Cosmos Instead of Churchiness
Sunday, February 14, 2016

Once you are in an authority position in any institution, your job is to preserve that institution, and your freedom to live and speak the full truth becomes limited. Francis taught us to live on the edge of the church, rather than managing the institution. We were not intended to be parish priests. Francis himself refused priesthood, and most of the original friars were laymen rather than clerics. This position offered the Franciscans structural freedom. We were to always occupy the position of “minority” in this world. (The M in OFM stands for minorum, Ordo Fratrum Minorum.) Francis wanted us to live a life on the edge of the inside–not at the center or at the top, but not outside throwing rocks, either. This unique position offers structural freedom and hopefully spiritual freedom too.

The early Franciscans said the first Bible was not the written Bible, but creation itself, the cosmos. “Ever since the creation of the world, God’s eternal power and divinity–however invisible–have become visible for the mind to see in all the things that God has made” (Romans 1:20). This is surely true; but you have to sit still in it for a while, observe it, and love it without trying to rearrange it by thinking you can fully understand it. This combination of observation along with love–not with resistance, judgment, analysis, or labeling–just observation with love and reverence, is probably the best definition of contemplation I can give. You simply participate in what one Carmelite described as a long loving look at the real.

For Francis, nature itself was a mirror for the soul, for self, and for God. Clare uses the word mirror more than any other metaphor for what is happening between God and soul. The job of church and theology is to help us look in the mirror that is already present. All this “mirroring” eventually effects a complete change in consciousness. Thomas of Celano, Francis’ first biographer, writes that Francis would “rejoice in all the works of the Lord and saw behind them things pleasant to behold–their life giving reason and cause. In beautiful things he saw Beauty Itself, and all things were to him good.” [1] This mirroring flows naturally back and forth from the natural world to the soul. All things find themselves in and through one another. Once that flow begins, it never stops. You’re home, you’re healed, you’re saved–already in this world.

That’s the kind of salvation that so many of us perhaps expected, but only in the next world–and only for a few it seems–if we follow our own criteria. Meanwhile, we live unhappily and with a sense of scarcity in this world, hoping for some victory later. I believe the victory is now, or it isn’t much of a victory; if you don’t have it now, you won’t know how to live it later, or to even desire it.

Either this world is the very “Body of God” or we have little evidence of God at all. “Transactional” theories of a later salvation–instead of transformation now–have come to mean less and less to most people. Yet those whose livelihood depends on this theory continue to keep many sincere seekers codependent on such a message and even their precise formulation of it. Such codependency only works among people who do not know how to pray and see for themselves. Salvation is not something you arbitrarily believe in. You only believe in it because you first of all see it. Francis, a living contemplative, walked the roads of Italy in the 13th century shouting, “The whole world is our cloister!” By narrowing the scope of salvation to words, theories, and select groups, we have led many people not to pay any attention to the miracles that are all around them all the time here and now.

Richard Rohr

This is for you if you are interested in coming to walk or if you want to just know what is going on at Phil’s Camino. We have been going strong here lately, come rain or come shine, largely because of my avid hiking companion Roan. But please come and be here with me and other pilgrims. This time of year wear rubber boots and maybe a rain jacket.

On our walk across Spain we are at the town of Castanares which is about 10k out of Burgos. I remember walking this stretch with Gracie. This was a hard area of trashy industry and poverty. But you can see the Catedral in the distance.

Walking Schedule for Phil’s Camino:
Monday 0900-1000
Tuesday 1530-1630
Thursday 0900-1000
Sunday 1530-1630

Hope to see you, Felipe.

That’s the quote of the week in my neighborhood. One of my Bible Guys rolled in with that. I think that it means that there is no such thing as “I love you but…”.

And Valentines Day mañana. We kind of know what that means. But I’m wondering how this got started. Was there a St Valentine? Let me do a little quick research.

Here is a little bit from Wikipedia and there is more if you are interested:
“Several martyrdom stories associated with the various Valentines that were connected to February 14 were added to later martyrologies,[2] including a popular hagiographical account of Saint Valentine of Rome which indicated he was imprisoned for performing weddings for soldiers who were forbidden to marry and for ministering to Christians, who were persecuted under the Roman Empire.[3] According to legend, during his imprisonment, Saint Valentine healed the daughter of his jailer, Asterius,[4] and before his execution, he wrote her a letter signed “Your Valentine” as a farewell.[5]”

Sounds like a Shakespeare play to me. Hollywood could probably do something with that also. But there was a person or maybe more that morphed into one that is more or less a legend now. Somehow that is important to me, that there was a person involved.

OK, off to my Saturday. Raining a Feburary rain outside. I need to put some hours in on my paperwork. The best to you there, love, Felipe.

I need to correct myself on some the facts of yesterday. Jesus did prepare a meal of fish on an open fire for a handful of the Apostles who were out fishing on the Sea of Galilee. That is in John 1-14. I should have remembered that as I was on a committee that commissioned that scene to be painted. My memory is shot full of holes. Luckily, I have the painting nearby to remind me.

Here is part of a group of inspirational stories sent in to me by Ellen: “Today, I was traveling in Kenya and I met a refugee from Zimbabwe. He said he hadn’t eaten anything in over 3 days and looked extremely skinny and unhealthy. Then my friend offered him the rest of the sandwich he was eating.
The first thing the man said was, “We can share it.” Yea.

So, let’s see what else is new? Oh yes, a gorgeous poster came out for Phil’s Camino documentary. I will try and get that for tomorrow’s blogpost. Apparently, some of the film festivals have completions for film posters so we got one together. You are going to like it.

Well, I think that I will let you go for now. This will give you more time to make St Valentine Day’s preparations, right? Don’t blow this one. Love you, Felipe.

If ever we have a Padre Tomas Caminoheads Cookbook, cheesy grits are going to be in there. This is a Premire Father Tom breakfast item and wish he would get back here to run some quality control on us and to make sure we are up to snuff. Also served over easy eggs and fruit salad this morning to complete our construction worker’s breakfast.

Funny there in the previous sentence is the word served as in “served over easy eggs…”. That has never occured to me before that use of the word. Christ calls us to serve, to be a servant. He demonstrates this to me most fully when he washes the feet of the disciples. I don’t recall anywhere in the Bible where He cooks and serves food although the serving of the bread and wine at the first Eucharist was a serving for sure. Hmmm.

I came back from Spain a year and a half ago and was totally inspired to cook and to “serve”, to serve tapas and wine and good simple foods for my fellow pilgrims here just as I had been served there along the Camino. All along the trail so many folks kept up that tradition that you couldn’t help but catch it.

So now, just a reminder that Valentine’s Day is coming up on Sunday. An opportunity to serve, to give something to those around us, wherever we find ourselves. We aren’t in a coma or a prison camp, must be something we can rig up.

OK, off to Our Jennifer’s to make some progress on the bathroom remodel. She has company coming in from out of town and I will probably get a few days off from that to work on stuff around the ranch. Rainy days I will be finishing up my books for taxes and dry days getting firewood in for next winter. Yup, that’s what February means around here.

The best to you friends wherever you are today. Servant love, Felipe.

Good morning! Annie, our intrepid producer (IP) of “Phil’s Camino” documentary announced yesterday that our film was accepted at the prestigious South by Soutwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas. This is great news for it was a biggie on her list of venues to show the film and to get it out for folks to see. So that is where the Grand Premire of “the little film that can” will be this spring. A big hurrah!

I know about nothing about this process of promoting a film but we are doing it and I am learning. Annie did a lot of work on the promotion of the Camino documentary “Walking the Camino” with Lydia B. Smith over the last few years. And she is game to ramrod this effort for my documentary. So, there are film festivals all over the country and we will be there at various ones. We will put up news of those or links to news as we go along.

Festivals that we talked about over the phone last evening were Seattle WA, Dubuque IA, John Hopkins in Maryland, Nashville TN. So in the coming months check with your local outfit and see if they are showing it this spring or summer. This whole thing has just started rolling so who knows what will happen. Hopefully it will make a big splash and do the basic job that it is supposed to do.

So Felipe, what is the basic idea of the film and what is the job that it is supposed to accomplish? Right, OK, let’s tackle that while the coffee is still hot. Maybe it would be good to look at the genesis of the whole thing. The first that I can remember there was a conversation between myself and Dr Zucker, my rehab doc at Swedish Cancer Center, and one of us said, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we could document this.” This being the upcoming trip to Spain to walk the Camino de Santiago which was had just opened up as a reality for us. It just seemed like a innocent thing to say, “Wouldn’t it be cool…”.

But that started the whole show right there. So the basic idea will have to be connected to that conversation and that sentiment. OK, it is the story of a cancer patient who used the opportunity of his disease to springboard into the understanding of life and love. Wow, I just came up with that! This is almost the kind of stuff that someone else should write about.

So what if we run with that for the moment, can we come up with an answer to the second question of what is the job the film is supposed to accomplish. In my view it should inspire, encourage and motivate a patient (hate that word) to get outside of his or her comfort zone and try things that maybe they were told they couldn’t do or shouldn’t even attempt. Maybe instead of walking across Spain they need to walk ten miles, or one mile or ten feet. And it is not about walking either, it is about reaching out in whatever manner. It’s a lot about getting outside the disease even though OK you still have the disease, I get that, I’m trying to live that.

Thanks for following me here. I don’t know if we got as concise as we should but we got a start on answering those questions. And additionally perhaps we can set up some system to better inform you about movie news. I would love to talk Annie into a short once a week post here to give us the latest and greatest. Well, time marches on and things unfold in the place and time that they should, thank you St James. And this seems like a most exciting spring coming up.

Love, Felipe.

OK, we are off and running here on February 9th. Slowly crawling our way toward spring, yes we are. We have sprouty things sprouting, sunsety things sunseting and migrating birds on their way overhead. Of course there will be some setbacks but we are generally headed in that direction. That’s my take on February 9th. Hurrah!

Oop, Roan up and ready for something. He is restless like the coming Spring. Nice really, hopeful, expectant he is, we are.

Annie came in with a comment yesterday on the grandmother theme. I had posted about the hash my grandmother used to create. This sparked Annie to talk about the multi layer cake that her’s made. I’m going to dub it the Endless Layer Cake, the ELC. An outward sign of love, the ELC.

Somewhere along the line of Annie and my friendship she gave me a rosary that belonged to one of her grandmothers. Maybe the ELC granny, but it doesn’t matter. It has wooden beads and is from Jerusalem. Perhaps a souvenir from a friend returning from pilgrimage. Anyway I like that it has history, either real or imagined. It lives out on top of the wooden post that marks the beginning and end of Phil’s Camino. When I feel the need to say the rosary along a lap, it is there for me.

Well, there are many ways to pray, the rosary being only one. On this February 9th I am asking you for a prayer of some sort for cancer walkers that are dealing with chemotherapy. It’s the two headed monster, who will it attack today? It can be hell on the cancer but hell on the host simultaneously. Pray for us who are struggling with this journey. Thank you, this means so much in the trenches.

Well, I am off to my day. It is froggy foggy here. If the air could be any wetter we would be doing the backstroke. Have a good February 9th, love, Felipe.

I was up early this morning and got the kitchen cleaned up from the Super Bowl fun of yesterday. Made breakfast for Wiley and myself. I had a leftover venison chop and four boiled potatoes looking at me from the frig. If that isn’t crying “Hash!” I don’t know what is. I found a small onion, an egg and some parsley to complete my vision.

Well, not my vision but my Grandma’s. This was my maternal grandmother who came to the States in 1920 with my ten year old mother and two of my aunts as youngsters. She was shot at by the encroaching Communists and she said, time to go. She never bothered to learn English, nor I Polish but that didn’t stop us from communicating about the important things in life like food and Chinese checkers. When I was a kid she would come and stay with us for weeks every summer. And she was some cook and even leftovers were a dream. She always fed me this great hash for lunch everyday that was a revision of the previous evening’s meal.

So, now years later I still try and recreate her hash creations. And this morning I tried again and Wiley was impressed although it was just a rough facsimile to me. The hallmark of her hash was that it was always chopped so fine and this was way before food processors, at least in my neighborhood. I have tried and tried and never have the patience or the love to achieve this quality. And this realization that comes to me years later of my Grandmther’s love is what I am left with.

I have to switch over to talk about Terry Hershey’s blog where he mentioned me again. I am honored to say the least. Thank you Terry. You will have to read him at “Sabbath Moments” blogsite. Better yet subscribe and it comes to you every Monday morning. He has a great post today and he quoted Julian of Norwich who is one of the heaviest in my book. She was an anchoress, which was a woman that would live at the church and spend her days counciling and praying for others. This is 11th, 13th century, something in there.

The quote is a description of her meeting with God who is holding the whole universe in his hand and it is the size of a hazelnut. This is totally opposite from the “Carl Sagan vision”, which we are familiar with, where there is nothing outside of the universe. So read this quote below (I added a little) and marvel as I do. Go Julian!

“God showed me a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, in a palm of my hand, and it was a round as a ball. I looked at it with my minds’ eye and I thought, “What can this be?” And answer came, “It is all that is made.” (This is all the light years, stars, galaxies, nebula, black holes, sinkholes, potholes, bad roads, good roads, freeways, Super Bowls, hotels, bars, spas, neon lights, casinos, cashews, contenders, califlower, Californians, New Yorkers, jokers, jockeys, jobless, homeless, less less, billionaires, quadriplegics, little blue flowers, the wind, the snow, the hearth, the eggs and the sperm, the time and the space and the love in my Grandma hash.) I marveled that it could last, for I thought it might have crumbled to nothing, it was so small. And the answer came into my mind, “It lasts and ever shall because God loves it.” And all things have their being through the love of God.
In these little things I saw three truths;
The first is that God made it.
The second is that God loves it.
The third is that God looks after it.”

Julian of Norwich

OK, I am way over my 500 words that I like to keep these posts under. Yes, and have a walk in a moment. Thanks for being here, love, Felipe.

Hey we’re moving along this week with Roan here helping out. This morning we got to San Juan de Ortega, 262 kilometers out, 297 laps. Tomorrow morning, God willing, we will be in Ages. We are about 66 kilometers out of Burgos.

So, come over and help out, keep me going. Things are drying up along the trail but rubber boots are in fashion.

Walking schedule:

Monday 0900-1000
Tuesday 1530-1630
Thursday 0900-1000
Sunday 1530-1630

Been dog sitting Roan for two weeks now. To tell you the truth he is wearing me out. In my mind I am looking forward to Cynthia being back at the end of the week to take over. But you know I will probably miss him then.

Super Bowl later today and it will be fun because we don’t have anyone close to our hearts in it. And we here in Seattle are still feeling beat up from last year so it will be good to just watch without high drama. I think it kind of boils down to the new hot shots in Cam Newton and the North Carolina Panthers vs the old school Peyton Manning leading the Denver Broncos. So, we are making the traditional hot Buffalo chicken wings and a few folks are coming over maybe.

But back to Roan, who by the way is pleasantly napping after two laps around the Camino. This seems to be the deal, two speeds or modes, sleeping and walking. The inbetween stuff gets confusing for him and for me. It would be nice if he had a tapa mode, something a little loungey.

But it has been really nice having his company because all my regular Camino walkers seem to have figured out how to scam a trip to somewhere warm and sunny. It has been pretty much Roan and I on the trail. So, I have time to observe him as he walks in front of me. He seems to be playing the role of flusher, one who gets the birds up in the air, being out ahead. Some dogs are more retrievers and hang around your feet waiting for the sound of the gun to get to work.

But Roan is always looking ahead and maybe planning ahead. Coming up to a new vista on the trail he will spend some time scoping it out and not just barge into it. Is he worried about the possibility of a Saber-toothed Tiger or just trying to get a jump on a possible flock of cheeseburgers? Who knows but fun to contemplate.

I know Cynthia will have fun reading this down in Mexico. And Dana y Catherine as well in Hawaii. Here is a seaweed heart from them to us here at Caminoheads:

Well off to the rest of Sunday. Love you whatever team you are on, Felipe.