Sin Dolor, No Hay Gloria

And when he knew for certain only drowning men could see him

He said all men shall be brothers then, until the sea shall free them.

-Leonard Cohen, Suzanne

There was a T-shirt that I saw for sale along the Camino that said in Spanish: "Sin dolor, no hay gloria," which translates essentially: "No pain, no gain," or more fully, "without suffering, there is no glory."  Lest you think that the Camino is all wine (or beer) and roses, let me just tell you that there is, for everyone a fair amount of suffering that comes with the journey.  Even when your body hardens and your feet stop complaining about the daily thrashing you give them, there is always the mental and spiritual sort of pain to step in and take the place of physical struggle.  You get homesick, you get road weary, sometimes you don't even know what's wrong with you, you just don't feel quite right.  As a matter of fact, you are every bit as vulnerable to random feelings of existential malaise as you might be back in the good old world, and you don't have your bed to crawl into or your TV to bathe you in inanity and insanity.
There is enough trouble to make you seriously consider why you're doing this thing to yourself, which is question you often cannot answer.  But ask it I did and I considered the nature of suffering.
As a Protestant, the Roman Catholic fixation with gore is a bit odd, but in every church there is a crucifix of some sort, and often a sculpture or a painting of the dead body of Jesus, either cradled in Mary's arms, or lying in the tomb.  Some of the sculptures were quite gruesome, and yes, I am aware that flogging and crucifixion were horrific and actually the statues even with all their bloody stripes and spear wounds probably don't come close to how ripped up he actually was.  What really got me though, was one day, when it was kind of rainy and cold and I was feeling just sort of dead in body and soul, I found myself looking up at one of these crucifixes, and I got it on the gut level.  I was standing there, sort of damp, with my pack on, and I saw Jesus bleeding on the cross, and I understood, beyond the intellectual way I had always processed it before, why so many people find the suffering and dying part of Jesus so blasted important.
See, on my good days, I tell myself that Jesus' teachings about love and equality and how the Kingdom is drawing near to us, despite our imperfections, to be rather enough reason to follow him.  Even if none of the supernatural stuff, the miracles, resurrection, the Trinity, was actually true, the fact that Jesus was anything like what the Gospels report would be enough for me to be his disciple.
Most of the time, I don't need him to be any more than the guy who said, "love your neighbor as yourself," and "let the children come to me," and "blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth."  Those things are light and life and they are big enough to challenge me to be better than I am.
But sometimes there is darkness and death, and then I need him to be on that cross and in that tomb, and especially I need him to come out again.  It is when I'm at the end of my rope that I need to know the Jesus that would get himself beat up and crucified.
It's when I face things that seem to be beyond redemption that I need to know a God who has other ways of dealing with brokenness and evil.  The crucified Jesus reminds me that everything has a purpose, even that, even the worst we can do, even death, even the tomb, even his grieving mother.  For what it's worth, I thought of all the people who lived in a world that was even more nasty and brutish than the one we live in now, a world where kings and criminals were constant and mortal threats, a world where a barbarian horde or a rival warlord could ride in at any moment and kill, rape and burn everything that you held dear.  I thought about all the people in the world who still live with some version of that reality, and I thought about how the crucified Jesus comforts them and tells them they're not the only ones who ever suffered, or suffered unjustly.
He reminds all of us that suffering can be redeemed and be redemptive.  Given what I know about the middle ages, when many of those churches were first built, it's not really that mysterious that people would appreciate a reminder of how God is with them when things are particularly bloody.
I know it renewed my soul.