21: a Basque Mass

I still had a few minutes until the mass would begin, so I took the time to pray for a bit. Then a priest went to the front and started talking in Basque. The sparse congregation responded. The priest said something else, and again the congregation knew what to say. The talking was fast, and they were almost interrupting each other.

I was a little disappointed. I could not understand Basque, and I wasn't familiar enough with this liturgy to follow it in my mind. The speaking was mechanical, not like anyone meant it so much as like they were trying to get through it as fast as possible. And even though we were in a monastery, there were no monks anywhere to be seen.

I stayed and observed for a while, but then I got tired and restless. I took my pack and snuck outside. I went to the beach, spread out my trench coat, and lay down to rest. I was hoping to be able to fall asleep early tonight, but I lay there on the beach for several hours, taking turns trying to sleep and trying to think about something. There were dark clouds gathering, and the sea-wind was getting cold. Great, I thought. Get some sleep before it rains.

20: a side note about liturgy

Like many people, I gave myself the luxury of holding certain views for much of my life without really knowing much about the issue. Growing up in a mainstream Evangelical missionary setting, I was taught early on that Roman Catholics have it wrong because they're trying to earn their salvation and because their doctrines and traditions are additions to the Bible and whatnot. I not only held this view, I defended it as well, even though I didn't know many Catholics, didn't know much about their theology, and had never been to mass in a Catholic church.

Then I experienced liturgy.

Most of my life I had assumed that a church service consists of two things: songs and a sermon. There were of course other elements, like an offering, a communion celebration, maybe a time for announcements or testimonies, but the main course, the indispensable bit, was the singing and preaching.

I had a hard time finding a church in which the music and the sermonizing really moved me. I brought my standards down to "one out of two ain't bad". Then I stopped expecting to get anything out of going to church at all, telling myself that it is a fleshly and not a spiritual attitude to go to church in the expectation of "getting something" out of it.

Then I experienced liturgy.

The Anglican Church in Amsterdam was not my first exposure to liturgical services, but it was where I started "getting it". The sermons were hit and miss and the hymns were difficult and obscure (though I loved them because they were challenging), but that was secondary. I saw that sermons and songs did not have to be the main part of a church service at all. And I experienced that God met me and lifted my spirit week after week in the repetition of the liturgical "dialogue". I would seriously spend much of the week looking forward to hearing the priest say "lift up your hearts" and replying with the rest of the congregation, "we lift them to the Lord." I know this sounds a little bit pathetic, but I had really stopped expecting to have spiritual encounters in church, and this moment (among others) could touch my spirit in a way that made me giddy.

Like many Anglican churches, ours then got rid of much of the liturgy in an attempt, I assume, to be more "relevant". Since then I viewed the Roman Catholic Church in a different light. For all its faults, it could at least be counted on to not try a trick like that (or so I thought), and maybe that would be a place where I could still experience the Spirit of God. So as I walked past the Franciscan monastery in Zarautz and saw that Mass was about to begin, I went inside.

19: Zarautz and a tick

The descent into Zarautz is much like the descent into many other towns on Spain's northern coast. After walking through mountainous terrain and rugged shorelines for a while, the view opens up to show a beach right beneath you, with a city to its left and the blue waters of the Bay of Biscay to the right of it. There was a beach promenade further down, and a golf course as well.

I soon found the clinic. I was getting heartily sick of the weight I was carrying, though. Even though I'd only been walking for four days, I could already tell by the feeling of my pack whether my water bottle was full, half-full or empty. I wondered for the umpteenth time if I should get rid of the guitar.

I walked right into the most positive experience in a clinic of my entire life. The people were friendly and forthcoming. My Dutch insurance card got me in completely hassle-free -- not only was I charged no money, but I did not need to fill in any paperwork. I did not have to wait more than five minutes in the waiting room.

The nurse was friendly and we chatted about my pilgrimage. She had done part of the trip herself and was going to do another leg this summer. She removed the tick with a pair of sterile tweezers and killed it. I had felt a little self-conscious, going to a clinic because of a stupid tick, but that was put in order. I told her it's been over ten years since my last tetanus shot, so she gave me one then and there. This was great, because it meant I wouldn't have to worry about this every time I scraped my knee or whatever.

At the end she gave me a lot of advice for my pilgrimage. She told me to wear two pairs of socks to avoid blisters on the feet (I had been doing this already) and to get another pair of shoes or sandals or slippers or whatever (which I was reluctant to do, since the weight on my back already felt excessive). She remarked on my sunburn.

I headed out. I followed the signs to the Franciscan monastery. I saw that there was a church service about to take place, so I went in and sat down. I had never been in a Catholic Church for mass before, and had been hoping to remedy that for a long time. I decided this would be a good opportunity to stop procrastinating.

18: Silence, Part 1

I crossed a bridge and took to the trail leading to Zarautz.

I was thinking about silence. I had started thinking about it when I was at Taizé. Taizé's prayer services include a silent time that usually lasts 5 to 10 minutes. The first two times I went, I found that to be an uncomfortably long period of silence, but after that I felt that the silence could be even longer. I started realizing just how long it takes me to gather my thoughts.

But I was very annoyed by the lack of actual silence during these silent times. There were thousands of young people from all over Europe, and thus there was a constant concert of coughing to be heard. It was like the pianissimo sections of a Tchaikovsky symphony: you can bet your life that those will be the moments when several people in the audience will find it necessary to cough.

"And it's funny," my friend Ryan had once told me, "that people don't normally cough. Like, listen for it in restaurants or wherever. It's when everything is quiet that you get that itch in the back of your throat…"

So it is. I almost suspect that the coughing in these cases isn't really a throat irritation so much as a subconscious unease. It is as if we have some need to assert ourselves. We rebel against being forbidden to make a sound.

Even as we entered the Taizé sanctuary, there were people with large signs which read "Silence" in several languages. These signs had little to no effect on many of the conversations taking place between the people who were entering. Even an usher coming and "hushing" the people who were making too much noise was not taken seriously. People hate being hushed. Even those who are well-meaning will usually just drop the volume of their conversation, but not stop it completely.

But just as they hated being hushed, I hated the fact that they didn't fall silent. The person seeking noise is always at an advantage, because he can generate the noise himself; the person seeking silence has to count on the co-operation of everyone within hearing distance.

Why did this annoy me so much? I got to where I couldn't even concentrate on my prayers because I was so angry at everyone who insisted on coughing and clearing their throat during the silent times. But surely one must learn to accept certain sounds as being a part of the silence? Our own breathing, our own heartbeat, will not go away.

But how much sound can be accepted as being "a part" of silence?

The true contradiction is this: I talk a lot.

Part of it is that I'm fastidious -- I try to get things precise and exact. This is the same quality I've mentioned before in connection with not making mistakes graciously. When I listen to myself speak, I constantly feel that I am telling half-truths. Ambiguities and slight inaccuracies bother me, and I feel compelled to correct or qualify them, to make room for disclaimers and exceptions. These parentheses-within-parentheses make whatever I'm saying longer, less interesting and more confusing. Even if you've never heard me talk, you can see that characteristic in my writing.

[The other contradiction is that I can't pay attention for very long if someone else speaks this way.]

But while this characteristic may account for the length and nature of my discourses, it does not explain the fact that I feel compelled to speak in the first place. Why is it that I get so annoyed with people who can't maintain silence during a prayer time or a symphony, and yet am also the most likely guy to break the "uncomfortable silence" in a table conversation?

Well, the clearest reason is of course that a prayerful silence and an uncomfortable, conversation-stopping silence are two different things. But there are other things I find in myself: I suffer, for example, from the delusion what I have to say is too important to keep to myself. I also find that I somehow feel personally responsible for the awkward lulls in conversation -- as if everyone were feeling uncomfortable and it was my duty to relieve them of their discomfort by resuming the conversation.

Yes, I certainly feel that responsibility. Where on earth could this come from? This is something I'll need to meditate on.

17: Igeldo to Orio

I remember the walk from Igeldo to Orio as a pleasant one. The guitar weighed heavily on my back and gave me something to think about, but it was an otherwise enjoyable hike. I was pleasantly surprised that it took me less time to get to Orio than I had thought. There is a little chapel shortly before you get into the town, but it was closed. I saw a young couple walk by with raincoats and large backpacks. We got to talking a little bit. They were from France, and also doing this pilgrimage. They took a picture of me.

A little further along there was a pilgrim shelter. The place looked good, and had atmosphere. I asked how much it was, and the lady told me 10 Euros. I asked if I could just hang out and rest a bit before heading on, and she said sure.

At the campground they had asked me if I had a pilgrim’s pass. I didn’t even know what that was. I asked this woman if I could get one here. Yes, she said. She would just need to see my passport.

I was slowly learning about what it means to be a pilgrim on this road. There are many shelters along the road, where you can stay for cheap or even for free if you have a document showing you to be a pilgrim. This document gets a stamp at every stop along the way. Everybody knows this, of course, but I was the pilgrim who had come without doing any research.

Poem on the wall of the Orio pilgrim shelter.

The lady gave me a map and explained where the next three shelters were. I thanked her and went on my way. I was thinking about that tick in my side, and hoping to still find a clinic or something to remove it before it would spread some disease, or whatever the heck it is that ticks do. But it turned out that there was no such place in Orio. The tourist information office was open though, and the woman at the desk told me that I should go on to the clinic in Zarautz, a few kilometers further.

16: The interconnectedness of things

I still didn't have much of an idea of what it meant to be a pilgrim on the Camino de Santiago. It was only my fourth day, and I had met no other pilgrims and no real pilgrim services or shelters along the way. This was OK with me, because my plan was to learn these things as I went along. This turned out, I think, to be a good plan, even though it meant making some mistakes along the way.

I knew that the pilgrimage was becoming a trendy touristy thing. I had intentionally planned to avoid pilgrim shelters for this reason. I had wanted to rough it as much as possible, but now I was starting to have doubts about this. My previous experiences of roughing it had always been a few days only, and they had been different. They had usually been hitch hiking trips, which normally don't involve walking great distances on mountain trails.

Spending the whole day walking had not become a routine yet. It still felt like a sometimes arduous, sometimes exhilarating weekend retreat. My thoughts were fresh but scattered. I wondered what sorts of things I'd be learning over the next weeks. I looked at landmarks on the horizon and wondered how many hours I'd have to walk to reach them. I wondered if I'd be able to gauge distance well by the time I'd been doing this for several days.

I knew there would be plenty of time to meditate while walking, and I'd brought plenty of things to meditate on. I was meditating on the resurrection accounts in the gospels. I was meditating on the Lord's Prayer. I was meditating on the Efche (Jesus prayer). I was meditating on two or three hymns. I was meditating on some of the things that the monks at Taizé had said to me during Holy Week. I was meditating on the Epistle of James.

This was probably too much, and too disparate. And, not being very experienced in meditating, I found my thoughts wandering around a lot. Sometimes I let them wander, following them curiously to see where they were going. It wasn't until the last part of the pilgrimage that I would start to see how interconnected these various strands were. Maybe it means that God was guiding my thoughts to one point. Maybe it means that I don't have a large arsenal of original thoughts. Maybe I have only one, and, given enough time to trace my thoughts to their origins, I'll see that they all came from that one.

Most likely there were a handful of things on my mind, and my brain was following the trend of all human brains to associate everything with the things that are preoccupying it anyway.

You can connect any thought with another, if you give yourself enough time. To me, 40 days were enough to show me some surprises.

15: A morning at the campsite (Day 4)

I woke up unwillingly. I’ve always envied people who can go right back to sleep if they wake up before they have to.

I had to check out of the campsite by noon, so I was in no hurry. I took all my clothes and went to the wash basins. I hadn’t found an ideal piece of travel soap yet, but what I did have worked just fine. I washed my clothes and hung them up.

The problem was that my clothes would not dry in time. I should have done them last night, but I had been too tired.

As I showered, I noticed a tick in my side. Great, I thought. I didn’t know much about ticks, but I did know that they spread disease, and that you should remove them without getting their head stuck inside you. I had recently read that the traditional ways to do this – holding a match against the tick or drowning it in oil or something – were not such a good idea after all. There were apparently special tweezers that were the best way to get this done.

I had all morning to hang around the campsite. I called my Mama in Germany and we talked for a bit. I mended my guitar bag, which had a strap that was coming loose. I sat on the outdoor tables writing in my journal and eating some overpriced bread and yoghurt from the campsite grocery store. It started raining lightly, so I hung out under an overhanging roof.

Eventually I did pack my damp clothes and headed out. I would need a hat, I thought. My nose was quite sunburnt. I tied a wet shirt around my head like an Arab head covering, and it kept my head cool, but did not really keep the sun off my nose. I packed my things and started walking.