expectations

[Maura Santangelo]

Dear Pieter,

I have tried sending this earlier but it was rejected by the list serv
for containing macros....perhaps I should leave it there in the
undefined internet zone, but you hooked me with your comment so here it
goes again.


I am not sure that I believe any longer in the adage that the more
suffering the more spiritual merit of a pilgrimage, the more obstacles
you overcome the more dignity your suffering the more bad karma you
expiate.  Though I will admit that it is a pretty general
trans-cultural belief.  When walking on the camino through the
eucalyptus forest, so rather late on the walk, I did experience a sense
of grace which i have never felt before.  By this point of my walk, I
felt that every step was torture, and it seemed rather pointless.  So I
made an offering of it to all the people in the world who have been
tortured, or forced to march to their death, from the Jews in nazi
Europe to the Cambodians under Pol Pot, to the native Americans in
their Journey of tears out of their homes and into reservations, to all
the people suffering in the current conflicts.

As I go on I also realize that all this is unnecessary that we do not
need to punish ourselves to find God, that indeed we already always are
in a state of grace, that the love of god is always there and all this
is penitential beating of ourselves is not necessary.  It was the first
time in my life that I felt I actually belonged on this planet, walking
on this earth, breathing this air.  This was not an intellectual
realization, more of a heart feeling that all something as seemingly
unattainable as this state of grace is always there if we knew how to
access it.   It made me feel that we were emphasizing all the wrong
things by being so punitive toward ourselves.  Unnecessary suffering is
doing violence against yourself, and you don't learn compassion with
violence any more than you make peace with war.  But this was a later
explanation.
Words fail actually in describing what it felt like.  It was much
better expressed in a poem I shared with this group once before.  It is
by Mary Oliver, a contemporary american poet, it is called Wild Geese:

You do not have to be good.
you do not have to walk on your knees
for hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
you only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
.......
You are right I did have expectations, I expected to be told 'we are
full, walk on or yes you will have a place later'.  What I did not
expect was rudeness.  And yes, it is all grist for the mill.  Perhaps I
would not have had my insight without it.

Maura


On Tuesday, December 9, 2003, at 09:46 AM, pieter pannevis wrote:

> Dear All,
> A pilgrimage is not a conducted tour with hot water and Earl Grey
> If you want that; please do something other than the Camino the
> Santiago
>