Being yourself. “The paths that lead to life.”
Paths that lead to life. One million paces from Santiago.
A long Camino is over 1,000,000 steps.
The first part of The Ruta de La Lana was marked, for me, by physical weariness and inner dullness. This was so in spite of meeting some wonderful and inspiring people, especially the Friends of the Camino, the group of volunteers who do so much to make life safe and possible for everyone who walks the camino. Each step I took in Alicante, Albacete and Cuenca remains fossilised in my memory. (My memory nowadays captures less and less. ) I felt no joy.
So I devised a prayer to repeat over and over again. “Lord, teach me how to give you glory and how to live in joy.” The first part of this refrain reflected my puzzlement over the whole business of praising and giving glory. I can’t imagine what this means. The idea of heavenly hosts singing all the time doesn’t inspire me much except at Christmas and why God should want my praise I can’t imagine. One of my own great battles is to detach myself from seeking praise and to know how to accept it healthily when it arrives. Praise can be addictive, for me at least.
A Long Stretch on the Ruta de La Lana in Solitude.
Paracuellos to Fuentes. 40km
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Prayers of this sort are always answered. It is just a matter of waiting. This time I had an answer to the first part fairly soon. I would have longer to wait for the joy. The Ruta de La Lana has some long stretches without any services. Two weeks into this Camino I had stayed in the Hermitage which is a kilometre off the Camino just outside of Paracuellos. This is a Casa Rural which offers pilgrims a very good rate for the night and also has a restaurant/bar. On leaving I asked for two bocadillos which turned out, each one, to be a feast, one with a ham omelette and the other with home-made chorizo. I attribute the answer to my prayer partly to the chorizo.
There is only one village between Paracuellos and Fuentes, but this is an important one. Monteagudo de Las Salinas is where the original Ruta de La Lana began. It offers minimal services, but the only ones for 40 km. When I arrived the village was empty.
A heartening plaque in Monteagudo de Salinas.
With difficulty, I found the shop which looks just like all the other houses. It is alongside the Camino, but I had wandered up into the deserted village, missing it. The shopkeeper explained that she has very few customers and, moreover, a van comes round the villages with fresh produce, so the survival of a small shop is unlikely. On the other hand, her non-commercial services, as a social centre for the elderly population, a drop-off point for medical prescriptions and help in times of mini-emergencies were thriving. She was happy, she said, in her shop but it was not economically viable.
Monteagudo de las Salinas
Before entering Monteagudo I had enjoyed my chorizo sandwich. So when I met this woman I was thrilled for she was confirming for me all that had happened as I ate my sandwich. The Camino had passed through a long green plain, about 4 km long, bordered either side by low hills. I had been saying my prayer about praise and joy when the plain itself distracted me. I imagined it as a golf course and I soared off on a reverie planning all the holes on this course which would undoubtedly be one of the world’s most exclusive, hidden treasures. So much for prayer, even repetitive prayer, let alone wordless contemplation! When I became aware that I was dreaming and planning, I knew it was time to stop and investigate the sandwich.
The glory in being just who you are.
I sat down on a clump of grass beside my golf course and gave thanks for the sandwich and its home-made red sausages and salad. I had stuck my walking pole in the sandy earth and began to absorb my surroundings. I saw a little white flower which seemed to say, “Look at me. I am beautiful”. “You are,” I said. “you are just perfect in yourself.” Then, it was as if someone nudged me to say, ” Just listen to what you are saying”. At which point I understood something about giving glory to God. It’s all about just being and being who I really am.
The golf course behind by pole, earthed in the sand.
Uncovering the hidden treasure.
For the rest of this day the Camino passed through farm land with cattle and sheep. The path was bordered by rosemary in flower, deer ran, dashing across the green pasture to the shelter of the woods. I remember long ago reading Heidegger who was suggesting that we live blindly in a world we construct from our falsehood, from cover-ups. He explained that the Greek word for truth, Aletheia, means Un-covering. Much of what I recalled of this great philosopher still excites me and my simple understanding that all I had to do to give glory to God is to be my real self, I had from heard Heidegger. The task is not easy. We have to strip off layers of self-deception, self-justification, fear of ourselves, our past and our guilt. That this truthfulness, individually and collectively is the only path to life is common wisdom in all the major spiritual traditions. “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life”, John14.6
Deer are very plentiful on the Ruta de La Lana.
Un-covering the truth of who we are is a life-time’s work, I expect; if not several life times. Christians, of course, believe that the work is completed for them by Christ which makes, to me perfectly good sense in the context of our oneness with and in God, in the Body of Christ. But in the meantime, theology apart, I had a Camino of many millions of steps to walk.
The woman in the shop, however, confirmed for me one of the key corollaries of this awareness of giving glory, which is that being who we are also means being where we are, now. This, thanks to many modern treatises on spirituality, is a secret in the public domain. (Rohr, Tolle)
This chorizo sandwich moment on a day in which I met only one other human being, the woman in the shop, happened (by chance?…) on the day of the most wonderful solitude for me. I was at no time alone surrounded by the vibrant truth of nature. The panentheist in me wanted to sleep under the stars, ask questions of the hares and let the rosemary kiss me. Nature uncovers the true self.
“If they build a golf-course here, will you eat it?”
Praise in itself is neutral: it can both veil and reveal. The praise which reveals is that which we want to offer to each other and to God. We praise when we see the reality in another person, the truth, the beauty, the hurt, the confusion, and the light, whatever is there and offer it as understanding and reflection of the goodness we see. We give glory when we stand unclothed, just as we are, before God and each other.
The Camino offers us many opportunities of divesting ourselves of our adornments, our disguises, our make-up. We begin to know where our own beauty really is. The Camino is a Way of compliments. We begin to see the good in our fellow pilgrims through our own good will which thrives in this special, flowing community. “Well done!”, “You are very kind!”, “I really enjoyed walking with you this morning”, “You look wonderful!”, “Gosh, how fantastic! You’ve painted your toenails again. You are a wonder.” It is a way of praise, even in the most elementary Way. And in the highest way of all we know that giving glory to God is like being a little flower, or a shopkeeper who is: we praise him by being ourselves.
A ruin for the night after a day of solitude.
High on the plateau above Fuentes and Cuenca, itself, I lay down for the night on the grass and the stones, earthed, like my pole giving thanks to be, just be, “You have shown me the paths that lead to life.”