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.