Camino Reflection #13

My camino is over, or more accurately my caminos are over, and I am feeling the need to make some sense of my experience, to create a story to explain why I walked nearly 600 miles and how I have been changed as a consequence. This is the human process for making meaning, yet I wonder how much it will also limit the possibility for other understandings and will reduce the richness of the experience into something easy to remember and repeat. This is the process by which new experiences and ideas become dead dogma. So, I wonder how to tell the stories of my pilgrimage while holding those stories lightly and allowing new understandings to continue emerging.

It feels as though I’ve been on two pilgrimages – one to Santiago and another to Finnesterre, one about emptying and letting go and the other about being filled. While I never imagined this as a religious pilgrimage, I was surprised by how much my religious experience was affected by the first of these pilgrimages. With each step I took and with each new cross or church or statue I saw, I found myself becoming even less religious. I saw enough statues and pictures of St. James cutting off the heads of Moors and enough church alters gilded with gold stolen from the Incas and Aztecs to be thoroughly disgusted.

The riches, power and control of the church was a constant jarring contrast to Jesus’ message about poverty, simplicity, love and inclusion. This contrast made it increasingly easy to dismiss the Christian church (and by extension, all organized religion) as irrelevant anachronisms that have outlived their usefulness. When I noticed the age of the clergy and the huge convents and monasteries with only a handful of ancient nuns and monks, I could sense that the church is dying and I could better understand the reactive and defensive attempts to regain and retain control.

What surprised me is that as I walked, I noticed myself letting go of my need to struggle and to fight against the absurdities of religion and I actually began to feel some compassion for those whose way of life and understanding of the world is being so radically challenged by the modern world. And I also found myself drawn more strongly to the radical message of Jesus about living simply and with love and compassion and about avoiding all connection with worldly power.

For so many years I have tried to fight and to argue against the hypocrisy and inconsistencies and irrationality that I experience in Christianity. On my camino I often had a walking partner who was a very valuable mirror for me as she would repeatedly become engaged in ranting against the inconsistencies and atrocities that she saw. This mirror allowed me to observe my own judgement and anger toward Christianity and to recognize the futility of my emotional reactivity. There is no need to fight against a feeble old institution that has outlived its relevance. That’s a bit like picking on a feeble old person.

So, I found myself letting go and accepting organized religion as something that I don’t need to accept or participate in but I also don’t need to fight against it. This seems like the most recent in a long series of letting go (letting go of my career and home and possessions and now my anger toward organized religion). And like the other stages of letting go that I have experienced, I found this to be extremely freeing and energizing. One less stone to carry in my backpack.

My pilgrimage to the “end of the world” was a very different experience, one of filling me up. But I will save that for another reflection…

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