Gacela de la raíz amarga
hay una raíz amarga
y un mundo de mil terrazas.
ni la mano mas pequeña
quiebra la puerta del agua.
¿donde vas, adonde, donde?
hay un cielo de mil ventanas
- batalla de abejas lívidas -
y hay una raíz amarga.
amarga.
duele en la planta del pie
el interior de la cara,
y duele en el tronco fresco
de noche recién cortada.
¡amor enemigo mio,
muerde tu raíz amarga!
- Federico Garcia Lorca
Avant que tu ne t'en ailles
pâle étoile du matin
- mille cailles
chantent, chantent dans le thym -
Tourne devers le poète,
dont les yeux sont pleins d'amour
- l'alouette
monte au ciel avec le jour -
Tourne ton regard que noie
l'aurore dans son azur
- quelle joie
parmi les champs de blé mûr! -
Puis fais luire ma pensée
là-bas, bien loin, oh bien loin!
- la rosée
gaîment brille sur le foin. -
Dans le doux rêve où s'agite
Ma mie endormie encor ...
- vite, vite
car voici le soleil d'or. -
- Paul Verlaine
Sunday, February 1, 2009
Monday, January 12, 2009
HC Prayers Jan8/09
Please stand. Let us pray. Dear God, thank you for walking with us every day, and for showing us the way we should walk. This morning I particularly want to thank you for the awesome beauty in nature, for the surprising kindness of strangers who become friends, and for the elusive gift of time to reflect on our path. Please God, help us all to recognize and accept this gift of time, and use it and all the gifts you have given us to build up humanity which you have created in your image. Amen.
Our hymn today is the MT house hymn, on the inside cover of your hymnal. Since it’s a new year, I invite you to change things a little if you feel like it, and make this song about us instead of some guy. Instead of he, sing we, instead of him, sing us, instead of his, sing our.
Good morning. I’ve had a line of a poem stuck in my head for a while: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead. Come to tell you all, I shall tell you all.” In this ironic line the poet is wondering whether he has anything to say to the people who read his poetry, and although, like anyone in this profession, I love to talk, I have been asking myself the same thing in the past weeks since I agreed to speak to you today. Last year I had a year off from my job here, I had great adventures, some crashing misadventures, and I learned a lot. Is there any point to telling you about it? Will you believe me? Will it make a difference to you? I can’t answer any of those questions with a simple yes or no, obviously, because the you here is plural, and invariably what plants a thought or idea in one you’s head will put some others of you to sleep. In any case you have a solution to this problem, wrought from your experiences of sitting here quietly in three times a week.
Rather than imparting profound revelations from this lofty spot, I’d like to relive with you one month of my year, the month of May when I walked 800 kilometers on the camino, an ancient pilgrimage route to the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela in Spain. This camino, or path, has been a pilgrimage route for about a thousand years, and lots of people still walk it: in 2004, there were 200,000 registered pilgrims from all over the world. I’d like to invite you on to my camino for a few minutes, and you can respond as pilgrims do to each other: you can nod or say “hola” but keep walking by yourself, go wherever you need to go mentally. Or you can walk with me for a bit, out of curiosity or boredom or whatever, for as long as it suits you.
The hymn we sang today, To Be A Pilgrim, is an adaptation of a poem by John Bunyan, from his allegory A Pilgrim’s Progress. It’s the first story I read by myself in English as an eight-year-old immigrant. It’s the story of a man who is tired of his life of frivolity and wickedness, packs his things and sets off, just to get away from what’s been dragging him down. What happens to him on the way is an allegory, a long extended metaphor, for the Christian life, that is, what it’s like to leave behind a life of sin, find salvation for your immortal soul, and live with integrity while you wait to get to heaven. Along the way, Pilgrim discovers that what was making him miserable was not just the surroundings he left behind, but in fact it’s also the stuff he thought was part of him, that he had put in his pack to take along on his trip. A crucial point of the story is when he arrives at a cross and has an epiphany, a realization that changes his life: his weighty pack falls off his back, and he walks on, finally free. He’ll still have other troubles, but he’ll face them without that pack dragging him down.
Humans have been going on pilgrimages for centuries. They hear of a holy destination and set off, hoping for enlightenment, healing, forgiveness, salvation. My motivation was a little different: although both my immediate and my distant ancestors spent a good deal of time on the road, motivated by religious devotion, it was usually not in order to get to a destination. I come from a long line of refugees – persecution in post-Reformation Europe, pacifists fleeing northern Germany; German-speaking Christian Soviet citizens following the retreating Germany army out of Ukraine, pursued by vengeful atheist Russians in 1944. And finally, practicing Christians threatened by Soviet authorities until, in 1972, mysteriously receiving permission to move to Canada. My parents know what it’s like to leave a place with only what you can carry, but they don’t understand choosing to do that when no one is threatening your life. One relative said to me, “Can’t you think of anything better to do with your time?”
I’m not a person who sees spiritual significance in every leaf, or who interprets events as part of a grand plan in the universe. When I hear about life-changing experiences, I have a lot of doubts and questions, and I certainly wasn’t walking the camino looking for a spiritual transformation. Rather, I wanted to do this walk as a change from my usual every day life in this school: I wanted a physical challenge, time by myself, time in nature, and a cultural and linguistic experience. I certainly got all of that in thirty days of walking.
I did quite a lot of preparation before I left, getting the right clothes, shoes, pack and other essentials such as duct tape and clothes pins, following recommendations from other pilgrims. I was worried about two things before leaving: figuring out what I could live without and what I could carry, and being able to speak to my husband regularly. In the first four or five days, I paid the physical price of my refugee impulses: the weight of the food I had packed did some damage to my feet, legs, hips and shoulders, and I ended up handing out my heavy snacks to fellow pilgrims and putting two pounds of stuff in the post. But I was very thankful to have a phone, so my husband could call me every day before he went to work.
So I registered as a pilgrim in a village on the French side of the Pyrennees and received a pilgrim passport entitling me to sleep in pilgrim hostels. I set off at 7 a.m. on day one to cross the Pyrennees into Spain, destination Roncesvalles. It was so beautiful! It was so hard! My pack was so heavy! At about 10:00 a retired French businessman named Claude who had already walked 600 km, slowed down to walk with me and entertained and encouraged me for an hour that would otherwise have been solitary agony. Much later, when the path was still climbing, I stopped to talk to a grizzly Spaniard named Pedro who adjusted the suspension on my pack to distribute the weight more equally. And finally when the path was going down, and it was not easier but just difficult in a different way, a German student of Zen named Kim walked with me for a while, and gave me a bamboo walking stick when we parted, just before I reached the pilgrim hostel in Roncesvalles. There I went through a routine I would do 29 more times: I threw my pack on my dormitory bed, showered, hand-washed the clothes I had walked in and hung them out to dry, then crashed on my bed until it was time to eat. At 9:00, I took in my dried clothes, crawled into my sleep sack, put in my earplugs, and pulled my eye shade over my eyes. Day one had already given me more than I had bargained for in physical challenge, unimaginable beauty in nature, 7 hours of solitary walking (out of nine total), and I had used all my languages with my fellow pilgrims. No wonder I slept like a log before doing it all over again the next day.
The beautiful scenery and the friends I made among my fellow pilgrims are the easiest to talk about. What is more strange and difficult to explain, is how a pilgrim processes events. Robert Ward, a Toronto author who has walked the camino numerous times, and who doesn’t see himself as a spiritual person at all, nevertheless talks about the camino mysteriously providing for pilgrims, and recounts anecdotes from his experience. In my conversations with fellow pilgrims I heard time and again how the camino provided for them. Still, I wasn’t really expecting the camino to provide for me, I was prepared, with all that heavy stuff in my pack. And I certainly wasn’t looking to put a spiritual spin on a walk in the country. And yet …
I’d like to tell you a couple of anecdotes of how the camino provides. I’ve already told you about the people who helped me through day one. I discovered that that is standard pilgrim behaviour, and that the camino often provides for our needs through other pilgrims. On day two, I was part of a rather dramatic event: a German pilgrim named Renate fell three times on the rocky descent and though I had heard her speak English pretty well earlier in the day, after the second fall she became disoriented and spoke German to everyone as though they understood her. I was the only German-speaker in the crowd of Samaritans around her, so I thought I’d better stay. After the third fall, when her nose stopped bleeding, an Argentinian pilgrim named Elsa organized the rescue Samaritans. A tall Spaniard named Pachi took hold of her on one side and said he would walk down with her. His friend MariaJe walked behind them, and Elsa walked in front of them to set a reasonable pace for Renate. The bamboo stick I had received on day one found its next owner, replacing the short stick over which Renate had toppled three times. José, a 60-year old Spaniard, in addition to his own pack, loaded Renate’s pack on his front and walked two km downhill on shifting rock. I called him San José de dos mochilas after that. When we finally got to Zubiri, and put Renate in an ambulance from Pamplona, the little band of Samaritans dropped our packs in the hostel and went to the pub. The camino certainly provided for Renate, in spite of her obstinacy, by getting her to safety. But it also provided for me, because I had been looking for someone who could use a good stick, since I prefer to have my hands free. And Elsa and José became friends and walked together with another friend all the way to Santiago. Meeting the needs of one person can meet the needs of many.
That week I walked by myself a lot, with breaks for conversation with interesting people from all over the world. In the evenings in the hostel I met some of these friends again and continued the conversations over the daily “pilgrim menu”. On day eight I happened to leave the hostel in Logroño at the same time as four friends I had met previously. They were two Mexicans and two Germans, representing four different decades. I walked out of the city with them, and discovered common literary and muscial taste with the 67-year old retired German engineer, a common admiration for churches with the 27-year old Mexican philosopher, and delightful humourous conversation with the 34 and 57 yr old businessmen. When the rain started, their infectious good humour made the soaking quite bearable, especially with some raucous singing. We found a gazebo under which to eat our mid-morning snack, and we did a few sun salutations together, to the invisible sun. They had met on the camino and now adopted me as their pilgrim sister, and we became a little family of friends, taking breaks together, sharing chocolate, oranges, laughs, aches and pains and remedies for them. I delighted in these camino brothers the camino provided for me, when I had thought I was just fine on my own. They enriched my life when we walked together the five days in the middle of the month, and their memory was with me when we separated and met each other again. The fact is, every pilgrim is on her or his own camino, and I learned with some difficulty to recognize which camino was mine. My camino brothers and I did walk the last five days into Santiago together. There we got our pilgrim certificates before attending the pilgrim mass in the cathedral, after which we joined a huge crowd of friends for one last pilgrim menu dinner. Still now, we remind each other of what the camino gave us when we write, e-mail and skype together regularly. I know they are with me today as I talk to you.
My last anecdote is a blessing I want to pass on to you. In Carrion de los Condes, I stayed in a hostel run by the nicest Augustinian nuns. Their warmth and kindness erased some of the annoying human interactions, which happen on the camino like everywhere else in life. At the pilgrim blessing in the evening, the nuns sang some songs, and then one of them gave us a few encouraging words. She held up a little yellow arrow, like the comforting arrows showing the way along the camino, and told us about four arrows to tell us we’re on the right path, whether on the camino or in the rest of our life. Here are the four arrows:
1. The first arrow is when you meet someone on the path and they give you an encouraging word, such as Animo! or Buen camino! Then you know that you are on the right path.
2. The second arrow is when you are walking alone in silence. Sometimes you hear yourself think, sometimes you hear a voice from God, and sometimes you just hear silence. What you hear when you walk alone is an arrow to tell you you’re on the right path.
3. The third arrow is when you meet a fellow pilgrim who asks you for help. That is a sign that you are on the path, where you’re supposed to be.
4. The fourth arrow is when you ask for help from fellow pilgrims or others you meet. Asking for help is a sign tht you’re on the right path.
The nun told us that their community would be walking with us in spirit and praying for us, then the nuns went around the room and blessed each person “Que Dios te bendiga. Ve con Dios”. I thought of those four arrows almost every day on the walk, (there were many arrows), and very often in the past months as I’ve been back at work.
Although I was on my own camino, walking mostly alone, I was really never alone: I got joy and inspiration from others on the road: friendly villagers, the pretty snail or shiny slug crossing the path, friends I ran into, an encouraging note left by someone ahead, a gift of a glass of wine or a flower on my pillow when my spirits were down, the stork feeding her baby. The pilgrimage gave me acceptance, peace, perspective on striving, and respect for the complexities of walking and living. Did I have a life-changing experience? I don’t know. Am I a different person? I don’t think so. My values haven’t changed, the month-long pared-down existence just gave me time to think and practice them. The camino is not magic, it’s just life. I guess an important realization I’m still learning is that leaving behind the pain of a too-heavy pack can lead to arrogance and weighing yourself down again. I am trying to remember that my striving is like the poet’s words, which “strain, crack and sometimes break under the tension”. And maybe it’s ok to be a slow learner of this realization, part of different stages of the walk. As the poet says, “The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” He further encourages, “Quick now, here, now, always.” And that’s what I wish for all of us. To be quick to be, here, now, always and to see the arrows pointing to the next step.
Our closing prayer is a list of ten pilgrim beatitudes sent me by an American fellow pilgrim.
Las Bienaventuranzas del peregrino. / Pilgrim Beatitudes
1. Bienaventurado eres, peregrino, si descubres que el camino te abre los ojos a lo que no se ve.
Blessed are you, pilgrim, if you discover that the camino opens your eyes to what cannot be seen.
2. Bienaventurado eres, peregrino, si lo que más te preocupa no es llegar, sino llegar con los otros.
Blessed are you, pilgrim, if you more concerned not with arriving, but arriving with friends.
3. Bienaventurado eres, peregrino, cuando contemplas el camino y lo descubres lleno de nombres y de amaneceres.
Blessed are you, pilgrim, when you contemplate the camino and find it full of names and of dawning.
4. Bienaventurado eres, peregrino, porque has descubierto que el auténtico camino comienza cuando se acaba.
Blessed are you, pilgrim, because you have discovered that the true camino begins when it ends.
5. Bienaventurado eres, peregrino, si tu mochila se va vaciando de cosas y tu corazón no sabe dónde colgar tantas emociones.
Blessed are you, pilgrim, if your backpack empties itself of things and your heart is overflowing with emotions.
6. Bienaventurado eres, peregrino, si descubres que un paso atrás para ayudar a otro vale más que cien hacia delante sin mirar a tu lado.
Blessed are you, pilgrim, if you discover that a step back to help someone is worth more than a hundred steps forward without looking to the side.
7. Bienaventurado eres, peregrino, cuando te faltan palabras para agradecer todo lo que te sorprende en cada recodo del camino.
Blessed are you, pilgrim, when you lack the words of gratitude for everything that suprises you at every bend in the road.
8. Bienaventurado eres, peregrino, si buscas la verdad y haces de tu camino una vida y de tu vida un camino, en busca de quien es el Camino, la Verdad y la Vida.
Blessed are you, pilgrim, if you look for truth and make your camino a life, and your life a camino, in search of the one who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.
9. Bienaventurado eres, peregrino, si en el camino te encuentras contigo mismo y te regalas un tiempo sin prisas para no descuidar la imagen de tu corazón.
Blessed are you pilgrim, if in the camino you meet yourself and offer yourself a priceless time to in order not to neglect your heart.
10. Bienaventurado eres, peregrino, si descubres que el camino tiene mucho de silencio; y el silencio, de oración; y la oración, de encuentro con el Padre que te espera.
Blessed are you, pilgrim, if you discover that the camino holds much silence; and the silence, much prayer; and the prayer, an encounter with the One who waits for you.
Amen
Our hymn today is the MT house hymn, on the inside cover of your hymnal. Since it’s a new year, I invite you to change things a little if you feel like it, and make this song about us instead of some guy. Instead of he, sing we, instead of him, sing us, instead of his, sing our.
Good morning. I’ve had a line of a poem stuck in my head for a while: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead. Come to tell you all, I shall tell you all.” In this ironic line the poet is wondering whether he has anything to say to the people who read his poetry, and although, like anyone in this profession, I love to talk, I have been asking myself the same thing in the past weeks since I agreed to speak to you today. Last year I had a year off from my job here, I had great adventures, some crashing misadventures, and I learned a lot. Is there any point to telling you about it? Will you believe me? Will it make a difference to you? I can’t answer any of those questions with a simple yes or no, obviously, because the you here is plural, and invariably what plants a thought or idea in one you’s head will put some others of you to sleep. In any case you have a solution to this problem, wrought from your experiences of sitting here quietly in three times a week.
Rather than imparting profound revelations from this lofty spot, I’d like to relive with you one month of my year, the month of May when I walked 800 kilometers on the camino, an ancient pilgrimage route to the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela in Spain. This camino, or path, has been a pilgrimage route for about a thousand years, and lots of people still walk it: in 2004, there were 200,000 registered pilgrims from all over the world. I’d like to invite you on to my camino for a few minutes, and you can respond as pilgrims do to each other: you can nod or say “hola” but keep walking by yourself, go wherever you need to go mentally. Or you can walk with me for a bit, out of curiosity or boredom or whatever, for as long as it suits you.
The hymn we sang today, To Be A Pilgrim, is an adaptation of a poem by John Bunyan, from his allegory A Pilgrim’s Progress. It’s the first story I read by myself in English as an eight-year-old immigrant. It’s the story of a man who is tired of his life of frivolity and wickedness, packs his things and sets off, just to get away from what’s been dragging him down. What happens to him on the way is an allegory, a long extended metaphor, for the Christian life, that is, what it’s like to leave behind a life of sin, find salvation for your immortal soul, and live with integrity while you wait to get to heaven. Along the way, Pilgrim discovers that what was making him miserable was not just the surroundings he left behind, but in fact it’s also the stuff he thought was part of him, that he had put in his pack to take along on his trip. A crucial point of the story is when he arrives at a cross and has an epiphany, a realization that changes his life: his weighty pack falls off his back, and he walks on, finally free. He’ll still have other troubles, but he’ll face them without that pack dragging him down.
Humans have been going on pilgrimages for centuries. They hear of a holy destination and set off, hoping for enlightenment, healing, forgiveness, salvation. My motivation was a little different: although both my immediate and my distant ancestors spent a good deal of time on the road, motivated by religious devotion, it was usually not in order to get to a destination. I come from a long line of refugees – persecution in post-Reformation Europe, pacifists fleeing northern Germany; German-speaking Christian Soviet citizens following the retreating Germany army out of Ukraine, pursued by vengeful atheist Russians in 1944. And finally, practicing Christians threatened by Soviet authorities until, in 1972, mysteriously receiving permission to move to Canada. My parents know what it’s like to leave a place with only what you can carry, but they don’t understand choosing to do that when no one is threatening your life. One relative said to me, “Can’t you think of anything better to do with your time?”
I’m not a person who sees spiritual significance in every leaf, or who interprets events as part of a grand plan in the universe. When I hear about life-changing experiences, I have a lot of doubts and questions, and I certainly wasn’t walking the camino looking for a spiritual transformation. Rather, I wanted to do this walk as a change from my usual every day life in this school: I wanted a physical challenge, time by myself, time in nature, and a cultural and linguistic experience. I certainly got all of that in thirty days of walking.
I did quite a lot of preparation before I left, getting the right clothes, shoes, pack and other essentials such as duct tape and clothes pins, following recommendations from other pilgrims. I was worried about two things before leaving: figuring out what I could live without and what I could carry, and being able to speak to my husband regularly. In the first four or five days, I paid the physical price of my refugee impulses: the weight of the food I had packed did some damage to my feet, legs, hips and shoulders, and I ended up handing out my heavy snacks to fellow pilgrims and putting two pounds of stuff in the post. But I was very thankful to have a phone, so my husband could call me every day before he went to work.
So I registered as a pilgrim in a village on the French side of the Pyrennees and received a pilgrim passport entitling me to sleep in pilgrim hostels. I set off at 7 a.m. on day one to cross the Pyrennees into Spain, destination Roncesvalles. It was so beautiful! It was so hard! My pack was so heavy! At about 10:00 a retired French businessman named Claude who had already walked 600 km, slowed down to walk with me and entertained and encouraged me for an hour that would otherwise have been solitary agony. Much later, when the path was still climbing, I stopped to talk to a grizzly Spaniard named Pedro who adjusted the suspension on my pack to distribute the weight more equally. And finally when the path was going down, and it was not easier but just difficult in a different way, a German student of Zen named Kim walked with me for a while, and gave me a bamboo walking stick when we parted, just before I reached the pilgrim hostel in Roncesvalles. There I went through a routine I would do 29 more times: I threw my pack on my dormitory bed, showered, hand-washed the clothes I had walked in and hung them out to dry, then crashed on my bed until it was time to eat. At 9:00, I took in my dried clothes, crawled into my sleep sack, put in my earplugs, and pulled my eye shade over my eyes. Day one had already given me more than I had bargained for in physical challenge, unimaginable beauty in nature, 7 hours of solitary walking (out of nine total), and I had used all my languages with my fellow pilgrims. No wonder I slept like a log before doing it all over again the next day.
The beautiful scenery and the friends I made among my fellow pilgrims are the easiest to talk about. What is more strange and difficult to explain, is how a pilgrim processes events. Robert Ward, a Toronto author who has walked the camino numerous times, and who doesn’t see himself as a spiritual person at all, nevertheless talks about the camino mysteriously providing for pilgrims, and recounts anecdotes from his experience. In my conversations with fellow pilgrims I heard time and again how the camino provided for them. Still, I wasn’t really expecting the camino to provide for me, I was prepared, with all that heavy stuff in my pack. And I certainly wasn’t looking to put a spiritual spin on a walk in the country. And yet …
I’d like to tell you a couple of anecdotes of how the camino provides. I’ve already told you about the people who helped me through day one. I discovered that that is standard pilgrim behaviour, and that the camino often provides for our needs through other pilgrims. On day two, I was part of a rather dramatic event: a German pilgrim named Renate fell three times on the rocky descent and though I had heard her speak English pretty well earlier in the day, after the second fall she became disoriented and spoke German to everyone as though they understood her. I was the only German-speaker in the crowd of Samaritans around her, so I thought I’d better stay. After the third fall, when her nose stopped bleeding, an Argentinian pilgrim named Elsa organized the rescue Samaritans. A tall Spaniard named Pachi took hold of her on one side and said he would walk down with her. His friend MariaJe walked behind them, and Elsa walked in front of them to set a reasonable pace for Renate. The bamboo stick I had received on day one found its next owner, replacing the short stick over which Renate had toppled three times. José, a 60-year old Spaniard, in addition to his own pack, loaded Renate’s pack on his front and walked two km downhill on shifting rock. I called him San José de dos mochilas after that. When we finally got to Zubiri, and put Renate in an ambulance from Pamplona, the little band of Samaritans dropped our packs in the hostel and went to the pub. The camino certainly provided for Renate, in spite of her obstinacy, by getting her to safety. But it also provided for me, because I had been looking for someone who could use a good stick, since I prefer to have my hands free. And Elsa and José became friends and walked together with another friend all the way to Santiago. Meeting the needs of one person can meet the needs of many.
That week I walked by myself a lot, with breaks for conversation with interesting people from all over the world. In the evenings in the hostel I met some of these friends again and continued the conversations over the daily “pilgrim menu”. On day eight I happened to leave the hostel in Logroño at the same time as four friends I had met previously. They were two Mexicans and two Germans, representing four different decades. I walked out of the city with them, and discovered common literary and muscial taste with the 67-year old retired German engineer, a common admiration for churches with the 27-year old Mexican philosopher, and delightful humourous conversation with the 34 and 57 yr old businessmen. When the rain started, their infectious good humour made the soaking quite bearable, especially with some raucous singing. We found a gazebo under which to eat our mid-morning snack, and we did a few sun salutations together, to the invisible sun. They had met on the camino and now adopted me as their pilgrim sister, and we became a little family of friends, taking breaks together, sharing chocolate, oranges, laughs, aches and pains and remedies for them. I delighted in these camino brothers the camino provided for me, when I had thought I was just fine on my own. They enriched my life when we walked together the five days in the middle of the month, and their memory was with me when we separated and met each other again. The fact is, every pilgrim is on her or his own camino, and I learned with some difficulty to recognize which camino was mine. My camino brothers and I did walk the last five days into Santiago together. There we got our pilgrim certificates before attending the pilgrim mass in the cathedral, after which we joined a huge crowd of friends for one last pilgrim menu dinner. Still now, we remind each other of what the camino gave us when we write, e-mail and skype together regularly. I know they are with me today as I talk to you.
My last anecdote is a blessing I want to pass on to you. In Carrion de los Condes, I stayed in a hostel run by the nicest Augustinian nuns. Their warmth and kindness erased some of the annoying human interactions, which happen on the camino like everywhere else in life. At the pilgrim blessing in the evening, the nuns sang some songs, and then one of them gave us a few encouraging words. She held up a little yellow arrow, like the comforting arrows showing the way along the camino, and told us about four arrows to tell us we’re on the right path, whether on the camino or in the rest of our life. Here are the four arrows:
1. The first arrow is when you meet someone on the path and they give you an encouraging word, such as Animo! or Buen camino! Then you know that you are on the right path.
2. The second arrow is when you are walking alone in silence. Sometimes you hear yourself think, sometimes you hear a voice from God, and sometimes you just hear silence. What you hear when you walk alone is an arrow to tell you you’re on the right path.
3. The third arrow is when you meet a fellow pilgrim who asks you for help. That is a sign that you are on the path, where you’re supposed to be.
4. The fourth arrow is when you ask for help from fellow pilgrims or others you meet. Asking for help is a sign tht you’re on the right path.
The nun told us that their community would be walking with us in spirit and praying for us, then the nuns went around the room and blessed each person “Que Dios te bendiga. Ve con Dios”. I thought of those four arrows almost every day on the walk, (there were many arrows), and very often in the past months as I’ve been back at work.
Although I was on my own camino, walking mostly alone, I was really never alone: I got joy and inspiration from others on the road: friendly villagers, the pretty snail or shiny slug crossing the path, friends I ran into, an encouraging note left by someone ahead, a gift of a glass of wine or a flower on my pillow when my spirits were down, the stork feeding her baby. The pilgrimage gave me acceptance, peace, perspective on striving, and respect for the complexities of walking and living. Did I have a life-changing experience? I don’t know. Am I a different person? I don’t think so. My values haven’t changed, the month-long pared-down existence just gave me time to think and practice them. The camino is not magic, it’s just life. I guess an important realization I’m still learning is that leaving behind the pain of a too-heavy pack can lead to arrogance and weighing yourself down again. I am trying to remember that my striving is like the poet’s words, which “strain, crack and sometimes break under the tension”. And maybe it’s ok to be a slow learner of this realization, part of different stages of the walk. As the poet says, “The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” He further encourages, “Quick now, here, now, always.” And that’s what I wish for all of us. To be quick to be, here, now, always and to see the arrows pointing to the next step.
Our closing prayer is a list of ten pilgrim beatitudes sent me by an American fellow pilgrim.
Las Bienaventuranzas del peregrino. / Pilgrim Beatitudes
1. Bienaventurado eres, peregrino, si descubres que el camino te abre los ojos a lo que no se ve.
Blessed are you, pilgrim, if you discover that the camino opens your eyes to what cannot be seen.
2. Bienaventurado eres, peregrino, si lo que más te preocupa no es llegar, sino llegar con los otros.
Blessed are you, pilgrim, if you more concerned not with arriving, but arriving with friends.
3. Bienaventurado eres, peregrino, cuando contemplas el camino y lo descubres lleno de nombres y de amaneceres.
Blessed are you, pilgrim, when you contemplate the camino and find it full of names and of dawning.
4. Bienaventurado eres, peregrino, porque has descubierto que el auténtico camino comienza cuando se acaba.
Blessed are you, pilgrim, because you have discovered that the true camino begins when it ends.
5. Bienaventurado eres, peregrino, si tu mochila se va vaciando de cosas y tu corazón no sabe dónde colgar tantas emociones.
Blessed are you, pilgrim, if your backpack empties itself of things and your heart is overflowing with emotions.
6. Bienaventurado eres, peregrino, si descubres que un paso atrás para ayudar a otro vale más que cien hacia delante sin mirar a tu lado.
Blessed are you, pilgrim, if you discover that a step back to help someone is worth more than a hundred steps forward without looking to the side.
7. Bienaventurado eres, peregrino, cuando te faltan palabras para agradecer todo lo que te sorprende en cada recodo del camino.
Blessed are you, pilgrim, when you lack the words of gratitude for everything that suprises you at every bend in the road.
8. Bienaventurado eres, peregrino, si buscas la verdad y haces de tu camino una vida y de tu vida un camino, en busca de quien es el Camino, la Verdad y la Vida.
Blessed are you, pilgrim, if you look for truth and make your camino a life, and your life a camino, in search of the one who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.
9. Bienaventurado eres, peregrino, si en el camino te encuentras contigo mismo y te regalas un tiempo sin prisas para no descuidar la imagen de tu corazón.
Blessed are you pilgrim, if in the camino you meet yourself and offer yourself a priceless time to in order not to neglect your heart.
10. Bienaventurado eres, peregrino, si descubres que el camino tiene mucho de silencio; y el silencio, de oración; y la oración, de encuentro con el Padre que te espera.
Blessed are you, pilgrim, if you discover that the camino holds much silence; and the silence, much prayer; and the prayer, an encounter with the One who waits for you.
Amen
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