Saturday, March 24, 2012

An unexpectedly sacramental walk | Gisela Raines

1:55 AM | Posted by Free Game Zone | | Edit Post

In my pilgrimage from Seville, I found the solution at a rate that has fed me long after I arrived in Santiago

made me ask "Why?" with new urgency, when I flew to Seville. Who in their right mind decide to walk, from Seville to Santiago, about 600 miles, on your own? It had seemed a good idea when I thought about what I do on my sabbatical. I was invited to visit, somehow, and "yes" seemed the obvious answer. But now that the reality this morning, I was terrified, it was a ridiculous idea. I lose, I get blisters, they do not all the way, I feel stupid, I would be a pilgrim.

"lack of preparation is preparing to fail", a friend of mine told teenagers, with a wisdom beyond his years. And I remembered, I was ready. He had walked to and from the work of Spanish and back, almost anywhere and back. I had taken care to increase my mileage each week. Now, having arrived in Seville, the only thing to do was to create fear and anxiety aside and start walking. So I put on my first day, greeted the statue of Saint-Jacques in the great cathedral of the city and began searching the yellow arrows to guide the pilgrims on their way to Saint Jacques de Compostela. I was on my way.

  • the end it took 42 days to arrive in Santiago and was a revelation, the landscape and people and the skies and space and silence and prayer. Walk every day, sometimes alone, sometimes with others, creates a pace that makes you free. Do not make decisions on what to do or what to wear or where to go: all you need to do is get up in the morning, pack your bag and walk in the direction of Saint-Jacques in the old and new ways. And all you have to do on arrival in the afternoon or evening on the pilgrims' hostel is clean, show some love to your feet (which is crucial), eat and share with other pilgrims experiences of the day.
One of the things that happened to me when you are far from constant stimuli of daily life and work in a city is that, slowly, over days and weeks, the landscape and all that part he started taking a new intensity. Cuckoos and his urgent call, storks and their nests in the disheveled magnificent tower of every church in the village, lichen-rich ancient stone, the blue sky, the clouds of magnificence, a black horse in an incredibly bright green, a wall ruin, the kindness of strangers, the friendship of fellow travelers: all conspired to make me feel alive. Such as fatigue and blisters and sunburns and lost.

I traveled with a poem by Thich Nhat Hanh, who reminded me that the road is not there to be "conquered" as if it were an enemy: the empty path is there to greet you, you wear and give you peace. The Gospel story of the risen Jesus with his disciples walking on the road to Emmaus, was close to my heart and received communion in some churches of the people, moved by the welcome they gave me as pilgrim.

But it was unexpected for me sacramental experience just walking every day, across large landscapes. RS Thomas concludes his poem The Moor with the line: "I was walking, simple and poor, while the air crumbled and broke on me generously as bread." That is, for me sums up my pilgrimage, a journey on which he fed and fed in a manner not expected. Upon arrival in Santiago was amazing and the cathedral in all its beauty always a wonderful house back guy. But is the way, step by step on the road, I have under my skin. Five years later is still there.


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