Moving On

For 35 days we moved.  Every single morning we woke up, packed everything we had and walked to another place.  About a week in, I started to notice the dynamics of this practice: some places were easy to leave, other places felt a little like leaving home.  People too, you never knew if you would see the same people come evening, maybe they went farther or not as far, maybe they picked another albergue.  Some people were easy to part with, others you left with a hope that your paths would cross again.
Aside from homesickness, the constant moving was perhaps the biggest challenge of the Camino, and yet it was also a compulsion.  The thought of staying somewhere for two nights seemed odd to both Dad and me.  We talked about it any time someone mentioned staying somewhere to have a bit more of a look around: Leon, Astorga, Ponferrada, Sarria, the thought crossed our mind that maybe we should just take a day off.  But we didn't and our justification was mostly momentum, we didn't want to stop, because we feared the difficulty of starting to move again.  As long as we did this every day, it was routine, or as close to routine as you can get when you're a pilgrim.
There were a few days at the end where we had to re-adjust to staying in the same place.  We stayed two days in Santiago, and resisted the urge to drive or bus it out to Finisterre and Muxia, because we sort of knew that we had to stop moving somewhere.  Personally, I tried to relish the chance to just be still, but it was difficult, partly because I really wanted to be home, to finish the journey.
Since I have been home I have felt very content to just be where I am.  Sometimes I have dreams where I'm moving again, sometimes the idea that I moved that much for that long seems like a dream. It's not all good though, my body is quickly softening and spreading out again, my sedentary habits are re-asserting themselves, and when I observe this, I know I need to get moving to something, but what?
The suction of comfort and familiarity is a powerful thing, and not always a bad thing.  If I were to give in to the wandering I would inflict far too much suffering on those who rely on me, and quite frankly it's not an option.  So I'm trying to learn what I can from my moving and from the experience of inertia, both in the habit of moving, and in the habit of staying.
I think there is always tension between the progressive impulse to change (hopefully for the better) and the conservative notion that we ought to keep things stable.  There is value in both things.  My pilgrimage taught me that the next thing was not always better than the last thing, and the notion that you were going to come to the end of your struggles over the next rise was an unhelpful and often cruel delusion.  But there is also a necessity to keep moving and not over-idealize the past and the status quo.
I hear a lot of rhetoric that mentions "taking back our country," or "turning our nation back to God," both of which ring with a prophetic notion of repentance, but when I look back at where we've come from, I don't think there is much prophetic about it at all.  The truth of the matter is that we are, perhaps too slowly, making progress.  I keep in mind Martin Luther King Jr's statement about the arc of history being long and "bending towards justice."  Lately I have been feeling like it might be nice if it bent a little faster, but I understand that it probably can't, things might start breaking.
Don't get me wrong, I have been steeped in reformed theology long enough to know that we are never going to reach the promised land. I know that this pilgrimage we are on is never ending, that doesn't mean we just get to pitch our tents in the valley of the past and stay there hoping we can hold on to what we have.  That is, in essence, despising the way that God is leading us, out of slavery and oppression and into freedom.  Do you want to go back to Egypt?  Does the future scare you?  Why?  Have you no faith?
The world was never perfect, not in 1950, not in 1850, not in the first century, go back as far as you need to, there is never a place where everything was just wonderful for everyone.  You Bible reading types know that Eden didn't even make it out of the third chapter of Genesis.  You might hope that some day God is going to magically make it all better, everything that has happened since "The Beginning," seems to indicate that God is pretty intent on having creation do its thing, and that  means us as well, with our sins and our stuttering and inconstant progress.
It is a grave theological error to make God as impatient and short-sighted as we are.
Let me be clear, God is not waiting for us to finally get it right.  It is not as though Creation is incomplete or broken.  What has been made is good, if there is anything out of joint about the whole thing, it's us.  We don't need to fix anything but ourselves and we are incapable even of doing that without God's grace.  I know, it's not fun to be constantly on the move, and not really sure of where you're going, but trust me, you can get used to it.