28: Accomodations near Zumaia... or not

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

27: Our daily sleep deprivation

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

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

"Give us this day our daily bread."

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

"Give us this day our daily bread."

I suddenly realized that I was talking about sleep.

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

"Give us this day our daily bread."

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

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

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

"Give us this day our daily bread."

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

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

"Give us this day our daily bread."

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

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

"Give us this day our daily

[rest]
bread."

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

"Give us this day our daily sleep."

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

26: Our Daily Bread

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Give us this day our daily bread."

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

"Give us this day our daily bread."

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

"Give us this day our daily bread."

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

"Give us this day our daily bread."

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

"Give us this day our daily bread."

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

"Give us this day our daily bread."

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

"Give us this day our daily bread."

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

"Give us this day our daily bread."

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

"Give us this day our daily bread."

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

25: walking on a rainy night

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

23: Leaving Zarautz

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

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

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

Hmmm. Concrete floor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hardly.

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

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

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