Pilgrims or Tourists? Prejudice?
Not in the true Camino Spirit.
In Forums on the Camino there are plenty of comments about other “pilgrims” who are not walking the Camino in its true spirit.
There are some, I have heard, who take buses and taxis, especially if it is raining and claim beds before those who have walked all day.
In Burgos Cathedral this year, two Scandinavian girls were at Mass in front of me. It was clearly their first ever Mass and had no idea what was going on. When it was communion time they went up and received the host in their hand, giggled and didn’t know what to do with it. The priest, rather perturbed, indicated that they should eat it. They returned to their seats chattering and amused.
Burgos Cathedral
Hospitaleros can share, if you are prepared to listen, innumerable accounts of rudeness and ingratitude, lack of care of toilets and kitchens and disregard for other pilgrims.
Pilar, with whom I was walking the Camino del Norte from Ribadeo, picked up every piece of litter on the way one day. She likes things tidy, but even for her, one day was enough.
On reading this, I expect that if you have walked the Camino you will remember how you felt about tourists and litter leavers and queue jumpers.
Pilar on a mission to collect litter. Camino del Norte.
The real world
Hierarchies, like rudeness and litter belong to the everyday world we want to leave behind when we go on a Camino.
How often have you felt, or heard others say, what a pity it is that the experience of life on the Camino – the friendship, compassion and honesty you meet, the self-knowledge, self-reconciliation, peace, inner freedom and love which all grow along the Way – is so hard to continue in “real” life? You maybe wish that the Camino was your real life.
A bridge.
There is, I think, a bridge between the two worlds and it is, of course, within each of us.
Remember your attitude to the tourists, the inconsiderate and the cyclists. It is possible, and in my own case it is certain, that these reactions arise from prejudices. Discerning prejudice is very difficult because it means recognising that our own viewpoint in everything cannot define anything, definitively. We cannot cross the bridge till we recognise our prejudices.
Puente Quintos, Montemarta – Tabara, Camino Sanabres
Equality on the Camino
The Camino, for all that I have focussed here on the exceptions, is, overall, a great leveller: even the veterans can suffer a strained muscle. Blisters can make tourists. A great part of the spirit of the Camino is a spirit of equality. But there is much more and much of this much more comes to us through the wonderful encounters we have with each other; such as the acts of kindness and generosity.
[ I met a young Scottish boy in O Pedrouso who had walked from Motherwell. He’d just left home and walked, finding himself on the Camino. He had managed by begging and sleeping rough. He told me that the day before he had asked an elderly couple in a cafe if they might buy him a hot drink. They did and listened to his story. The elderly woman took his hand and said, “My dear, our son, too, left us, just as you have left your parents. He, too, lived rough and walked and walked. Then one day he came back grown up. You remind me of him.” Then she gave him 50 euros. He told me it was the most money he had had all year, and now he had it for when he arrived in Santiago.]
Then there is the joy we have in new friends, in listening to and exchanging stories, in the Irish and in sharing tables, bedrooms and showers. The spring from which all this flows is Love, love for each other and for the earth, humanity and all creation connected, illuminated and purring with energy like the Milky Way. We are thrilled by the synchronicities, serendipities, “coincidences” and miracles which the Camino supplies in abundance, the connectedness which love creates and confirms. The Camino is still basically Christian and for Christians, God is Love. But for Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims, too, Love is central. I don’t think we should at all shrink from recognising that the Camino through its tradition, its Faith-relationship, its symbolism, its challenge and difficulties, its capacity to purify, empty and cleanse and its community is all about Love.
Prejudice is inimical to love.
Undoing prejudice: crossing the bridge.
Crossing the bridge, Camino del Norte 120km to go.
One of the finest gifts the Camino has given me is that it has alerted me to my prejudices.
I think I became aware of them when I questioned my reactions to tourists taking a bed when I had walked all day, or when someone shut a window pointedly after I had just opened it. Or when I asked myself why I disliked this guy who knew everything. My gaze turned on myself rather than blaming the other for being just who he/she is. I, too, am in the process of learning to be just who I am. Who am I to expect others to be ahead of me on that journey? We begin to undo prejudice when we notice that we are seeing the speck in the other’s eye.
Faced with my prejudice, now admitted, I cross the bridge and befriend, hug, listen to, share with or simply offer a smile to this other who has gifted me an awareness of my prejudice. Always my prejudice disolves, always.
This is real life: this is the spirit of the Camino. I realise now how many hospitaleros, pilgrims, and local people in the pueblos have welcomed me when I was needy or smelly or too tired to talk: or, perhaps, big, Scottish, badly-dressed, fruit-eating, white, retired, limping, inattentive, insensitive or some of the things I’m ashamed to put in writing.
We might not be able to take the whole Camino experience into our daily “normal” lives, but we can cross this bridge anytime. The yellow arrow points this Way.