Unbeliever on the Camino

[Elizabeth Boylston-Morris]

I am re-posting a message which appeared on this list about a year ago and
which, I think, directly addresses, in part, the meditational queries and
musing feelingly expressed in this list in the last few days:

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Date    3/3/01 7:17:51 Pacific Standard Time
 From    BlaroliaAOL.COM (Rosina Lila)
To:     GOCAMINOaPETE.URI.EDU

Hi Michael,
For what I saw and the people I met, the overwhelming majority of the
pilgrims in the Camino were walking because of religious reasons, consciously
or unconsciously. Sometimes the devotion was dormant, and it surfaced
somewhere along the way,  I guess that passing all those cruzeiros (the stone
crosses in the crossways) and seeing the messages, flowers and ribbons left
there by other pilgrims awakens surpressed needs for faith or childhood
memories of the spiritual comfort that it provides.
At the Cruz de Fierro there came some young Mexicans carrying a rather large
stone with a message carved on it.  The stone looked quite heavy and the
youngsters told us that they had carried it all the way from Lisbon on foot
after arriving there from Mexico.  When I translated the message on the stone
to a sixtysh English pilgrim tears rolled down his face.  He said that he had
not been in a church since he was a boy, and that for most of his life he had
harbored an acute dislike for institutional religion in general and the
Catholic church in particular; and yet, he said, somewhere halfway in the
Camino he had begun to feel like crying every time he saw a Cross or
religious monument.
I heard many stories like that, particularly in the crowded, (very crowded),
confession line at the Cathedral which even I joined, somewhat to my surprise.
It could be that the physical tiredness of the very long walk, and the
climbs, and the different and general solitude of the effort, make it
possible for some sentiments buried under the business of life and complex
emotions to be given vent.  Or perhaps it is the communion with the thousands
and thousands of pilgrim souls who have left over the centuries so very
vividly religious and so very many monumental indicia of their pilgrimage.
I don't know.  When Carl Sagan died a couple of years ago his wife wrote that
he had never wanted to believe, that he always wanted to know.  For myself, I
am not only content, but fortunate and happy to feel what I feel on the
Camino, and I really don't need to know.
Rosina
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