A Pre-Camino Practice

I’ve caved. I have agreed to walk a small portion of el Camino de Santiago – the Portuguese route – with some of my local hiking friends this month.

Many people who walk el Camino de Santiago, a 500-mi pilgrimage from France through Portugal to Spain, write about their experience after the journey. They share how they were transformed, what struck them as they slowed down and turned inward, and how the unexpected proved to be their greatest teacher.

I’m a little unusual. I’m writing about the Camino before I begin. Because, for me, the spiritual practice of walking the Camino has already begun.

Even though it’s not been on my bucket list, I always thought that if I did do this pilgrimage, it would be a spiritual practice with the intention of letting the journey unfold before me, each day unplanned. And I’d want to walk the entire 500 miles.

But this will not be quite like that.

And I suspected that from the beginning, which is why I just listened as these friends planned the trip. A much shortened version, planned through a tour company that organizes your accommodations every night. And delivers your backpack to these places for you!

But being the adventurer that I am, and in hearing my friend ask me once again if I would consider going, I finally said yes. Then the internal questions began.

As I listened to pre-Camino conversations and concerns among these friends, I knew for certain that their focus was very different. But we live, after all, in a privileged culture. And I was quietly advocating for something countercultural.

So, I wondered, did I make the right decision? Would I be able to stay grounded within my being and carry my intentions? Would I feel like an impostor as I encountered other pilgrims who were walking much farther and under very different circumstances?

I think of my El Paso friend, Heidi, a lay missioner with a lifelong commitment to social justice and accompanying the poor and marginalized. She’s walking the Camino as I write this. Her plan is to complete the entire 500 miles. She and her companions don’t have reservations along the way, they are carrying everything they need on their backs, and they’re enduring some intense weather. Consequently, they are traveling simply and lightly. With the intention to accept whatever comes. And recognize it as gift.

At first I felt my accomplishment would be so little in comparison. Yet, isn’t this also what is asked of me as I walk with this group of friends on the Camino? To put aside my expectations and anticipations, my judgments and preferences? And love each person I accompany, and encounter, where they are? Just as I am asked to love the migrants whom I’ve accompanied on their own camino?

Neither is easy.

_{Pots hand painted by migrants to raise money for their journey}

Whether it’s the privileged or the underprivileged we walk with, the ordinary or the extraordinary we encounter, loving what is, is a hard practice. There’s no doubt about it.

I remember when I first picked up St. Therese of Lisieux’s Story of a Soul more than 30 years ago. How simple and childlike she seemed to me. Yet I have long since learned that her “little way” is anything but simple. She put her preferences and her will aside daily. In the confines of a convent, where she lived with some challenging personalities. And offered up every little detail of her “ordinary” life, as it unfolded, for love. She accepted what was in front of her as divine will.

For the practice of the presence of God IS accepting the present moment, just as it is. And loving who and what is in front of you. That, I’ve discovered, is my spiritual practice.

To walk even the smallest part of the Camino with that intention will not be easy. So, the Camino will have much to teach me.

And the lesson is beginning before I even walk out the door.