Cultivating Pilgrim Spirituality

Solvitur ambulando: It is solved by walking.

Saint Augustine

Some time back, our Adult Catechesis class covered the Beatitudes. One of the main themes of the Beatitudes is, of course, detachment from worldly things while still living in the world. It struck me that this is exactly the center of what I call “pilgrim spirituality” as well.

When you walk the Way, you will hear pilgrims repeat many phrases that encompass this life. If you pay attention to what these sayings actually signify, you soon realize that they all point to something deeper.

The Camino Provides

When faced with some difficulty or need, every pilgrim I encountered took to heart some form of the ubiquitous phrase “the Camino provides”. And it does. Along the Way I saw examples of this nearly every day. No matter what the problem of the moment might be, the solution would inevitably appear. So why worry?

There’s a certain serenity in trusting that everything will work out. This is, of course, only an inch away from Deus providebit – God will provide. Or perhaps the more contemporary Jesus, I trust in you!

If we actually lived as though we believed this, if we actually lived with complete trust in the Lord, how much worry and anxiety would melt away from us. Why is it so difficult to do this in our everyday lives, but so easy to do on the Camino?

There, pilgrims not only trust in providence, but they abide in that trust, they rest in it, and it gives them peace.

The Tourist Demands; the Pilgrim Thanks

There’s a certain attitude of gratitude that pilgrims come to after walking for a while. The very same people who will complain in a restaurant at home that their food is not hot enough will cheerfully and gratefully gulp down cold french fries and drown them with cold, red wine.

On our Caminos, I have been grateful for the sunshine and grateful for the rain. I’ve been grateful for terrible Spanish beer out of a vending machine. And I’ve been so grateful for the pilgrims and villagers we’ve met.

A disappointingly full albergue in 2013 led to a grand adventure down the road and to discovering what was probably my favourite albergue. I’m grateful that there were no beds available at our intended destination.

If we lived our “normal” lives like this, how much happier we would be! Every commercial interaction would be a delight rather than a chore, and every personal interaction would be one of love rather than utility.

Expect Miracles

This is closely related to the two sayings above. It flows naturally from them. For some reason, miracles happen on the Camino with astonishing regularity. And by “miracles” I don’t mean the unusual or the peculiar, I mean the astonishing and the transformative.

There is a sense on the Camino that God is perhaps more imminent than He is our our “regular” lives, that miracles and wonders are around every bend in the road.

I’ve often wondered whether this is actually true, or whether we’ve just put ourselves in a place to better notice the miracles and wonders that are always happening everywhere. I think the answer is the latter. Miracles abound, but we’re too quick to dismiss them in ordinary life because we aren’t expecting them.

But living to expect miracles is, in fact, the center of the sacramental life. In every Mass, on every day, on every altar of the world, Christ becomes physically present. I don’t know of a bigger miracle than that.

In the Sacraments, all the signs and symbols – everything, really – points to a higher reality. We’re living in Plato’s cave. Or, as the great Chesterton said,

Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front–

G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday

The Camino shows us, a little bit at least, how to shine a light into the cave. How to walk ’round the front.

Everybody Walks their own Camino

One of the most popular sayings of the Way is also perhaps the most obvious: “everybody walks their own Camino”. It’s sometimes said in exasperation, like a parent with a wayward child, but more often in a sense of – wonder is perhaps too strong – but perhaps in admiration.

You can offer advice, you can point the way if asked, but you can’t force somebody – perhaps especially yourself – into your predetermined idea of what their Camino experience should be. They will walk the Camino they need to walk.

You need to walk with no expectations. Easier said than done, but after some time on the Way, it begins to come naturally. Or at least more naturally. And everybody is different. Everybody walks at a different pace. Everybody has different expectations that the Way needs to smash, so that the pilgrim can come to live by that first principle above, “the Camino provides”.

The Way is a teacher – indeed Christ the ultimate teacher is the Way, the Truth, and the Life – and every student must learn in their own way and at their own pace.

Things I have learned include: Pack light. Take every detour. Help every pilgrim in need. Hydrate. Fall backwards. Sometimes the best response to tragedy is to laugh at the absurdity of it. Keep walking.

All Distances are Lies

Famously, no two sources can agree on the distance between any two points along the Way, much less the length of the entire Camino Francés from Saint-Jean to Santiago. Ultimately, the only thing that is certain from any one day’s walk is that there will be joy, and there will be hardship, whether physical, emotional, or spiritual.

And even in hardship, there may be joy. Francine and I, within sight of the town where we had planned to end the day, were confronted by a sudden hail storm on what had already been a brutal and physically demanding day.

We did the only thing we could under the circumstances. We doubled over in laughter at the sheer ridiculousness of it. And we sang as we marched through the hail into town.

This is a concept that some hikers call “embracing the suck”.

But it’s more than that. We walk in hope, in the hope of a warm albergue, a hot meal, and some cold vino tinto. We walk in the promise of rest, and ultimately, in the promise of arriving at our destination, Santiago de Compostela. We walk not in deprivation for the sake of deprivation, but in deprivation for the sake of achieving the goal.

Once again, it’s the sacramental nature of the Way that confronts us.

We live our lives in the promise of rest in Christ, of the promise of arriving at the heavenly Jerusalem. We live the Christian life, with all of its demands and difficulties, not for the sake of deprivation, but for the sake of achieving this goal.

What if we could live our lives with these simple truths before us?

The Gift of the Camino

Perhaps the single biggest gift of the Camino, though, isn’t to be found in one of the pilgrim sayings that get bandied back and forth. And the reason for that is simple: it’s the thing that strikes you when you get home, where there are few if any pilgrims to commiserate with.

It is simply this: you are always a pilgrim.

In one sense, you can recover the pilgrim ethos and spirituality every time you walk out your front door. A very wise man once said:

It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

Professor Tolkien understood the ideal of pilgrimage. Both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are journeys fraught with danger and wisdom and ordinary good cheer. And in particular, the spiritual journey of The Lord of the Rings exactly mirrors the Camino in this way: that we walk to rid ourselves of attachment.

In the case of Frodo, it is the attachment to power symbolized by the Ring, a quest that ultimately he cannot accomplish under his own power. It is only because Frodo, and Bilbo before him, showed mercy to Gollum that the evil of the Ring was able to destroy itself.

In the case of the pilgrim, we shed attachments to power, to comfort, to predictability, to ego. And ultimately, though we may walk the entire Way under our own power, it is only through grace that we are able shed these attachments.

And every step until we arrive is a step towards this goal. The Camino is a sacramental sign for our entire journey upon the earth. Or, as Saint Francis de Sales says, “we are all pilgrims in this mortal life”.

And as each pilgrim eventually gathers about him a “Camino family” of companions, but also is connected in some way to the family of all pilgrims, so we have our friends and family, and also all of our fellow humans to walk with.

Our goal must be to arrive, not just in the city of Santiago but in the heavenly city. To become saints. For what else matters? And not just for ourselves, but for all our fellow pilgrims. Our goal must be to arrive with all our companions at the gates of the heavenly Jerusalem.

This, then, is the final gift of the Camino. The sure knowledge of how to live the life of a pilgrim, the life to which we are all called. Do we always do this? Of course not; we’re all human. Sometimes I need a new Camino to remind me of these things. And that’s fine.

None of us can do it alone. But with God’s grace, we can each of us finish our Camino in the spirit of the pilgrim.