It’s hard to find mountains in Dallas, and yours truly wants to do more than just walk on flat ground. A friend invited me to join him at the Cedar Ridge Preserve. It has a variety of trails and some striking changes in elevation.
The Preserve is a place to make you feel good about your fellow humans. To start with, it is popular. We met there at 6:30 on a Saturday morning, and the parking lot, which had just opened, was already half-full. Lots of people already on the trails: runners, walkers, athletes, couch potatoes, babies and toddlers, old guys and young ones. There were also dogs and at least one chicken.
My friend is super-athletic and super-encouraging. When people passed by, we’d say hi but he would say more. “What are you training for?”
It’s a question that gets people talking. More often than I thought, the answer was something particular and interesting. A man up in years said he was going to hike some mountains with his son, who lived in another state—my friend knew the mountains. Many others, women and men, mentioned races.
But a very common answer was, “Oh, I don’t know. Life?”
That’s a good answer. We’re training for life.
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But: if we’re training for life, when is life going to begin?
Lots of the most interesting literature on the Camino de Santiago is about how training is actually just life put into a small picture: what you do while you’re training is a picture of what your life is as a whole.
Last week I was reading Joyce Rupp’s Walk in a Relaxed Manner. At age 60 she walked the Camino with a friend; this book is a record of what she learned and discovered. She describes sleeping with a roomful of people in bunk beds, many of them snoring or talking late or noisily leaving early; of toilets and showers shared and dirty; and so on. She doesn’t get graphic, nor does she linger, but she is honest: she found it very uncomfortable. And she was forced to face her discomfort, its implicit contrast with the privilege of her comparatively protected American existence, and so on. She realized the Camino was calling her to let go.
All of life is a lesson in letting go. This will preach, no? Job—that guy in the Bible—he loses everything, he has to let go. Job gets it: “Naked I came into the world, naked I will leave it.”
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So yours truly, with the help of his friends, is training for the Camino. But the Camino itself is training for life.
It’s all life, and it’s all letting go.
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Let’s be less “spiritual” and more specific. Life is about surrender to God. We practice that in a lot of little ways (and some bigger ones). But in the end it is not practice, it is the sum total of reality. We let go to God, or into God. We lose our life. We surrender to Jesus. It is not necessarily a nice thing. I think of the message of the wicked witch: “Surrender, Dorothy!” I think of dirty toilets and noisy and snoring people. But according to the best testimonies, the surprise at the end is that when we surrender to Jesus, we find out who we have really been all along.
