(photo P Volker)
Here is the last one:
“Blessed are you pilgrim if you discover that, the Camino holds a lot of silence; and the silence of prayer; and the prayer of meeting with God who is waiting for you.”
OK, here we are at the tail end of February and we are at the tail end of the Pilgrim Beatitudes. Everything working out so nicely. That very seldom happens!
And here we are with the Camino holding “a lot of silence”. It is like we are moving through deep space. All of a sudden there is openness, space, opportunity for us. We have to know how to deal with it though as that could be a frightening thing. But somehow we dealt with that.
Then there is “the silence of prayer”. That one was easy to do and hard to understand. So much prayer in our lives seems to be institutional prayer or modeled after it. A prayer leader strives to sort of conjure up God from afar with a lot of pleading. But I think we learn on the Camino that he can very close by and indeed inside us already. And even if we are out of breath praying can easily happen. And I believe that this is what they are referring to here.
And then “meeting with God”. I really thought that He was very close to me then. Then when I was so tired and disheveled. That is what being on the mountain top looks like.
OK, alperfect. The other day I did Google “Pilgrim Beatitudes” and I did get some info of folks who had them and were writing about it. I still have to explore that. So that is coming up.
thanks as always loves, Felipé.
Hi boss,
Before going to the Camino in 2014, I was already following some blogs, and came across with one of Andy, an anglican priest who is also a life long pilgrim. Andy had written a wonderful post entitled “when the walking becomes the prayer”, and I remember having returned to that thought quite a few times when walking. I think it is part of the virus too, what Catherine mentioned yesterday, and you today, this closeness, nearness, sense of becoming intimate, that happens more often than not when we go silent… (at the end of the day, God already knows what we need more than us, for a change!!!!)
This is a piece of what Andy wrote, but below is the whole post… VERY WORTH reading it!
“What I gradually discovered was that the walking became the praying. Alan Ecclestone describes the pilgrimages of Charles Peguy to Chartres: A pilgrimage gets to the holy place at last but what gives it its part in prayer is the slamming down of ones feet to complete the journey while praying the while for all its features[ii]. In putting one foot in front of another, in the tiredness, in the blisters, in the being at one with myself, the landscape and God, in the mind quietening, in all this, walking, pilgrimage itself, became prayer.”
https://pilgrimpace.wordpress.com/2011/02/28/the-walking-becomes-the-praying-2/
Love LOVE you,
Cris