The experience of communion.
Mass in Campillo de Altobuey, Cuenca
On the Ruta de La Lana, I arrived in Campillo de Altobuey the day after my “shock”, when I had a fierce reaction to antibiotics. This had forced me to go off-camino to Iniesta. I was 8km west of the Camino and had to make a guess at the route since no-one in the village seemed to know. The direct route north was intersected by a new high speed rail link and a motorway. Fortunately, the path I chose had bridges over these and re-connected me with the yellow arrows. I felt as if I had arrived home. What a sense of security I have when I see yellow arrows! I give thanks for the Amigos del Camino once again.
A yellow arrow!! Re-joining the Camino.
In Campanillo de Altobuey a map in the village square says that the Parish offers lodging for pilgrims. I phoned the priest who said firmly that this was not the case. Asking in bars is a reliable method of finding somewhere to sleep and I was soon advised to find the mayor. The mayor was at a wedding! The local people urged me to go into the wedding reception. I tentatively pushed open a door to the huge hall I had been directed to and when many people turned to look at this new visitor, I realised I still had my hat on, and my rucksack, sandals, of course, and a walking stick. The 150 seated guests were extravagantly elegant in their wedding outfits, as country folk can be on such occasions. They were just beginning the wedding feast. The word quickly reached the Mayor that I was looking to speak with him and he approached, took hold of my arm and asked, “Have you eaten?”
Campanillo de Altobuey.
He arranged for me to sleep in the Sports Centre and later that evening I went to find the church for evening Mass. It was the Saturday before the third Sunday after Easter just as it had been in Samos, three years earlier when I felt so much Love around the Passion of Jesus. This time I was just grateful that my body was healing from the infection and my burnt hands and feet from my allergy to ultra-violet exposure. The Ruta de La Lana was a Camino of spiritual aridity in contrast to my spiritual springtime on the Via de La Plata so I had no startling illuminations this time. I would like to say I felt included in this parish Mass, but I must admit that I was affected the priest’s decision not to give hospitality to pilgrims: I had certainly been more welcome at the wedding. I was bearing a grudge, feeling entitled to recognition as a suffering pilgrim who would prefer a bed in a presbytery to the floor of a sports hall.
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The next day as I walked to Paracuellos the priest sped past me on the road. The morning was bright and the sprawling plain of Campillo disappeared behind the folds of the deep valleys which have been gouged out of the limestone plateau of Cuenca.
Looking back over the Camino from Paracuellos.
As I entered this hilltop village the church bells rang and I imagined that this was the bell rung before Mass: the first of three which are rung at intervals calling people from their houses. I arrived at the Church panting after the climb and walked in expecting to be early, one of the first to arrive. For the second day in a row I realised that being in shorts, sandals and hat, carrying my rucksack and pole was a distraction for those gathered inside who were at the point of receiving communion. I shuffled off my backpack and sat down, relieved to have a seat. Within minutes the church emptied and I had just begun to relax into a quiet prayer when the priest stood in front of me and said, “I’m sorry, you’ll have to leave. We have to lock the church.” He obviously served Campillo as well as Paracuellos.
I gathered my hat and stick and rucksack and left, the church was locked and the priest sped off in his car. Then I realised that, in my hurry, I had left my GPS inside the church.
This is the Church with which I am in communion I thought bitterly.
Padre Crescente, Salmerón
For all my spiritual dullness on the Ruta de La Lana, I must have had some moments when the Spirit stirred me. In one of my voice recordings , just over a week after this experience, I speak enthusiastically about the Eucharist and confession, rambling a bit and ending up with a fervent call for Roman Catholic anarchy. Maybe I had been stimulated by the radioactivity from the huge Nuclear plant in Trillo which I had skirted the previous day. I imagine though it was more to do with having had Pilar join me for a couple of days and a memorable meeting in Salmerón.
Trillo nuclear power plant
The recording tells of my disorientation, so something had occurred. I certainly wanted to capture something in this recording but I didn’t manage to do so very well. (You can listen to it if you wish at the end of this post). Two days before, the 4th sunday after Easter, I had been to Mass in Salmerón, the first village in Guadalajara. Pilar had come to walk with me for a wonderful couple of days and drove off after Mass leaving me to my camino. No sooner had she left than the elderly priest came up to me and asked about my camino. We began to talk about God’s Love, as one does! This man was full of it.
Now 86 years old he had retired to his home town many years before. He had been born beside the village church where he was now pastor – this was Good Shepherd Sunday. I felt like a lost sheep found, by the way he swept me up into his enthusiasm. He took me back into the church where we climbed over some building rubble piled up under the choir gallery. He opened a side door and inside was a nearly-finished chapel with a magnificent vaulted ceiling. It had a keystone beautifully carved with a prayer to Mary. He had built this chapel with his own hands, cutting the stones himself and lifting them into place, often with the help of his brother. Two years ago he slipped and broke his ankle, but he had carried on and hopes to inaugurate the chapel soon. We showed each other our badly scarred left ankles. Like masons with trouser legs rolled up we shared our mutual secret of recognition. This made up for Campillo de Altobuey. He sent me off on my camino with a huge hug, an embrace of peace, communion in Love.
Looking back over Salmerón from the Camino
As I climbed up and away from Salmerón I looked back on the village and the province of Cuenca spread out to the horizon. The two days with Pilar and my meeting with Padre Crescente had given a lift to my rather flat spirits. However, my spiritual dullness was soon to return as if it had been written into the script of this Camino.
One Body in Christ
The effects of my meeting with Crescente must have grown silently with me as I walked the 21 km of deserted path through dehesa, past abandoned habitations and the ghostly village of Villaescusa where those who walk the camino are unwelcome. I met with more kindness that night when I arrived late in Viana de Mondéjar. The albergue was closed, but with a phone number. The key was kept by a man in Trillo who, although it was 9pm on a Sunday, left his family to drive 9 km each way , open up the albergue and ensure that I was comfortable. I thanked him and he returned home while I prepared for a shower by switching on the hot water. I also switched on a heater rather than light a log fire. The lights went off as the fuse tripped. The main switch for all the electricity was in the social centre above, so I had no hot water or heating for that night, or light. I saw in this another thread sewing together the material world with the more veiled textures of my soul.
Yet something was growing within me, clothed in this Love of which Crescente and I had spoken, in which he built his chapel and tended his flock and in which I walked my Camino.
Clear springs in Cifuentes, living water of life.
[In an earlier post I wrote about an experience of God’s Love which I had had in Samos just over 3 years earlier and now I am writing about another. It may appear that these are common for me. They are not. Also, they are not “insights” or special understandings which I have fairly regularly: ideas which I don’t take over-seriously since they rarely stand the test of time. These, on the other hand, are experiences which I find hard to describe in words but which still live on within me.
Writing about a spiritual journey in a blog condenses and distorts while creating a narrative of sorts. The reality is much more chaotic, discontinuous and ordinary than it might appear here.]
Central to my experience was the reality that we are joined together in love by eating the bread and drinking the wine; the body and blood of Jesus (symbolic, figurative or real, it makes no difference) in whose memory we share this food together. The experience was triggered by reading from the Gospel of John which I had found on the ground in a park at the start of my Camino. The passage was John 6: 1-71. Oddly enough the passage, in which Jesus says, “You must eat my flesh and drink my blood if you are to have eternal life” does not mention Love, or unity. It is a passage full of disunity, disputes and separation.
I was filled, however, with a sense of oneness in Love with all humanity in the Body of Christ, coupled with a real sense of contrition. My voice recording, made while leaving Cifuentes, comes out more as a thought or idea than the raw unspoken experience I recall. It was not in my head.
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I felt this Love and unity, physically in my limbs, my stomach, my heart and my skin. Contrition flowed in my blood sweetly, as if I had just eaten a bunch of ripe grapes. Maybe I was still feeling Crescente’s hug. This I can still feel but I am amazed how quickly I launched into reflection and analysis. If it were not for the recording made while walking I would probably not remember my garbled outburst against a hierarchical Church and its laws. I’m still tempted to justify these thoughts: such is my ego. Herein grows the fodder of theology, good or bad. This is the meat of disunity. True unity is not a product of theology. It comes through sharing a meal; through remembering the life and death of Jesus in the bread and wine made holy, His body and blood. It joins us in Love.
This Unity fulfilled every need I have for recognition. It is complete belonging and Love is indiscriminating and abundant. Contrition, too, thrives in this Union.
Las Tetas, Landmarks near Trillo.
Between Campillo de Altobuey and Cifuentes is a Camino full of interesting landscapes, lonely and often muddy paths, wild herbs and rocky escarpments, birdsong and silence; Cifuentes sparkles with its crystal clear springs of water. It was a stretch on the Camino where I was given a moment’s respite from my inner aridity and my arthritic pains. It was a time of communion with Pilar, with Padre Crescente and his parish, with the Priest in Campillo de Altobuey, with the wedding guests, indeed with all humanity. Communion. Just as it is.
The voice recording