98: Comillas

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

79: the pilgrim shelter in Güemes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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.