Part One:
I wake up to the cold and the dark; Palas de Rei in the early morning
hours feels apprehensive, like as soon as I begin my morning walk I’ll leave
behind the last few stages of the journey and begin to tidy things up. There are just over 70 kilometers left before
reaching Santiago de Compostela and the tomb of St. James. Seventy is a very… comprehensible number.
Seventy is a number that scares me, because seventy is not very far from
zero.
I’ll be honest – I don’t remember breakfast. I’m pretty certain I ate quickly and left
quickly, eager to enjoy the chilly morning.
Those expectant hours before the sun comes up have always been some of
my favorites; in boot camp we would rise early and go on long ruck marches when
it was so dark the only thing I could see was the vague outline of the person
in front of me, when the fog and the damp muted the sounds of people marching
and I fell easily and quickly into a meditative trance of breathing, walking,
and bearing weight.
I did take a minute to stand at that statue of St. James. I’d read that the last few towns before
Santiago become very crowded and suburban, and I wasn’t ready to abandon these
small rural icons to the past. I knew
based on my time in Burgos, Leon, and Sarria that in Santiago I’d be overwhelmed
with religious imagery, but I felt more kinship to the silent dignity of this James.
A digression: In O’Cebreiro, prior to my gastrointestinal explosions, I’d
picked up a slim book titled A Christian Interpretation of the Way of St.
James by the Archbishop of Burgos.
It was a kind volume, at once deeply considered and immediately
passionate, touching deftly on all the reasons this pilgrimage had called to
believers for a millennium. In it, the
Archbishop illuminates the James who said ‘yes’ to Christ – and connects his
faith to our own as pilgrims who have embarked on a journey of uncertainty and
doubt, believing that we will find our faith transformed in the process. I deeply identified with this description of
James, as a person who chose to affirm rather than deny. Faith in that choice is one of my most
fundamental beliefs – that despite doubt, challenge, hardship, or fear, ‘yes’
always brings us closer to the truth.
Yes is chaotic, and dirty, and often gets us into trouble… but yes is right.
The first hour or so goes by quickly as I hurry off in search of the
nearest place I can get coffee; by the time the morning has warmed to the sun I’ve
found myself trudging through eucalyptus groves and dodging tourists and day
trippers (and where were my Musketeers to help me mock them with
misappropriated Beatles?). There is a
long, gloriously muddy stretch of trail lifted straight from the Blue Ridge
that reminds me of how soon I’ll be heading back to the U.S., and, fittingly, I
spend some time walking with Lisa, Pepper, and their Irish friend. Lisa and I talk about our love for North
Carolina and working in therapy, and I find myself going on about AA/NA work at
such length I become embarrassed. Lisa
and Pepper have a complexity to their relationship that makes me both jealous
and proud.
Approaching Melide I begin to hear snippets of conversation among the
pilgrims about the pulpo there. Now that I have come properly and fully into
Galicia, it’s more or less expected that I try the regional octopus. Every time I think of it, though, I get that
sick feeling in my stomach from O’Cebreiro and balk. The descriptions don’t really do a great job
of selling the pulpo to begin with –
boil an octopus, chop it up, and drench it in paprika and olive oil. There you go, pulpo!
As the Camino reaches that weird state just before a proper city, where
it leads you out of fields and into nonsensical paths adjacent parking lots and
abandoned buildings, I see a figure ahead of me shuffling along. Lotus.
She’s got on her gardening hat, she’s dragging her hiking poles from one
wrist, and she’s flapping her shirt up and down frantically in what I imagine
is an attempt to cool off. I have that
moment where I wonder if I should slow down and let her go on, or try to
stealthily pass. Instead I sidle up to
her and start talking.
Correction – as soon as she recognizes me, she begins chattering away at
me about the heat and smoothly segues onto pulpo.
Apparently, THE best restaurant for octopus in Spain is just ahead, and I
must join her for lunch.
I really do try to think of ways to escape. I run the list of every possible excuse or
reason for moving on, but before I can pick the best out, I find myself saying “Lotus,
I’d love to join you for lunch”. Spoiler
alert: I don’t order pulpo. I leave that to Lotus, but I do order one of
the generic American-inspired dishes off the menu, something with potatoes,
egg, a hamburger, and a coke, and we sit at a table on the street watching
pilgrims together. We talk about
Asheville. We talk about the weather. We
talk about how Lotus is a homeopath. We
talk about religious universalism and Lotus’ ill-defined ‘everything is the
same’ philosophy. We talk about all
sorts of things I don’t particularly want to talk about, and I barely get one
word into the conversation.
Lunch with Lotus is one of my favorite experiences on the Camino. Lunch with Lotus was a significant religious
experience.
I’m not joking, there’s no hyperbole in that statement. Just a few weeks before that day, Lotus was a
person I actively dreaded and whom I’d have avoided at all costs. She ‘polluted’ my pure pilgrim
experience. She annoyed me, was
off-putting, and talked about things I didn’t like to talk about. I felt incidental in her presence.
Nothing about my surface-level interaction with Lotus changed in those
weeks. She acted in exactly the same way I remembered – and if anything, I
ought to have had less patience for her.
I was hot, I wanted to hold onto each moment of solitude and contemplation
before reaching Santiago, and I didn’t want to listen to Lotus’ trials and
tribulations. Something had changed in me, however. I’d been doing lots of thinking about how the
pilgrimage would affect me, would leave a lasting impression, would bring me
closer to how I want to live out my faith.
I’d been doing lots of planning.
And in the moment with Lotus it was so easy as to be almost
unrecognizable – the petty annoyances were there, but they were unimportant. I was able to sit at the table, break bread
with this woman who I found difficult and abrasive, and simultaneously recognize
and love her. Compassion felt effortless,
and natural, and right.
My experience was religious because I can’t deconstruct that moment any
further. I said ‘yes’ to lunch;
completely unrelated to the circumstances of our relationship I felt us to be part
of the same body, the same creation, and my instinct was neither fear nor
suspicion, but love. So here’s to Lotus –
the obnoxious, self-absorbed, grandiose, forgetful, crass, sometimes topless,
face of Christ.
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