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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

"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."

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

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

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"

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.