conflict on the Camino

[Donald Schell]

Dear friends,

I'm watching our conflict with frustration at how familiar this flaring of
tempers becomes to anyone who 'walks' for a while on this list.  I am pained
to see people who do contribute here hurting one another verbally.  A
strident call for courtesy won't get us very far.  I hope this doesn't sound
like one.  Various people have suggested that they need to leave the list,
want someone else to leave the list, wouldn't care to see someone else in
the flesh, ever, etc.  What does it have to do with the Camino?  Maybe more
than we know how to deal with.  And maybe our real memories of the Camino
will serve this conversation.

Like many here, I treasure memories of extraordinary experiences on the
Camino.  I am planning to return this June for the third time.  Having
walked with one daughter and my wife before, this time I'll walk with one of
my sons.  Maybe some day I'll also walk on the Camino with my other son or
other daughter.  In meeting self and other, it is a deep experience of human
communion and an individually transforming physical experience in the
step-by-step repetition of thousands and thousands of steps on just that
many radiant, unique, and challenging bits of Spanish earth. But do we
forget that it was and will be a human experience laden with the predictable
dilemmas of humanity?  Should we have expected that it would be otherwise?

The Pilgrim's Guide in the Codex Callixtinus could remind us that the
medieval pilgrims were not always kind to each other.  We have old stories
of thieves preying on the pilgrims and old stories of pilgrims stealing from
each other.  Pilgrims songs, legends, and folklore multiply the treachery,
murder, violence and adultery along with the glory.

And spirituality?  Speculations and traditions that some of us (including me
sometimes) might dismiss as 'New Age' spirituality were part of the the
Middle Age's range of spirituality.  That doesn't make it more appealing to
me, but I am fascinated to see it as much a part of the modern Santiago
pilgrim fellowship as it seems to have been from early times.  It wasn't New
Age then, but sectarian or esoteric, with all various mixes of pre-Christian
Celts, Kabbalah, Priscillianists, Templars and all thrown in.

As a skeptical intellectual and a fairly plain Christian much of this
doesn't attract me much (medieval or contemporary), but I'm very glad that
it's no longer dangerous to be sectarian or esoteric in belief or practice
and occasionally something flashes for me with recognition or epiphany where
I did not expect it.  In the Middle Ages, like today, there were also
substantial measures of superstition and grace, common sense discovery,
miracle and illusion for any sharing a spiritual path or practice.

Just like Medieval pilgrims, we return with stories we will cherish for the
rest of our lives and a desire to share our experience with those, like us,
who have walked.  Part of the experience won't sit still for description but
does reverberate in the presence of those who have walked it.

But all of us also come back with (fewer probably) stories of people who
were angry, rude, short-sighted, self-absorbed, or lacking in compassion.
Maybe some of us can tell stories like that on ourselves.  My daughter and I
had a fierce argument the day we were approaching Santiago.  It didn't fit
(remotely) other of our pictures of what 'ought to have been' for that day.
It was painful and unwelcome and both of us (at the time) thought the other
was in the wrong.  I'm very glad we kept walking together.  Isn't that what
happens in this discussion from time to time too?

What about defining an authentic pilgrimage, or 'who is a true pilgrim,' and
even the judgment that someone walking or bicycling our same path isn't a
'true pilgrim.'  I certainly heard those conversations when I walked.   I
tried (and continue to try) not cultivate them, but they do seem to grow up
along the path like native thorns and nettles.

I suspect that most of us could tell of times we thought we saw judgment or
ego or small-mindedness in others' behavior and later concluded that we were
wrong and had misinterpreted fellow pilgrims, and sometimes when we judged
quite accurately, we later saw that very same fellow pilgrim act in ways
that touched or inspired us.

Doesn't all this also happen in our conversation here?  Does this make any
difference?  Might wondering how a pilgrim conversation is like the
pilgrimage itself help us offer each other a little more patience?

love,
donald