Walking the Camino

A reflection from ACU Chaplain Fr Michael Buck on the Camino pilgrimage.

At last, our group of 18 ACU colleagues, family and friends today reached Santiago de Compostela, the destination of our seven-day walking pilgrimage along the mediaeval Camino de Santiago, having traversed over 115km of the trail. All but one of the days of our walk were overshadowed by significant rain, so it was probably with more relief than anything else that we walked through the doors of the Cathedral.

Over the past week, as I trudged through the seemingly endless kilometres of mud, my vision framed by the partially effective plastic poncho wrapped around my head and torso like a littered plastic bag stuck on a tree and billowing about in the winds, I fixed my eyes on the ground in front of me and searched desperately for the best place to put my next step. Over the hours of this, I repeated to myself again and again, “Just keep going, every step is a step closer to the end”. Or at least, something like that, there might have been a few extra words in the cold of the moment, as it were. The point is I couldn’t wait to get to the end of the road, but if the Camino is an allegory for our journey through life, that’s quite the surprise. Most of us are in no hurry to reach the end of our life, quite the contrary! So, what’s the difference? Whereas on the Camino, the end of the road meant an end to the suffering of the wet and cold, and the enjoyment and warmth of dinner and a hotel room, when it comes to life and death we tend to think of the here and now as our place of consolation, and the end of the road as the place of suffering and cold solitude.

But, at least for us Christians, this semi-conscious ‘lived’ assumption about the unhappy state of life after death needs to be challenged.

In times past, Catholics were encouraged to meditate regularly on the four last things – death, judgement, heaven and hell – and sadly the most common experience of that era of Christian piety seems to have been to concentrate mostly on hell and the fear of future punishment as a tool to encourage moral obedience in the present. While those days are behind us, my experience of the Camino has moved me to take more seriously the call to meditate on the last things, but this time to focus on heaven, more than anything else. Perhaps if we all spent more time considering the many good things that Scripture and faith promise us about life after death, we would gain a new spring in our step in the present. Perhaps our final destination is not one to be avoided at all costs, but rather something we have to look forward to.