Thursday is the National Day of Prayer and and noontime is our local service.  Sometime in the hour I have my twenty minute speech.  I am leaning into this one and my thoughts are concentrating on this event.  I have a plan, just need to shine it up a little.   So, yea, come on down if you are local.  Oh, at the Vashon Theater is where we will be.

Part of my strategy was to pick ten Caminoheads and get their thoughts on the concept of unity.  I did that and that is forming the basis to my talk with me amplifying each.  I think about it being ten two minute talks which my brain can handle.  Anyway, Padre Tomas was the very first to answer my request and he said something short and sweet and appeared at first sight to be off topic.  But the more I thought about his words the more I come to realize that it may be the key to the whole situation.  Gracias Padre Tomas.

His words were really about hope and gratitude.  If we can clear our mental landscape of everything but these two things we can begin to formulate a beginning point to think about unity.  That is where I am at this moment.

We have a walk this afternoon on Phil’s Camino.  We will try and step with hope and gratitude to get with this unity thing.  Thanks for checking in, with you always, love, Felipe.

Two of my best buddies were named after this saint and her feast day is today:

These two buddies are Catalina from Berkeley, our staff art historian and our neighborhood Catherine who is my beloved Mass partner and fellow tailgate theologian.  Too bad we don’t all live in the same neighborhood, that would be critical mass.

So, I survived the weekend.  It was very full and I was weak from my chemo.  But it all happened and good connections were made.  Marvin was here from Dads and Art was here from Teleios Bible Guys.  They are a handful those two.  Sunday revolved around my visit to The Vashon Zen Center.  That got me in with a whole crew of folks that I haven’t interacted with much.  They loved the film and we had a great QandA afterward.  Then two of the folks came later in the day for the walk and tapas.  So all that basically filled up my whole weekend.

Now I have to start thinking about Thursday and this speech that I have volunteered for.  It’s the unity speech right in the middle of apparent total disunity.  Well, not total disunity but seems like something pretty dang close.  I had better spend at least an hour a day with my notes and prayer.  I’m glad I am so brave because I don’t know what else I have going for me.  The Holy Spirit is really going to have to step up here.

Well, this is where things are at on a Monday morning.  Have a walk in 45 minutes.  We are getting out to the coast of Spain with our laps.  Come and join us when you get a chance.   Til then, love, Felipe.

Yes, pretty much Spring here.  The trail is drying up and the trees are in bloom.  Come when you can:

Monday 0900-1000

Tuesday 1600-1700

Thursday 0900-1000

Sunday 1600-1700

Still my need your rubber boots for another few weeks.  Felipe.x

After Mass this AM I had a showing at the Vashon Zen Center.  I was there for the service and then we showed the film and then My Rebecca and I were available for questions.  Pretty fun group.   That was mostly a set of folks that we hadn’t been around before with the film.

Before I forget, here is the hot link for Papa Francisco’s TED talk:

https://www.ted.com/talks/pope_francis_why_the_only_future_worth_building_includes_everyone?language=es

The sun is finally out and there is steam rising off everything outside.  I have one hour before we walk at four o’clock.  I don’t seem to be worth a darn at writing anything yesterday or today, too spaced out.

OK, maybe I will put my energy into the walk and tapas instead.  Yea so, could be worse. Be with you tomorrow of course.  It’s alperfect really.  Love, Felipe.

This is my bad weekend in the chemo cycle.  Catherine calls it my Pyrenees weekend.  Yea, that’s it.  All I have been good for today is watching baseball and hockey so far.  But I did have an incredible meeting and walk this AM with Art and Marvin who came from the mainland to play.

Yes, I owe it to Marvin to talk about him.  Marvin is a African American who is a little younger than I am, isn’t everyone and he runs an outfit called Dads.  His wife is with him in this endeavor.  Dads puts black families back together, that’s as easy as I can put it.  We have absolutely nothing in common except we are both serious believers and are both on our own Caminos.  What we realized is our own personal ministries have so much in common even though on the surface they look worlds apart.   That brought us together.

Art, remember Art from the first paragraph put on a retreat in February that both Marvin and I attended.  I got to show Phil’s Camino one evening and did a QandA afterward.  I was amazed how I connected with the group of black men that had come with Marvin.  There is something very authentic happening with Phil’s Camino that resonates with people even if they have no evident connection to Spain, or Camino’s or other surface details.  I was amazing to take this stuff in.  Thank you Marvin for getting back to me with this.

Marvin had a great way of expressing the plight of us when we are so involved with a project that we can’t see what it is that we are really doing.  We are so wrapped up that we can’t what outsiders see.  He called it, “When are in the can and can’t see the label.”  Yea, I get it.

That’s it folks, love you immensely, Felipe.

Yea, check it out, Pope Francis’s talk with us.  Cris sent that in to us as something for me to view for my unity speech.   Nice of him to do that for me.   It’s a good one but I may have to watch it again.  It is in Italian with English subtitles and I find myself wanting to watch him and the subtitles at the same time which is hard to do.

Here at the hospital with nothing I have to do for the next two hours.  I’m going to work on the speech and maybe check out FaceBook.  It’s enforced downtime while I hydrate.  A whole liter of saline going in to my body.  My we could have used this treatment in the Spanish August.

And then maybe I will take a nap.  OK, see you tomorrow, love, Felipe.

Grateful awareness, I like that phrase and stole it from Richard Rohr’s book “Divine Dance”.   That to me describes our perfect state of mind as we walk our trail, our Camino.

I worked on my unity speech yesterday while I was in the comfy chair at the Cancer Treatment Center.  I had scissors, tape and a stapler.  If I was on a United flight I would have gotten drug off.  Too many weapons on that cowboy.

Then last evening I was at St. John Vianney’s for a showing of Phil’s Camino.  They had a nice big screen TV and the picture was nice and bright and the sound was good and loud, I was happy.  And we had a long QandA afterward with My Rebecca helping me out.  It was a long day but that’s what happens these daze.  Thanks to them for having us.

Have a walk in a few minutes with two new guests coming.  I can feel that it is the start of the season here at the trail.  Last summer was certainly busy for us.  But that is what we do with our radical hospitality, right?

This Sunday after Mass I am headed to a showing and QandA for the Vashon Zen Center.  This will be at Havurate Ee Shalom, 15401 Westside Hwy SW,  Vashon, WA 98070 from 1000-1145.

Yea, there it is for a Thursday morn here at Raven Ranch.  Thinking of Pilgrim Farmer John in Iowa planting his corn.  Thinking of Sister Joyce recovering from her surgery here in Seattle.  Thinking of two nurses from the hospital on their way to Spain and the Camino.  It’s all happening.  Love it, love you guys, Felipe.

May 4th is National Day of Prayer here in the States.  It is an opportunity to pray for our leaders big and small, up and down the chain.  I am friends with the the person that organizes the local Vashon service every year and she tapped me to do the keynote speech.  Yea, yours truly.  We talked about it and unity came up as a topic.  OK then, let’s tackle that.  So, I am working on that here at the hospital today with all my time in the comfy chair.

I have never given a twenty minute speech but heck how hard can it be.  I did send out some emails to various folks to gather up some info on unity that maybe hadn’t occurred to me.  So, a bunch of stuff came back and I am sorting through it.  I have enough ammo to handle the situation.  My next chore is to get it organized in my head so I don’t have to read anything but a few prompts.  That is my goal to interact with the audience, to be present to them through the process.

So, the topic of unity seems like a good one to delve into at this time.  Seems like we need to pull together on all kinds of levels these days.  Lot’s of room for improvement.  And that is what we are going to tackle here at our little old Vashon prayer service on the fourth.

Let me go now and study.  Send in a comment when you get a chance.  We are here at Caminoheads to keep the flame lit and to buoy each other up.  See you tomorrow, love, Felipe.

No wonder Phil’s Camino has been under water.  We just broke the all time record for rainfall in April and we have a week yet to go.  Yike.  Catherine and Dana are bailing on me, headed for Death Valley for this last week to find some dry.  Hehe.

There’s that and then we had Ruben the Comcast guy here yesterday to revamp the system.  Internet twice as fast now.   Then there was a glitch this morning when it shut down and so this blog post is twice as slow, so it all evens out.

Coming up May 4th, the first Thursday in May is National Day of Prayer across the land.  We have a local prayer service here at the Vashon Theater at noontime I think.  My locals will have to make it because Felipe stepped up to do the keynote speech.  Speaking on the topic of unity which we need more than ever these days.  Yea, check it out, maybe you’ll learn something, maybe I’ll learn something.

I’m to back the hospital for treatment tomorrow, have to make the most of today.  I’ll duck in and out of the rain showers to get things done.  Thinking of Pilgrim Farmer John planting corn in Iowa right now.  I think that the Dubuque Film Festival is about ready to start there in Iowa also.  We were there last year for that great event.  We won the Audience Choice Award, our first award.  A good time was had by all.

OK, time to go get my jeans muddy.  I see on FaceBook where muddy jeans are going for $400 a pair.  I am so ahead of that.

Lovin you, Felipe.

Radical hospitality, where did I hear that phrase?  It was sometime over the weekend.  You hang around with the right people and this sort of stuff happens.  Hehe.  I keep saying it over and over to myself since I heard it.  I guess you could say it captured my imagination.

Is this what we experienced on the Camino de Santiago?  Eternal hospitality, ongoing, repeat it over and over again till you get it hospitality?  Could be, right?  At times it was funky.  Maybe things were poor?  Maybe they were overwhelmed and had been for days and weeks?  But I don’t think that you can ever say that it wasn’t heartfelt.

We as pilgrims learned lessons great and small continuously day after day.  We had an amazing experience.  But is there equal rewards or knowledge gained from being the folks that serve the pilgrims.  Is extending this radical hospitality a journey or discipline in itself.  All kinds of pilgrims train and go back to do this.  What is that like?

Maybe we could corral some of those folks and ask them.  It is an interesting twist to the story.  We have been so concentrated on the pilgrim side.  There used to be a DVD that were outtakes of Walking the Camino- Six Ways to Santiago.  We happen to have a copy of that and maybe it is still available from Lydia B Smith.  There were a lot of interviews with people along the Way.  Yes, maybe we should dig that up one of these days and play it again.  I watched it a least fifty times before I went to Spain.  I remember playing it without the sound because it was driving My Rebecca crazy.  Yea.

OK, Dana is going to be here momentarily to walk this AM.  She going to help me think about “unity”  which is the topic of a speech that I am giving May 4th.  Am trying to get that organized.  Maybe we will talk about that tomorrow.

Hey, it’s Monday,  the start of a new week.  What kind of hospitality can we cause?  See you tomorrow, love, Felipe.