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.