It is among the grandest churches in the world. It is one of the greatest achievements of man that took so long to build that architectural periods changed several times throughout its construction.

Even so, when you walk into Santiago de Compostela the first thing you see is not the cathedral. You neither see the gilded grandeur, nor the ornate.

The first things you see are pilgrims.

You see many, many pilgrims. You hear the tick-tick-ticking of their thousands of hiking poles, striking the flagstone streets with each stride.

They come from all over the globe, the pilgrims. And if you’ve spent any time walking the Camino at all, you have already learned to tell which pilgrim is from which country before ever hearing them speak. It’s all in the way they carry themselves.

The Germans are confident and contained, with tight, economical movements, and magnificently stoic. The French are loose-strided, open-eyed, and smiley; they carry box-wine in their backpacks, and their noses are sometimes slightly tilted upward.

The

Italians really do speak with their limbs, and when they tell you a story, they are not ashamed to cry or laugh, sometimes doing both at the same time.

The Dutch are courteous and quiet, often wearing at least one article of orange clothing. The Australians carry their own Vegemite for their toast. The New Zealanders have ninja-like senses of humor.

The South Americans, particularly the Venezuelans, hug everyone, for any occasion, including the onset of Daylight Saving Time.

The South Koreans are calm, polite. They clean up their table for their servers, and walk the Camino faster than U.S. Marines. The Chinese are kind to a fault, and in cafés they insist that others cut in line ahead of them, and place their orders before them.

We made it.

Things I’ve seen in Spain.

Little children, deviceless in public, making blatant eye contact with adults, behaving ten years more mature than their age.

Employees taking breaks in the middle of each day to be with their family, their friends, and to drink a glass of beer, and laugh loudly in sidewalk cafés with loved ones.

Old men taking long walks alone. Hands clasped behind their backs in silent contemplation. Moving their bodies, since they do not own a car. Even in their late 90s, they walk. They walk to the market for groceries. They walk to the bar to see their friends and eat supper. They dress in nice clothes. No tennis shoes in sight. No lounge shorts or T-shirts with phrases printed on the fronts saying “Yer Trailer or Mine?” They wear khakis. Button downs. Sweaters. Flat caps.

Public toilets without folding seats, only surgically cold porcelain bowls, so you have to hover, thereby subjecting every muscle in your body to an incredible test of endurance.

Bathroom light switches located

outside the bathroom wall instead of inside where it would make sense. So, when you enter the bathroom and it’s dark, you are soon searching for a switch by feeling around on the interior walls but can feel no protrusions so you end up saying “Hell with it,” and perform your necessaries in the ink darkness.

Succulent plants as big as small trees.

Teenagers, sitting quietly in cafés, playing newspaper crossword puzzles with a pencil in hand. No phones.

Young men hand-rolling their cigarettes non-ironically.

Giving gifts just because.

Being able to buy a beer—a good beer, not the American porta-john-flavored beer—for less than a buck.

Hanging laundry, flapping in the breeze, white in the sunlight, fragrant with the…

Lugo, Spain, is a mini metropolis compared to the remoteness of the Camino Primitivo. For days we have been hiking in isolated mountains and faraway countrysides. It’s startling to see a city suddenly emerge from the landscape.

We are looking at tall apartment buildings which stand over Lugo, and listening to the noise of traffic. The city is a vibrant oasis, teeming with life, an abundance of history, and iPhone retailers.

The cobblestones lead us into town, winding us past ragged stone walls, dating back to ancient Roman days. This is the only city in the world with such pristinely preserved Roman walls still surrounding the city. When you look at these walls, when you touch them, you get the distinct feeling that your species, your entire race, your culture, everything you know, is only slightly older than Keith Richards.

In other words, we humans are young. Painfully young. It was not that long ago, for example, that we as a race were solving our most

pressing socio-economic issues with big sticks. Consequently, not much has changed among our species, except that our big sticks are now powered by AI software.

The walls of Lugo would’ve been built in 263 A.D. to defend this town against invasion. And they look almost the same as they did back in Roman times, except now there are more underwear ads.

Each June, the town of Lugo puts on a huge festival called Arde Lucus, wherein people dress up in Roman and Celtic costumes. The festival features gladiator-fight reenactments, ancient music, lots of dancing, lots of beer, and the ancient human tradition of waiting in line for porta-johns. Some 500,000 people attend the festival, just to remind themselves of Spain’s Roman heritage.

But today, all we pilgrims know of Lugo is that this city means…

I have learned that everyone walks the Camino for a reason. This is my second Camino, and thus far I have not met anyone who approaches this 1,500-year-old path without a spiritual and emotional objective.

The reasons are not always clear. Sometimes the reasons are even unclear to the person walking. But the reasons are there. They walk so they can find something. Something unnameable.

They don’t know what this something is. They just know that this something is not the same “something” their parents, their family, their culture, or their religion has tried to cram down their gullet.

The young Austrian student, Heinrich. “I walk the Camino because when I leave University, I know that I do not want to do what my father and brothers have been doing in life. Which is work, work, work. And for what? Why do they work? More money? More things? What about God? Where does he fit in? Is he just another thing? Or is he all things?”

The 22-year-young woman from Ukraine. “All my brothers are in the military, and the man I was going to marry died in the war, and my father is dead. It seems my family’s whole life has been about wars and fighting and dying. I need peace. I have come here to seek peace.”

David, a middle-aged man from Colorado. “I sold all my possessions and started volunteering at this albergue because I want to be of service to pilgrims and anyone who travels this road. I know what this road can do. In the US, we are sometimes so focused on the wrong things, like becoming famous or growth and prosperity. Our American culture is very businesslike, always focused on more, more, more. But God is found in less, less, less.”

The 22-year-young woman from…

What is God?

This single question underpins all things on the Camino de Santiago, a trail inhabited by us full-time pilgrims whose lives are contained in backpacks.

We pilgrims think about this question as we walk. We ponder this question even as we are sleeping. Many pilgrims report having vivid dreams while on the Camino.

Sometimes we aren’t even sure what we’re asking when we ask this question. But we all ask it at some point nonetheless.

This morning we awoke in the hamlet of Fonsagrada. Weary pilgrims, from all four corners of the world, cooked breakfasts in a communal kitchen, and I interviewed them. “What is God?” I asked. The answers were all over the map.

What is God?

Is God a king? Is that honestly all he is? Is he a throne-sitter? A deity overlord, authoritarian and master, holding a giant scepter, wearing an ornate crown, like a magistrate holding political office? Why does God seem to need the ostentation of thrones and crowns and titles? Those

are the spoils of man, things man has warred over since ancient times.

Or is God even a he? Is it profane to even ask this? And why? Does he need a singular sex, and if so, why do we care so much about it?

Isn’t God both paternal and maternal? Doesn’t God cradle her children against her bosom the way a mother holds an infant? Hasn’t God held you against herself in your hour of deepest sorrow, when all you could do was cry into the folds of her skirt? Doesn’t God defend the weak the way a mother protects her young?

Or is God human-like at all? Does God have four limbs? A nose? How about kidneys? Toes? Teeth? Does God have…

Rain. It never stops coming. Rain, rain, rain. Sometimes it seems like all it does is rain.

It’s been raining for two days now on the Camino Primitivo. And there is no end in sight. Spanish news channels on television, which are wonderful media organizations whose reporters dress exquisitely, speak rapidly, and replay the same four news stories every six minutes, are predicting rain each day this week.

Walking in the rain is not fun. Especially in the remote mountains of Asturias. Your shoes squish into the mud. You lose your footing. You slip and fall. And even though this hike is supposed to be a spiritual experience, filled with deep meditation and reflection, fraught with subtle evidence of the supernatural, you cuss like a commercial fisherman.

Because even though you’ve always liked rain, even though you know rain is necessary for life to exist on planet Earth, even though you are a big fan of all water in general, when it’s raining on you personally, rain sucks.

The iron-gray sky looks woeful and despondent. The clouds seem angry. The dome of clouds appears to hover only a few feet above the treetops, like the stone ceiling of a gulag prison cell.

You are a sun-aholic. You are never fully alive until you are sitting in the sun. You crave the sun. You even bought an imitation sunlamp on Amazon once during a stretch of gray weather, because many reviewers claimed that this lamp would make you experience bouts of random joy during monsoon season.

The lamp’s advertisement images showed happy people hugging and wearing sunglasses and showing off perfect abs in the midday sunlight, while doing things like playing ping-pong or pickleball.

So, you bought one of these lamps and you dutifully sat beneath it for one hour per day…