Pilgrimage
We have come to know it as, simply, “the Camino”; in the past couple of decades its popularity has skyrocketed. It is a pilgrimage of walking to Santiago de Compostela, the place in northwestern Spain where are kept the earthly remains of Saint James, apostle of our Lord. Today, the most popular route starts just over the border in France then runs roughly 500 miles west. But it is artificial to think of the Camino as one particular route. A pilgrimage starts, in fact, from wherever you are.
Why? A pilgrimage is a kind of picture of the whole stretch of our life. Our starting place is simply given; it’s wherever we are when we come to consciousness of God and perhaps duty or purpose or a longing for meaning. And the end of our life is God himself. In a pilgrimage, we take a chunk of our life out of our life and make that stretch of time into a picture of our whole life.
A pilgrimage means something that’s uniquely personal to every pilgrim. One gets a sense of the possibilities of personal meaning in the 2010 film The Way, starring Martin Sheen. This is because of the simple truth: each of us is a distinct person loved by God. On the other hand, a pilgrimage means the same thing for every pilgrim. This is because each of us is a creature made by God, who has placed in every human heart a longing for him that nothing else will fulfill.
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Dallas has a vast network of trails—old train lines, a number of them, and also parks, and paths that connect parks. We must have at least hundreds of miles of trails. I’m becoming acquainted with some of them, as I prepare for what I hope will be a pilgrimage to Santiago.
It seems important that I un-learn multitasking. I don’t walk with music or lectures in my ears, and for the most part I don’t walk while talking on the phone. (But sometimes a phone conversation is good: it’s a way of sharing a walk with a friend who is far away.) It seems important, that is to say, for the pilgrim to be attentive to what is at hand.
One can go through the senses. What do I see? What am I hearing? What do I feel? Are there particular smells here? What’s the taste in my mouth? On the trails, I have seen trees of great variety. Right now some are bare but others have leaves. There are wild grasses with incredibly fine colors; they look like an impressionist painting, even up close I can’t quite focus on particular blades. There are also marks of industry, high lines, tracks, broken concrete. There are fences that block off yards; new construction; trash.
It’s good and bad, beautiful and ugly. But the pilgrim thinks—maybe I’m not supposed to be judging this. It’s just here—it just is.
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What Theologians Eat. At the end of a recent walk I was at Pecan Lodge. Brisket commends itself to the theologian: the union of the two natures (cow and barbeque) is perfect, the result being one thing, as we have in Christ who is one person with two natures. (The orthodox will not add sauce. Adding BBQ sauce is like saying the divinity was merely poured on top of Jesus.)
Out & About. The Good Books & Good Talk seminar will discuss A Canticle for Liebowitz this Sunday, January 26, from 6 to 7:30 p.m. at Incarnation, 3966 McKinney Ave., Dallas. Anyone who reads the book is welcome to the conversation.