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.

46: leaving Gernika

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

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

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

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