Camino Gratitude

I walked into Santiago de Compostela yesterday afternoon, exhausted in steady rain. I felt both full and empty, enjoying the busy Cathedral and streets of Santiago. My memories of walking 1,028,000 steps in 25 days over rocky dirt paths, listening to birds, amazing sunrises, sleeping with 4 snoring pilgrims each night, and wonderful conversations with kind, thoughtful people. Empty because this special pilgrimage is over, looking at billions of morning stars transitioning to sunrise is God’s magic in the Meseta. Maybe humble is the right word, watching thousands of people stream into Santiago. Knowing hundreds of millions of pilgrims have walked this Way to follow St James, the apostle of Jesus Christ, to evangelize Spain, over 2,000 years ago.

I walked with a wise, Australian lady yesterday who said “We create a lack of internal courage.” She was expressing how wonderful life is, how God created so much beauty for us to enjoy, but often we don’t have the courage to explore.

Joseph Pearce wrote a book about Alexander Solzhenitsyn, “A Soul in Exile.” He wrote – “People don’t know what they are striving for, they exhaust themselves in the senseless pursuit of material things and die without realising their spiritual wealth. I’m deeply convinced God is involved in every life. Our spiritual basis is key to our understanding life. Love without the spiritual side is not love. The Creator constantly participates in our daily life granting us the energy of existence. The goal of man’s existence is not happiness but spiritual growth. The artist who believes in God, who has this awareness that there exists some superior force, such a person behaves himself naturally like God’s apprentice.”