Whispers from the Camino—Day 16

September 20. Hornillas to San Anton. 16.4 Km.

A pilgrim on the horizon at sunrise—my favorite time to walk!

I woke up from my night in Hornillos already anticipating getting the to Anton Monastery. I didn’t know what to expect, but the few people who had stayed there told me it was one of the highlights of their Camino. There was something about staying in an ancient site that still held onto its original purpose, even if in a completely new form.

Right away my mind starting racing and my heart aching. I had opened up an email from Rites of Passage, an organization I was associated with that ran desert wilderness quests. One line immediately caught me, “there is too much anger, not enough grief.” In 2000 I took a two-year stint as a bereavement coordinator for hospice handling the grief associated with both patient deaths and community deaths.

Lots of places for prayer and reflection

After I moved onto from hospice I was struck by how little our churches and our society knows how to grieve or even make room for it. It was like hospice had given me new eyes with which to see and I suddenly felt like so much of what ails us as a society is our inability and unwillingness to simply grieve. Rather than grieve, it seems like our society fluctuates between a forced happiness and anger. We are always supposed to “stay positive” and if we can’t be positive, we fall into either depression or anger.

For some reason that prompted me to again think about what my next step should be in life. Part of why I struggle so much is that I want the security that I see so many people put in their lives, yet there is always a deeper calling gnawing on me that doesn’t allow me to ever really settle down. I pondered that for awhile and then I seemed to come upon a truth that reflected how I felt, “I belong to everyone. I am owned by no one.”

The communal meal in the middle of the ruins. Best experience!

I was not sure what that was about, but it spoke to the feeling that I was meant to serve the world and go wherever I was most needed and that no one person or group of people or organization had their exclusive hold on me. Maybe this was working through what it meant to be ordained in the Presbyterian Church. I am glad to be ordained in the church as long as it supports my deeper calling to serve. But as soon as it becomes a barrier to that call to serve, the ordination loses its hold on me. Twenty years before I had set aside my ordination when a group of people asked me to help them form a church outside of the Presbyterian denomination. I think my colleagues thought it was unusual, but it felt completely natural to me to put aside a barrier that got in the way of helping a group of people form a spiritual community that worked for them. "“I belong to everyone. I am owned by no one” made sense to me.

That led me to think more about my children. In my phone call with my son days prior, he had reminded me, “Dad, we want a relationship with you, but that doesn’t mean you need to be around all the time.” Then he added, “It seems like every few months I need to give you this reassurance. But honestly, Dad, it is really cool that I get to tell people that my dad is walking across Spain to see if a similar pilgrimage culture could be nurtured in America.” It seemed that I needed the reassurance once again.

The altar I slept on under the stars.

I arrived in Anton in plenty of time to get a bed. Actually, I didn’t really need one. They also said that we were allowed to sleep outside. I wasn’t going to pass that up. I found a place in the remaining ruins of the old altar underneath the spot where Jesus was hanging on the cross and where the sky was completely open above me.

The twelve of us shared a community meal outside. It was a nearly perfect evening except for the sudden medical scare as one of the pilgrims got their hand caught exiting a door and broke it badly exposing a bone. The brutal had met the beaufiful that evening.

After dinner I sat in the middle of the ruins and plucked away on my ukelele. A chord progression had already been forming in the prior days, but this night a few verses began to take shape. It was the first night that a song was starting to emerge from the chords I had been playing.