Whispers from the Camino—Day 14

Camino de SantiagoWhispers from the Camino

Jul 13

September 18. Orbanejo Riopico to Burgos 12. 5 km

Neither the strategizing of the prior days nor the almost manic “toss everything to the wind” satisfied my yearning to find an answer that satisfied my deeper yearning for home. As soon as I got up I was already saying to myself, “I just want to go home.” But I knew once again this was not a temptation to abandon the Camino. It was facing the reality that my life was at a bit of a crossroads. I was without work, but still two to three years before being able to comfortably retire given the standard of living that holding onto my house in Portland would have required.

My phone call with my son the previous day grounded me, but also made me realize that there wasn’t some easy immediate answer to my “home” question. After bouncing between two extremes I think I realized this morning that I was going to have to learn to live with the “in between” reality of my situation. I knew I couldn’t just go back to my former life. I had the option of retiring and then just working some lightweight part-time job. But I felt like I was still being called and pulled to help churches in transition.

The truth was I wasn’t really ready to retire. But to do that work also meant likely abandoning at least for a time my dream of owning a home close to my children and grandchildren. I went seventeen years renting homes and apartments due to my interim work and transitional lifestyle. I only bought a home when I thought I had finally reached a certain level of permanency. I had thought my dream of living within minutes of my children and grandchildren was safe and secure.

Of course, COVID changed everything. None of us could have predicted how much the pandemic would throw so many of our lives off. COVID changed the work needed by the presbytery, work that had given me that feeling of security.. Work that I had expected to follow more of a visionary trajectory shifted more to support and care as churches struggled to cope with the sudden ecclesiastical earthquake of the pandemic.

This day, however, I was left with accepting that there were no easy answers. I would have to live with the fact that if there was a perfect solution, it was still somewhere out there in my future. With that I did what all good spiritual teaching suggests, “I took a breath and decided that the best I could do was to be present to the path and the steps in front of me.”

Free from worrying about the future, this is what captured my attention this day as I headed into the city of Burgos: