Pilgrimage  –  Miracles for all.

Fairies, magic, and wonder on the right. Miracles, faith and saints on the right.

As a child, Christmas was pantomime time and at Peter Pan I remember saving Tinkerbelle’s life by clapping frantically as an act of my faith in fairies.  About 40 years on I no longer believed in faries and I also thought that happiness was something that belonged to childhood.  I was immersed in “reality”: family responsibilities, mortgage and so on.

Well, I’ve been cured of all that “reality” nonsense since I started walking and don’t find beliefsabout reality helpful any more.  Beliefs are like classroom walls: they cut off our horizons.

Wide horizons are a joy on the Camino.

What I can tell you about is my memory of experiences, vapours I have breathed which have been envigorating, life-giving and transforming.   The Camino has changed me.  Yes, the mean, manipulating, angry, critical and rational man you may have seen in me has evaporated and if you happen to be one of the many whom I have wronged, read on.

So what’s all this about miracles?

One of the difficulties about being a Roman Catholic is that the Church keeps getting in the way of the best experiences and joys of the spiritual life.  But wait…..first of all………….

So what’s all this about religion?

My first great miracle was on my first Camino, The Via de La Plata.  Very early on, before my first blisters had burst, after my first night, a night sleeping out alone in a field,

Simple accommodation on my first night, first Camino.

I awoke feeling a great freedom from my former need for a bed, a roof or even a tent to pass a night asleep.  Maybe, I thought, there are other things I don’t need.

Feeling lighter and freer, I strode on and confidently walked across a small stream and sank in up to my right knee and couldn’t lift my foot out of a huge dollop of mud.  I wriggled off my sandal, found terra firma for my other foot and levered myself up the bank.

Sandal extracted from sinking mud.

My sandals were my only footwear. This incident freed me from thinking that walking in wet footwear was a “bad thing”, a long held belief from childhood.  So what else might I be released from believing?

Everything!!

It was 18th March and I began to see flowers everywhere.

Flowers noticed while walking in wet sandals.

“It doesn’t matter!”, I felt.  I could have taken up recruiting for http://www.thefuckitlife.com/.

Yet, I was on a Pilgrimage – an act of Faith in a sense.  Faith is not what I thought it was – I used to think it was about believing in things, like God and the Virgin birth.   All beliefs, whoever held them, lost their power; they were no more solid than my foothold in the mud. Beliefs were not worth dying for.  A faith is not worth dying for, nor an educational theory nor an insecurity.  And that is still my position on “Religion”, although you will find on this The-Raft-of-Corks blog over 60 posts inspired by spiritual experiences.

So why do I say so much about miracles and saints and the Church?

I felt freedom and felt free to immerse myself in anything I chose (which wouldn’t be a muddy burn).  With all this freedom I saw no reason to look further than my own roots since I felt no great need to renounce them, even when faced with an enticing choice of religions, sects, philosophies and juicy nihilisms.  I’m Scottish of mainly Irish Catholic breeding so there’s plenty to chew on.

Easter Eggs in Seville, start of the Via de la Plata

Also I already know loads about Roman Catholicism: I have too few years of life left to plunge myself as deeply in Buddhism or Zoroastrianism, all things being equal, absolutely. So the balance points, for me, to an election for my unrejected roots.  I was lumped with that inheritance and even though there is much of it I don’t like, it is my language for these very, very difficult-to-express matters like life, death, suffering, world poverty, genocide, love, powerlessness and our infinitesimal smallness in the universe and in time, whatever that is.

“For to be aware and to be are the same” Parmenides

Given a 2000 year old belief system, with a rich vocabulary, a history of repeated mistakes, a track-record of misunderstanding of its own objectives, a big following of the faithful and the disgruntled, wonderful music, a rich basis of ritual practice, good liturgy and hundreds of mystics on the margins, a sacred literature of quality of all different styles and pretensions………well, why should I look elsewhere?  I’m landed with this family, even if the cupboards are filled with abused skeletons and sinfullness.  A bit like my own life – with abused skeletons replaced by obese, inebriated skeletons.

So, while not believing that St James ever set foot in Spain, or rather not caring, I immerse myself in this ancient tradition of walking to Santiago de Compostella…

Santiago Cathedral. Burial place of St. James the Apostle. (Maybe….or not likely)

 Miracles?

Yes, free of beliefs (Miracle no.1), immersed in but not confined by my roots, I was disposed to meet with miracles.  Two days later my blisters began.