Journeys

If it's worth the going,

It's worth the ride...

-Tom Waits, A Little Rain

I came back from my pilgrimage in Spain with a kidney infection, but something else has gotten into my blood since then.  I'm dreaming about the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, almost every night.  I'm imagining the prospect of returning there with my Dad in 2015 and walking all the way from southern France, across the Pyrenees, through Pamplona and Leon and then finally down the few little sections that I have already walked, through Santiago and on to the sea.  It doesn't terrify me, I'm actually yearning for it.  I even stopped as I typed the word yearning, because there aren't too many things in life that I have wanted so badly that I would describe it as yearning.  Graduating from High School, College and Seminary were yearnings.  Getting married, and waiting for the birth of my children, those were yearnings, but those are also major life moments.  This is just a really long walk, and I can't figure out why it's got such a gravitational pull on my spirit and even my subconscious.
The really interesting thing is that it has absolutely nothing to do with the destination, it's the journey for which I yearn.  I can still remember vividly the sights, sounds and smells of the Cathedral of St. James in Santiago, I'm not dreaming about getting there, I'm dreaming about being on the way there.  I'm dreaming about the singularity of purpose that pilgrimage entails.  I'm dreaming about the human pace and limitations of walking that I extolled in my previous post.  I'm dreaming about little chapels and wayside crosses and thousands of yellow arrows and scallop shells.  I'm dreaming about the hardening of a body and the softening of a soul, wearing out boots and renewing my spirit.
When I got back from Spain at the end of May, I sort of figured that I would be processing and summarizing things for a few months.  I didn't really count on feeling this pull to go back, like there is unfinished business.  I partially blame my Dad, he's even more wound up than me, but it's not just his enthusiasm rubbing off on me.  It's the nature of pilgrimage.  We met an older man from Australia on the train platform headed back to Madrid, he had just finished the Portuguese Camino, and he had done the French Camino two years before that and he was already planning another trip two years from now, which means I might run into him again.  The point is that this happens to a lot of people, they go once and it's just not enough, it gets in their blood like it has gotten into mine.
It's an infection, but it's not bad, it feels healthy, it feels like life has a direction.
It makes me wish I had discovered this twenty years ago.
It makes me want to tell people about it.
It's in danger of making me the sort of annoying proponent of an idea that you would dread getting stuck with in a corner at a party.  It's rather fortunate for everyone that I'm as much of an introvert as I am, which predisposes me not to corner people at parties, or rather, not to go to parties in the first place.
It has reminded me of the feeling that I had when I first came to real, adult faith in Jesus Christ, and I think that is perhaps the biggest pull of the whole thing.  As a discipline, it is a physical analog for a spiritual experience, and thus it becomes a sacred journey.
I feel like it has become, and should continue to be, a part of my life.  A reminder that life is a journey, for me a journey towards God, along the path of Christian discipleship.  It's worth the sacrifice and the discipline, the struggles and the climbs, but not just because of the destination.  That's a theological truth that I had been sensing since Seminary and has finally been driven home with the sledgehammer of pilgrimage: the life of faith is not just about the destination it's about the journey.
I am increasingly saddened by the sort of approach to faith, all too prevalent in modern Christianity, which emphasizes the destination, not because it's wrong, or because I don't believe in Heaven and eternal life, but because it's just not all there is, because eternity starts now.  Our journey towards God is the most important movement of our existence, why wait until you die to start?