d look for another place to spend the night. I found a bench. Benches aren’t that great, because they’re hard and narrow. In addition, this one was pretty public. I don’t like sleeping in public places, because you make people uncomfortable and they often return the favor.

There were drunken voices coming from the local bar. A few people were pouring out. Great, I thought. One couple came walking towards me. The girl was holding a flower in her hand.

They were laughing drunkenly, but when they saw me, they fell silent. Then the girl came to me and handed me the flower.

“Merci”, I whispered. They disappeared into the night.

OK, this bench is no place to sleep for the few remaining hours until daybreak. I take my guitar and go back to the beach. That guy is still there with his dog. What on earth are they doing?

I stop caring. I spread out my sleeping bag in the sand and get inside it. There’s a cold wind blowing across the beach, but I fall asleep soon.

I wake up as the day is breaking. It’s Easter Monday. A tractor is combing the beach and smoothing the sand.

The beach of St. Jean-de-Luz at daybreak.

2: Preparations

2007-07-03T12:40:00.000-07:00

On the entire Camino de Santiago, I was the least prepared pilgrim I encountered. I may have been the only one who took a trenchcoat along, but I was also the only one with no maps or guide books. I was also the only one I met who started out on the pilgrim journey with a guitar on his back.

My formal research for the "Camino de Santiago" was done in about five minutes. I typed the words into a search engine. I found out that there were several pilgrim routes to Santiago. I decided on the northern one, because it 1. went by the sea, and 2. was less busy than the Camino Frances. I made vague plans to start my pilgrimage shortly after Easter somewhere around that point where the French/Spanish border meets the Atlantic coast.

On March 19, 2007, I hitch hiked out of Amsterdam to Grenoble. I spent 10 days working at Champfleuri, a sort of campground near Grenoble. I also made my first attempts at downhill skiing. This might have been a mistake, considering I would still need those legs for a long walk. There is a video here that shows a typical scene of my attempts to ski.

The view from Champfleuri

For Easter Week I went to Taize. This was probably the wisest thing I could have done as a prelude to a pilgrimage. Taize is an ecumenical monastery near Cluny (France). The prayers, the songs, the long periods of silence, the walks through the beautiful surrounding area, the conversations with monks and workshops led by them, and the interactions with other people who came to participate... all these things laid a good groundwork for a pilgrimage.

The Taize sanctuary

On Easter Sunday, after the celebration and lunch, I got a ride in one of the buses taking a group of Portuguese young people to Lisbon. Around 2 AM on Easter Monday they dropped me off in St. Jean-de-Luz. I was now a pilgrim.

Soon after arriving in St. Jean-de-Luz I found myself on this street, named (in French and Basque) after the pilgrim route to Santiago.

1: Why we do things. For example, why I go on a pilgrimage.

2007-07-02T10:48:00.000-07:00

Do any of us know why we do things? At face value, it seems so obvious: we have needs and desires, and we meet them. We eat because we're hungry, we sleep because we're tired, we go to college because we want an education.

And yet, if I honestly look at why I do things, I find that it is not so simple. Why then do I eat when I am not hungry? Why do I not sleep even when I'm tired? Did I really seek higher education, or did I decide to go to university quite independently of that factor? Maybe the "real" reasons are too petty and whimsical (or too shameful) for me to admit to anyone -- even myself -- so I fabricate more legitimate "reasons" that I start believing as well.

In one of George Bernard Shaw's plays (I can't remember which one), one of the characters says something like, "We rarely know why we do things. If we did, would we still do them?"

Some people say that the rationality in our decisions is an illusion: all our decisions are made from our "gut", and we come up with reasons to justify them afterwards. Sometimes "afterwards" is a matter of split seconds, so that we cannot tell that the decision was there before our reasons were. Even the decisions we tackle with all our rationality -- perhaps writing long lists of pros and cons -- cannot truly be taken with our rationality alone. Something needs to evaluate why a given circumstance is a pro or a con, and this something is virtually always some form of self-interest. Even our most altruistic acts give us something in return, or else we simply wouldn't do them.

I do not know why I decided to take a 40-day pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. I don't even remember when I first heard about it. It would have been 2003 or maybe 2004. It might have been while I was on a hitch hiking trip, or in conversation with friends. I really don't know. But I do know that the moment I heard about it, my response was, "I'm doing that someday."

Is it possible to decide something and then discover, through reflection and meditation, what the real reason for my decision was? I asked myself this question again and again during the pilgrimage. Over time I had found three good reasons to take this trip:

1. I like walking.

2. I like getting to know new countries, but I don't like being lost in a country where I do not speak the language.

3. I'd like to take some time to pray and reflect.

At over 800 Kilometers, the Camino de Santiago is a long walk -- it took me 40 days -- through an area in which the infrastructure exists to make walking a good experience. I'd never been in Spain before, but I do speak Spanish. 40 days in which I do nothing but walk would be a good time to reflect, meditate, and learn about prayer.

But if these were my real reasons, why would it have taken me so long to figure them out? If these were not my real reasons, what were the real reasons, and would they also sound so much like the sort of things that would lure a person like me to such an experience?

I noticed that every pilgrim I met along the way was slightly uneasy about being asked why he or she was making this trip. Some of the answers I heard:
"Because it's there."
"I just decided I'd follow yellow arrows and see where they would lead me."
"I want to be able to believe in myself, and crossing the entire country on foot will definitely help."
"Well, I've done the Camino Frances, the Camino de la Plata and the Camino Portugues. Now I decided it was time for the Camino Norte."
"Well, I'm certainly not doing it for religious reasons."

At first it struck me that none of these are satisfactory answers to the question, but then I began wondering what exactly I would expect a satisfactory answer to look like.

On my 38th day, when the pilgrimage was almost finished, I might have heard the best explanation. Ivar from Norway, who had just finished his theological studies and was about to be ordained as a Lutheran pastor, put it more or less like this:

"All the pilgrims are here for spiritual reasons. Many don't know it, and some will go to great lengths to make it clear that those are not their reasons. But our problem is that we have some sort of expectation of what we imagine a spiritual reason to be, and our expectation is not matched by whatever it was that drove us to come walk here. But see for yourself how we all grope for the words to explain why we are making this road. We've forgotten the spirituality of simply walking. What else could be behind all this if not a spiritual reason?"