What Do Pilgrims Carry?

What Do Pilgrims Carry? Image courtesy of Brad Montague..

Years ago, from underneath the great oak tree in the plaza of the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Fátima, I watched in horror and fascination as a tiny old woman dressed in traditional religious black crossed the sprawling plaza. On her knees. A young male relative stood at her side with his hand on her shoulder as she moved slowly, agonizingly, hundreds of yards across the open plaza toward the steps of the Basilica of Our Lady of the Rosary. She carried nothing, or perhaps she carried her entire life.

I agonized about what to carry in my backpack on my first Camino. Or rather I didn’t agonize enough and chose to carry everything. I carried so much that I stopped at the post office three times on my way across Spain to fill boxes I mailed back home. But what I carried and what I sent back were only a metaphor for what I had been carrying for far too long: parenting guilt, personal shame, relationship failure, unrealized dreams, loss and grief, outmoded beliefs, toxic friendships, bad habits.

A Camino tradition is to carry a stone from home to lay at the foot of the Iron Cross (cruz de ferro). I carried that Seattle stone all the way across Spain because I couldn’t find it in my overstuffed backpack when I reached the cross. I found it in our Finesterre hostel room at the end of our walk. Not buried deep in the corner of my pack but plain as day, ready to meet the sea; it fell out of my backpack and rolled across the floor, the symbol of every burden I’d carried with me that summer.

We carry so much through our lives that a backpack and its contents seem the least of it. Babes in arms, groceries, moving boxes, suitcases, school books, musical instruments, sports equipment, prized possessions. Partnerships, aging or ill parents, children, friendships, failed relationships, abuse, trauma, pain of all kinds, grief, loss. A pilgrim goes on Camino carrying intention and through the process of walking leaves burdens we didn’t know we had at the side of the path.

By my second walk, I understood that my backpack was only part of what I was carrying.

I could choose to carry intentions as well as burdens, and for my second Camino I carried a practice. Thankfully unburdened of so many of my previous Camino expectations, pretensions, and emotional attachments; I hoped for more intention on my second walk, less an unburdening and more a tuning, a transformation, a hope. The practice never left my backpack, however, something I wrote about in Finding a Practice on the Camino. I carried the tools of an unused painting practice, like a penitent carries a cross.

I have heard of a Camino pilgrim who lost a relative to drug-related violence and certainly carried that loss with her the entire journey. It is the rare pilgrim who carries nothing at all, but I’ve seen those, too, and I’ve wondered if their souls were as free as their backs, although they might have been using a backpack service to carry their backpacks and would meet their burden in the next village.

It could be my German friend was right. She observed that the Italian girl we met walking alone for her third Camino could not yet have learned the lessons of the Camino and so was impelled to walk it again and again. I have trouble believing the Camino has only one universal lesson to give. Perhaps the Italian girl’s burdens were so many that the Camino called to her with new lessons about releasing burdens.

I carried the pain of divorce and failure for far too long, the shame and fear of an addicted child, the uncertainty of my parenting choices, and the inability to trust the faith I’d committed to or that the Camino would provide. Of the astounding stories of faith I heard on the Camino, mine is among the least remarkable, in part because I really didn’t trust in either my faith or the Camino. I was determined to manhandle the road the way I had tried to manhandle my life. 

Like life, the road would have none of it. I learned that the only way to the next stop on the path is to put one foot in front of the other. And to rest as often as necessary.

When I met Rosemary on our first Camino, she left the road at Leon while my son Erik and I continued on to Santiago. She came back to Spain the next year to make the walk into Santiago de Compostela on her own, and told me later that she had been consumed the entire way by thoughts about her relationship with her family. As Rose related her transformation to me, the burden of relationships and misunderstandings had lifted along the way until by the time she walked into the plaza in Santiago, she no longer felt their weight. When she learned four years later that she was dying of a brain tumor, she knew the gift of a very light backpack.

I’ll carry new burdens on my next walk. New losses, new grief, unresolved relationships, memories. This time my intention is to walk for Rose, who often had more faith in me than I have in myself. I’ve no doubt I’ll discover some strange hitchhikers in my backpack, but I now know that’s the whole idea.