eve-things

The eve of leaving on the Road is filled with contradictions.

Contradictory feelings: feeling "out of school" as I took my leave for a month from Good Sam Hospital. Such a rich work and ministry there, such fine colleagues and admirable co-workers, a pang deep beneath my heart as I said good-byes for a solid month. And yet a near-skip in my step as I walked out the front door, feeling very young again. I do not often feel young at the hospital. At rounds and other places I am surrounded by clever, talented people who are sometimes decades younger than me. I figure I bring the kind, safe uncle into situations, which is useful.

Delighted to be traveling with my youngest daughter, to whom I first mentioned the Camino de Santiago years ago amidst high school turmoil. She remembered and saved her money. Sad and rather guilty not to be traveling with older daughter and with spouse. But, schedules and money and life are all what they are.

Comfortable at the thought of being on the Iberian Peninsula, as I speak Spanish and have long been blessed by Hispanic culture, first and foremost mediated by my Mexican-descended wife. Less comfortable, beneficially so, as we have chosen the Portuguese road--I do not speak Portuguese, and the little Lonely Planet book has convinced me that the languages are and are not familiar one to another at the same time.

As far as pilgrims on the Camino go, the Portuguese Road is the "read less traveled by" compared to the familiar "Via Frances" across Galicia from the Pyrenees, although it is gaining in popularity.

It is something in me, something at once adventurous and individualistic and stubborn and ornery, that gravitates to the lesser-known road. That may be one reason why, instead of asking one of the local pilgrim associations to bestow scallop shells on us and bless us on our way, Helen and I took shells we found on the beach and had put in our garden, cleaned them off, and spent a day at the Trappist Abbey where my spiritual director blessed them in the monastery church after the Midday Office. We will bring that community with us, spiritually speaking, and place their concerns at the feet of Saint James, God willing.

Above all, I welcome the unknown and the unexpected.

You'll meet my daughter Helen in these pages as we go, with her elegantly close-cropped hair and her passion and her questions. I remember being 20, vaguely, but there are few survivors from those days when mail was on paper and Tricky Dick Nixon masks were still popular on Halloween and when Fleetwood Mac roamed the earth. You'll meet the people we meet, I hope, because I hope to pay close attention to the people of Portugal and Spain that we encounter and not simply treat the Camino de Santiago as one long religious theme park. You'll presumably meet me, and you may or may not like whom you meet, but that like the steps along the Road is utterly beyond my control.

I have named the 'blog the Strange Road as I read, perhaps from Paolo Coelho's book "The Pilgrimage" that began my dreaming of the Camino in the late 1990's, that one traditional title for the Camino de Santiago is "el Camino Extrano", the Strange Road. (Spanish readers, forgive the lack of a tilda on the N, but I do not know how to activate Spanish conventions on Google 'blogs). If we take the pilgrim road as pilgrim, we take it on faith amidst anxiety and hope, betting on the God of journeys. It is our life, symbol and metaphor and brief literal enactment of our life, with all of its unpredictability and tragicomedy and irony and sudden, savage beauty. It cannot help but be strange, if we pay attention.

From that thought I go to clean the bathroom, as the fam gathers tonight to grill something as a "despedida", a leave-taking. Then I will lay out the contents of my pack, my rather embarrassingly expensive Osprey pack with many mysterious zippers and pockets. I fear we shall know each other intimately before long, Osprey pack and I. I hope it doesn't mind sweat from a 50-something male body that appreciates Oregon microbrews perhaps a little too much. I'll fret again at what I am taking and what I am not taking, trying to keep the weight to 14 pounds as it was at the last weigh-in. Fretting about a small book or not is a safe neurotic way to not fret about the journey itself and the leave-taking from 2/3 of my beloved Portland family.

Saint James may await in Santiago, but I am asking him to stay here and look after the fam, after my home, after my friends, after the hospital with all its brave staff and those who come seeking healing. If you have a prayer or a hope or a grief that you wish us to take to Santiago Cathedral and lay before the bones of the Apostle, feel free to use "comments" or, for confidentiality's sake, text or FB Message me. Apologies to those who may find this a quaint and somewhat pretentious invitation, but this whole business is bringing out the latent medieval romantic in me big time. And besides, we may undertake pilgrimage for ourselves, but I have learned that in the end we have not gone for ourselves alone. The Strange Road is thronged with the seen and the unseen, and among those latter are those who cannot physically make the journey but whose cries and prayers, hopes and dreams, make the journey to the shrine and beyond.

Glad there's extra space in my Osprey.