We are walking through Navarrete on Easter Monday the moment Pope Francis dies. The bells of the massive church are ringing, non-stop. Locals are in a kind of reverential shock.
“El papa está muerto,” we keep hearing.
It is the first time in 1,300 years a pope has died on Easter Monday.
I walk into la Iglesia Santa Maria de la Asunción. I remove my hat. I take a pew. The altar is made of more gold than I have ever seen. There are older women in the pew beside me, praying. They are weeping. “Santa Maria…” they moan.
Soon, it is time to walk again. We walk the Camino beneath a white-hot Spanish sun, and many on the trail are speaking of the pope’s life.
“He was the voice of the poor,” one Argentinian man says. “He was a humble servant,” says a woman from Mexico.
An Irish woman tells me it was the pope’s words who first convinced her to walk the Camino.
She says, “The pope once said that you can learn all things about God, just by walking. Nothing else is needed.”
And as these people speak, we realize we are all indeed walking. And it seems a holy endeavor suddenly. Moving one’s feet.
I am getting the sense that we were all designed for this very act. Walking.
In my life, I’ve never actually known what I was made for. As a boy I thought I was designed to be a starting pitcher. When I got older, I believed fervently that I was supposed to become a photographer for Sports Illustrated’s annual May issue.
As I aged, I drank the Kool-Aid of modern society and believed I was created for the purpose of finding a decent job. Other times, I believed I was uniquely and wonderfully designed to go forth and find adequate health insurance.
But it’s not true. None of it is true. Your designation on earth is much simpler.
Somehow, you feel all this, out here, walking to Santiago. As you walk, you look down at your shoes. Your fellow humans have been walking this same path since before 800 AD.
You weren’t given two feet and two intricate, sophisticatedly engineered, complexly muscled legs, and a highly synchronous nervous system, simply to pay bills, cut the grass, and locate a strong WiFi signal.
While walking, you begin to sense another part of your being. A body part you hardly ever “feel.” Your soul.
Sure, you’ve always known your soul is there. But to be aware of your own soul is a lot like trying to “be aware” of your own spleen. Most times, you cannot feel it.
But the soul is definitely there. Lying deep beneath your blood vessels, somewhere under your breath. Often, your brain is merely too loud to hear the soul speak. The soul’s tiny voice is often overpowered by logic, reason, and your profound need for rationality.
But as we walk the Camino, on our way to pay respects to the bones of history’s first martyred Apostle; you hear this piece of your being speaking to you.
As you ascend arrestingly green hillsides, traversing mountainous vineyards, passing 2,000-year-old villages, your soul says strange things to itself. Things you wouldn’t really expect.
Things like: “Nice to finally be talking with you again.” And “Remember when you were a kid, and we used to be so close?” And: “Remember that time I helped you through a very hard period of life?”
Wait, you’re immediately thinking to yourself, is this MY soul speaking? Maybe you’re wrong. Maybe it’s not the soul at all. Maybe the soul is simply an internal telephone. Perhaps you’re actually having a conversation with the Operator Himself.
Perhaps, embedded within every man, woman, and child, is a means of knowing the Great Engineer Himself. Maybe He has always been with you, always talking to you.
Maybe He always WILL be with you, even until the end of the age, just like you always knew.
Moreover, maybe He is with every human He created. Maybe all the dogmatic persons and angry denominations of man who claim otherwise are profoundly and exquisitely full of sheep excrement.
“Either way,” says the Irish woman. “Life’s questions are not for you and me to figure out.”
Maybe Pope Francis was right. Maybe all we are required to do on this trail, as in life, is keep walking.
