Getting Started

So I'm muddling around on this site, figuring out how to do things, and I come across a little caption under my picture that says Change your picture. Help your friends recognize you. Is it that bad?

Random Camino Reflections

     1. We no longer walk like people have for most of human history. A walking pilgrimage gives us a          connection with most people from the past and also with many people in today's world for whom walking is their primary mode of travel. It also provides a connection to the sensibility that informs the Psalms of Ascent.

2. Walking time is slow time, another experience that most of us lack in the “developed” world. Slow time is not boring time. 6 hours of walking is not boring. 6 hours of sitting in a car is boring. At the same time, 6 hours of walking is not exciting or stimulating in those ways that demand increasing levels of stimulation to be satisfied, like video games, for example. It would be interesting to see what our brain waves are doing when we walk. At the very least I would say that slow time involves the body and mind in ways that are essentially unlike most of the activity of our days.

3. Walking with people over many days allows the kind of time for relationship development that our hurried and fragmented lives usually do not. Most people carry pain of some kind with them. For many, that pain is shared with other pilgrims over many hours and miles. Even when it is not, there is a sense between pilgrims that we carry more than just our packs – we carry each other.
4. Painful experiences along the way become occasions to support one another, to show love, to express community, and so they are a kind of gift.
5. Religious or not, people have a great hunger for community, maybe more so now than ever in history. Communities form naturally on a pilgrimage. This may point us in the direction of how a church might reach out to the modern world – offering a place of community or belonging to those whose need it -- Jesus stuff.
6. One of the greatest and most intimate expressions of community is eating together (communion?). Maybe one way of reaching out to the world is to invite people to eat with us.
7. If ordinary life is prose, pilgrimage is poetry – a more focused and intentional way of being, metaphoric on many levels.
8. People do a pilgrimage for many different reasons and motives – spiritual, religious, the adventure of it, the physical challenge, social connection, and so on. My reasons were mixed – I had read several books about it, I've kept a journal for many years (this seemed like something that would provide good journaling material), I've also read enough Catholic and mystical writers to see a connection between that writing and the medieval practice of walking a pilgrimage, and people who'd done the Santiago pilgrimage recommended it enthusiastically. In short, it seemed like a good idea.
9. Our pilgrimage was quite social. Some people walk the route in winter, when the experience is more solitary and leaves more time for contemplation. Each has its merits.
10. Maybe the most profound part of the pilgrimage is that it is a great leveler. We walked with people from all stations of life and of all ages, but the road respects no person more than any other. No one's feet are too important to get blisters. Everyone smells sweaty when they've been walking all day in the hot sun. Everyone gets thirsty.  
11. Regarding Gaudi's Sagrada de Familia and Guell Park: Gaudi's ecstatic architecture and design inspire pleasure, inspiration and hope. Art is, by its nature, an act of faith, performed with the belief that it reveals or performs some good function in the world, inasmuch as it opens our eyes to new possibilities of seeing and hence of being.   The uniqueness of Gaudi's work led me to a greater awareness that the world can be transformed and new and renewed.