Where the Weird Things Go

In 2017 I walked the Camino. This year, for the 'Wilderness Expo' I revisited it as my only real experience of the wilderness. On diving into my journal, I relearned what Jesus taught me out there.

Some real names have been changed by the rest is all true.

I was on the flight before I had my ‘what the heck am I doing?’ moment.

I had been carried along by the power of a great true myth. The Camino de Santiago, the Way of Saint James. In particular the quote-unquote ‘real’ or ‘full’ Camino, ‘The French Way’, starting in St. John Pierre de Port in Southern France, stretching the whole of Northern Spain and arriving at the Shrine of Saint James in the deep North West of the peninsula.

My sister had done it with uni friends. My brother had done it as a way of making his History dissertation fun and had returned with stories of near-death experiences involving bulls and cliff edges. Many other friends had gone and come back different. They were part of a club of pilgrims: the Catholic version of an adventurer, the closest thing we could get to being our collective childhood hero, Aragorn son of Arathron. Well, I wanted in to this club.

But in my EasyJet seat, it all fell away. What the heck was I doing? Why was I choosing to spend a month away from everyone I knew, from all my friends and family? To go on a ... big walk? Why? But it was too late now and somewhere inside of myself, I was sure that the answers to these questions would be revealed.

—

The Camino was a unique mix of hyper-social and deeply introspective.

It was one part Freshers Week:  a bunch of strangers from all over the world, thrown together into a totally alien situation. This meant that we were all keen to make friends. Conversations with strangers were never easier. To a person, the Germans and the Australians were the best. The French were usually druggies. The Americans were still Americans and Trump was in his first year. We more liberal European types could have been kinder to them.

And it was one part silent retreat. We walked from around 6 or 7am until 12 or 1pm, ‘the heat of the day’, agreed to be too hot to walk in. Across these six or seven hours, you could get a lot of time to yourself if you wanted it. It became more and more the norm to say to pilgrim friends, ‘Hey, I’m just gonna walk alone for a while’.

So, I prayed a rosary a day, ambled my way through the Gospel of Matthew every other day and prayed and thought about my life more than I ever had. Towards the end, a friend, a party guy from Cologne, said to me, ‘Have you been crying on this? I’ve been crying like every day!’ He had been writing letters home to ex-girlfriends and grandparents, anyone he had ever wronged.

It seemed that whatever you carried out here came quickly under the microscope of intense self-reflection. I was from the youth ministry Church world, so retreats had been training me in this. But yeah, I cried a couple of times too, once from a powerful homesickness I didn’t understand at all.

—

Weird things happened on the Camino and more importantly, so did weird people. I need you to know this. If you’re getting swept up in the myth right now, it’s important for me that you know: the weird people you avoid in real life are making their pilgrimage too and they are going to be a part of yours.

No one warned me of this. I had assumed that to commit to this extreme 780k badassery, you had to be somewhere in the Venn diagram of spiritual, seeking, adventurous or just hyped up on Tolkien and religion. Not so.

In my first week, I walked with a guy who was carrying on his back a suit and shoes for his job interview on the other side. All he did was complain about the weight, all day. Then, he would pause on conquered hills to take a selfie. Total unaware parody.

I walked 10 extra kilometres to get away from this guy. He had stifled me for about three days and being English and ‘nice’, I didn’t know how to tell him I just did not want to walk with him. I had to save my Camino from this weirdo. I powered on.

Where were the cool people? The free spirits? The hippies? The larger-than-life characters I had been promised? In truth, they were around too, but the ratio was way off for my liking and I firmly placed myself in their camp.

—

On Day 11, I met Mark on the 24k walk between Ages and Burgos. I heard about Mark before I met him - this would happen as pilgrims overlapped back and forwards like shoals of fish on the same current, rhythmically catching each other up and falling behind. A handful of people had asked me if I had met ‘the other British guy’ and I was excited to meet my first compatriot.

Mark taught English as a foreign language in Italy, where he had lived for decades with his family. The Brexit vote was still very fresh and he had skin in the game. He was passionately Remain and so of course our first conversation was dominated by this and the strong anti-Trump sentiments that we both shared.

I started to wonder if all Mark could talk about was Brexit and Trump. It seemed impossible to learn why he was out here doing this or whether he had anything reflective going on.

He talked a lot. So much so that, one day, as he approached where I was recuperating with a friend, I decided to run a social experiment. I wondered, ‘if I don’t speak at all, will Mark bring me into this conversation?’ A good fifteen minutes later he headed on, none the wiser as to how I was.

He also confidently misnamed. On Day 14, my journal recounts, ‘Weird thing. Yesterday, Mark called me Tony ... really strange’. I had to politely correct a lot of other pilgrims because of this.

And, he got an Australian pal of mine booted from a hostel. Mark and a chef pilgrim friend had set about preparing a feast for everybody in ‘the spirit of the Camino’. The cooking went long and by the time it was done the owners were asking them to go to bed. They refused, red wine in hand. The police were called. My Aussie friend was kicked out. Mark said they would have to ‘come and get me’. I watched from my bunk as he played dead in his bed, the torches of four Spanish policemen scanning across the dorm looking for him. They decided to let sleeping dogs lie. My friend slept in an alley.

—

By Day 15, roughly the halfway point, I arrived at Carrión De Los Condes, a town at the edge of a long stretch of desert known as ‘The Meseta’, Spanish for plateau. There was 16k of desert between Carrión and the next town of Sahagún - by far the greatest distance between towns on the Camino. This meant no water or shelter for 16k, so everyone stayed in Carrión to brave the desert stretch in the morning.

By this point, I had decided that Mark was definitely too weird for me. My prayer had become increasingly, ‘God, what do you want me to do with these weird people that you keep sending my way?’ Was I supposed to prioritise my Camino and my peace by just bombing away from them every time? Was I supposed to get them to engage in a more meaningful conversation about why they were here? Or was I supposed to just pray for them?

I was hoping for the former as I wandered to a square to get a coffee and pick up where I had left off with the Gospel of Matthew. Anticipating that Jesus would tell me to preserve my inner peace, I opened the Bible. Instead, he slapped me in the face with Matthew 7:1-5.

‘Do not judge

Do not judge, and you will not be judged, because the judgements you give are the judgements you will get, and the amount you measure out is the amount you will be given. Why do you observe the splinter in your brother’s eye and never notice the plank in your own? How dare you say to your brother, “Let me take the splinter out of your eye”, when all the time there is a plank in your own? Hypocrite! Take the plank out of your own eye first, and then you will see clearly enough to take the splinter out of your brother’s eye.’

So, pretty clear. My journal enthuses, ‘INCREDIBLE STUFF ... Best scripture experience ever. Heard Jesus. ... this is like Jesus answering the questions of my day ... ‘Do not judge.’ Laughed out loud in square. Sounded like him. So blunt to me. ‘Why do you observe the splinter in your brothers’ eye?’ Sounded like, ‘Why do you do this?’ Real joy in reading. Old truths. Mindset still ‘the cool’. An area to fix.’

—

As I poured over my Camino journal to write this, I was struck by a note that I had left next to my entry about Jesus on judgment. It’s just a name: Dan Garvey. I was surprised to find this name there but it makes sense to me and I think it makes sense to share with you. Dan was in my seminars at uni. We were alike in a lot of ways, lanky guys with big hair who had ended up on an English Literature and Creative Writing course at Birmingham.

In our early weeks, I had assessed that some of the students in my seminar group were weird and that I would rather stand around awkwardly than chat to them before our seminars. I’ll never forget the day I watched Dan bound right up to them and get chatting. Fresh out of high school, I was still seeing people through the binary of ‘cool’ or ‘weird’. To my mind, Dan was definitely ‘cool’ but he was also kind by instinct and just he didn’t seem to see the world in these terms. Of course, neither would Jesus. I remembered thinking that, in this way, Dan was far more Christian than I was. He remains a witness of kindness to me.

The last time I saw Dan was when he mercifully let me squeeze in next to him when I was late for our lecture. A few weeks later I had a phone call from a friend letting me know that he and his family had been on a small plane that crashed over Somerset. Tragically, they all died. It was all there in a BBC News article. Dan remains a witness of kindness to me and I mention him to honour him and to remember what Jesus said to me that day in the square in Carrión, ‘do not judge.’

—

Day 31, I arrived in Finisterre, the coastal town for pilgrims who want to go beyond Santiago. Here you can watch the sun set into the Atlantic Ocean. The Romans believed that this was the end of the world - finis/finish - terre/earth - get it?

Here, on a rocky outcrop before a lighthouse is a final stone marker - it reads ‘0k’. Nowhere left to go, the walking is done. This was very hard to accept. The walk had come to define everything for a whole month. It was why I was sleeping deeper than ever before and it was why I had ached myself new leg muscles built for crossing 30 kilometres a day. Pilgrim had become our identity. But we must go home again.

Here, we shared in the collective silence of watching the sunset at the end of the world, just like the Romans did.

As I hung out with pilgrim friends in Finisterre, Mark came up again. I journaled: ‘We had joked about Mark a bit. Will wants to be adopted by him. Eoghan had wondered what he’s like with his kids and wife. I had done an impression, [of him saying] ‘our relationship is on schedule’.’

My flight home was from Santiago airport, so I spent my last Camino night there. A perfect end presented itself in the form of a final paella with three of my favourite recurring characters. They parted with a ‘see you tomorrow’, because you always might on The Way.

On the bus, I reflected that somewhere in the Camino was the heart of life, the reason why we are put here. But the experience was just so big that it was challenging to think of exactly what treasure I was carrying back home with me and how I could protect it from the drudgery of the office job that I knew awaited me in the city. I was still trying to figure this out when I crossed the threshold of Santiago airport. I’ll allow the final entry of my Camino journal to tell you what happened next.

‘As soon as I walk into the airport, who do I see sat a table but MARK. My heart laughs. Of course. This is how my Camino ends ... Somehow that feels really right. We chat for a good while. He Facebooks me.

... I am keen to finally ask him some big questions. Now is the time. He mentions Mass, I stop him talking and ask him if he’s Catholic. He says he was raised but never Confirmed so doesn’t feel wholly Catholic.

... At one point, I ask if he’s looking forward to going home, I said I hadn’t expected married people on the Camino. He said in truth, his marriage is in crisis. Straight away I feel bad. Of course. Why had I never cared enough to ask? Had impersonated him to his family last night. Rough. Splinters. Plank in my eye.

He said usually they went as family on a camping holiday in Italy, his youngest is 17 now though. Camino came at just the right time.

Together we went up to an area to sleep. His plane is at 6am. We talked a bit more. Told him of my journey of splinters, an approach I want to take back ... He said he definitely saw his own arrogance, intellectually/socially ... Really good to end here with him. I told him to wake me, say bye before he left. He did. Such a kind of epilogue to the adventure. Real Camino stuff, a final encounter it sent my way.’

— 

I’ve been trying to think about why the habit of making judgements runs so deep for me.

Not having had a traumatic childhood, most of my issues circle adolescence, the period of time when, as early teenagers, we move from the (hopefully) unconditional approval of our parents to the very conditional approval of our peers. At around thirteen, we are frankly all just desperate to fit in. This belies the truths in the plot of ‘Mean Girls’ and many an American high school movie and it is why so many leave their faith at this time. If it’s gonna make you seem weird, you jettison it, often no matter what.

This is no small thing. For me, I was the only kid from my primary school to go to my high school - I knew no one, and for about three years I had no real close friends. Thank God I was friends with my siblings otherwise I would have been really lost. By the time I was thirteen, I was being kind of casually bullied by a friend of a friend, a guy in our circle of not-close-friends who was really into boxing. Maybe about a dozen times I was on the receiving end of this. Often framed as a kind of rough and tumble, it was clear sometimes that he really was just trying to hurt me, to punch as hard as he could. Once, I cried and it was very awkward and we all just agreed that I had hay fever and it never happened again. 

A few years ago, I was about to tell someone that I was bullied and that it had been good for me when I caught myself. Why had I come to believe that being beaten up had been formative for me? Maybe it’s just the same impulse that causes the generation of kids who were hit by their parents to say that it made them the successes that they are today. Perhaps when we’re that young we need to tell ourselves something like that.

These are the stakes of the weird/cool binary when you are a kid. As I have reflected, I have judged myself a little less harshly for how deeply embedded they are in me, as much as I hope to shed them over time. For a long time, I was desperate to not be marked out as a weird one.

Maybe this drew me to ‘cool’ Christianity. I needed to see that Christians existed who were not just not weird but actively cool. Did you play the electric guitar in a worship band? Sick, I wanted to be your friend. For a long time, I loved the worship of megachurches and dreamed of being a worship leader. As a Catholic, this was just never really going to be possible and maybe that’s a good thing. I don’t mean to write off the ‘cool’ churches, often they are just trying to reach people with the gospel and that’s admirable. I just know that for me, I was partly drawn to them because of this insecurity.

But isn’t Christianity just unavoidably weird too? Historian and author of ‘Dominion’ Tom Holland has been leading the charge to let Christianity be weird again, to lean into the miraculous side of Jesus. I think he’s on to something. 

Over time, I ultimately realised that most of the people I thought were cool weren’t trying to be, they were just being themselves and that that was really what to aim for. Dan was this.

— 

I still haven’t figured this out yet. I was at an event recently and I caught myself being colder than normal to a guy just because he looked like a stereotypical nerd and was peddling a kind of Catholicism that is a bit too weird for me. I know that I still carry this weird/cool binary and that it needs healing. I’m getting better at catching myself but I also need a Jesus who can say, ‘do not judge’ to me as bluntly and loudly as I need to hear it.

But he is teaching me something deeper still. For a while, I was confused by his carpenters’ language of planks and splinters. Is he saying that other people have smaller problems than me? I don’t think so. I think he’s saying that an issue I can spot in someone else is just the very tip of their iceberg, that I can’t see the rest of their life or why they are as they are. What I can see is my own plank, if I choose to turn my attention to it: to my shadow, the unexplored blind spot, the things I don’t want to look at.

Seven years after sitting in that airport with Mark, I have been trying to see my own plank more often and chip away at it. I’m aiming at the fullness of life that the Camino opened my eyes to. I have drastically limited my digital life, I am praying more than I used to, I am accompanying others and being accompanied and I have been facing up to an addiction. But there’s always more.

I now find myself training as a counsellor and am being immersed in self-reflection. I am being taught that to help others, I am going to have to figure my own stuff out too. There’s a lot of talk of empathy, self-awareness, congruence - I love all of it. But I also think that it’s all there in the carpenter’s language too. It’s all planks and splinters. I hope that as I chip away in my hidden corners, one day I will have the privilege of being entrusted with helping someone else with their splinters.

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