Back when Josh and I were dating, back when my Christian faith felt more secure, I went on a spiritual pilgrimage.
I had assumed that other pilgrims along the five-hundred-mile Camino de Santiago in northern Spain would be fellow Christians, but in most cases, they were people in the middle of an “Eat, Pray, Love”–type crisis. One blonde Canadian woman I met along the trail had recently divorced, quit her job, and sold her house. Another fiftysomething couple had lost their eldest son to suicide the year before.
To be sure, the Camino is a religious pilgrimage and officially recognized by the Roman Catholic Church. All pilgrims who can vouch that their travels are in part spiritually motivated may receive an indulgenced certificate of completion called a “compostela” once they reach Santiago. But my motivation for walking the Camino was less about sanctification and more about having a post-college adventure.
My companion on the Camino was Rachel. She was my sister Sarah’s roommate from college. Sarah was newly married and pregnant with her first baby, and I suspect the email updates we sent from our internet hostels along the journey made her twinge with envy as she picked out onesies and crib sheets in suburban Virginia. We didn’t have smartphones (this was 2007), so we relied on payphones or desktop computers with sticky keys in the community rooms of hostels, or tiny internet cafés where you paid Euros for fifteen-minute increments of connection.
The trail was marked by bright yellow arrows spray painted on pavement, or on boulders, or on wooden signs nailed to trees. Some days we walked on suburban sidewalks. On others we walked through dramatic fields of red tulips and up winding mountain trails, or sometimes through tiny Spanish villages where old men in tweed jackets stood in doorways of stone houses and watched us walk by. We hiked through herds of sheep, through acres of vineyards, or through noisy city traffic. Over nearly thirty days, we covered the five hundred miles of the trail without a map, the right direction obvious in bright yellow marks.
After a few hours of hiking each morning we would break for lunch, usually for a baguette and cheese, sometimes grapes or wrinkled apples we had bought from a shoebox grocery the day before. We would keep walking until we made our destination for the evening, checking into albergues especially for pilgrims along the Camino that stamped our passports with the name of the town. After dumping our bags and taking showers, I would meet Rachel in the albergue courtyard, each of us wearing our only pair of clean town clothes and Chaco sandals, which revealed bandaged heels and browning toenails. We joked that you could always identify another pilgrim in town because they walked with a particular limp or shuffled their legs, sore from walking ten to twenty miles a day.
Walking the Camino was the first time I participated in a spiritual practice with people outside my faith tradition. We walked together and drank from the same ancient water fountains and traded tips on blister care, yet our collective religious beliefs ranged from conservative evangelical to devout Catholic to pagan to none. Hearing these fellow pilgrims talk about their views on reincarnation felt vaguely threatening; I felt enormous pressure to share the Gospel.
I always carried my Bible with me then. It slid into my purse and had a battered, duct-taped cover. I was proud of this Bible, the way the wear and tear on its binding and pages reflected my piety. In those days, I also carried the Book of Common Prayer and a Celtic prayer book from Iona. I would find a shady table in the hostel’s courtyard and open up my devotional materials, looking up the appropriate verses from the daily lectionary, praying “Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ above me, Christ below me.”
“Are you actually reading a Bible?” a fellow pilgrim asked me one day after a long day of hiking. He was a thirtyish French man who wore a red scarf jauntily around his neck. Rumor had it that he’d had several romantic relationships with pilgrims along the journey, carrying on with one woman from Pamplona to Los Arcos, then breaking it off and finding a new girlfriend by Najera. Men like this made me supremely uncomfortable with their sophisticated, women-wise ways. I was a rigid twenty-three-year-old virgin who read her Bible every morning. I was also concerned that he hadn’t heard the truth about Jesus, that his soul was in danger.
“Yes, it’s a Bible,” I said, picking up the book to show him the binding. “Haven’t you ever read one?”
“No,” he said, sitting down in the wrought iron patio chair beside me. He adjusted his round spectacles, which reminded me of John Lennon. I prayed a silent prayer, wondering how I could succinctly explain the gospel message to this attractive, hedonistic French man.
I don’t remember the rest of our conversation. I imagine that I fumbled through the basics: the incarnation, Jesus’s crucifixion conquering death, how God was bringing a new kingdom in and through God’s people. I imagine that this French man leaned in, taking in this young American woman with a blue bandana in her hair, clutching a duct-taped Bible to her chest as she talked a little too quickly. It was one of my first experiences evangelizing a truly secular person, who lived his life outside of the story of God’s now-not-yet redemption for the world. These conversations made me afraid. I wanted people to know Jesus; I wanted them to be saved. But even as I spoke, the Christian words felt forced.
The conversion attempt likely ended when my friend Rachel joined us at the table, and the conversation shifted from the incarnation to which tapas restaurant we would try that evening. Rachel had just finished a year of service at the Youth with a Mission (YWAM) base in Amsterdam; her relational philosophy of evangelism was summed up by “people are not projects” and it was the Holy Spirit, not us, who changed hearts. She didn’t seem to have any of my nervous energy around relating to religious outsiders.
We both had plenty of opportunities to talk about our faith along the Camino with fellow pilgrims. Many longed for transcendence; many hoped the month-long pilgrimage would somehow change their life. Yet most were the spiritual-but-not-religious, trading the pilgrim destinations of shrines and Catholic churches containing the ancient bones of saints for beer gardens and bars along the journey.
Even I was unnerved by the ornate Catholicism at every turn: gothic cathedrals, the paintings of Saint Sebastian’s bloody body punctured by arrows, the altars piled with plastic figurines of baby Jesus. I couldn’t help feeling like a throwback, an American evangelical in a sea of European pilgrims who had shed their Christian devotion generations ago, along with customs like bloodletting. And, as far as I know, my words and witness, my daily Bible reading and silent prayers didn’t convert anyone on that trip.
I think about the Camino sometimes now when I try to incorporate spiritual practices into my marriage and family life. Sometimes I still feel like the ridiculous Christian trying to explain the tenets of faith to our kids. When I see them through Josh’s eyes, they seem ludicrous.
But even if Josh and I don’t share the same religion, we are still fellow pilgrims walking side by side. We are traveling through life together as we raise our kids and welcome friends into our home and struggle to define and live out our common values.
Nowadays, the only Christian practice we—irregularly—do together is the examen prayer. Josh and I first learned of examen, which Saint Ignatius of Loyola deemed the most important of daily spiritual exercises, when we attended a church small group together while we were dating. The traditional examen includes a five-step process: express gratitude for the day’s blessings, invite the Holy Spirit to be present, identify missteps and faults from the day, ask for forgiveness, and ask God for help in the future.
But when Josh and I remember to pray the examen after the kids are in bed, we don’t actually close our eyes and pray out loud. What we do is ask each other two simple questions: Where did you give or receive the most love today? and Where did you give or receive the least love today?
We have carried the tradition to our supper table most nights, where the kids join in the practice. We ask each other, Where did you experience love or joy today? Where did you not? It’s a variation on the questions we answered during our family Advent devotions.
Invariably, I learn something about Josh that I didn’t know: how, in his middle school science class that day, one of his students told him his dad just died, or that he discovered a new running trail he loves. Especially on the nights when we’re fighting, or disconnected, practicing the examen forces us to lean in a little, make eye contact, and share something that impacted us that day. The practice may be the brainchild of Saint Ignatius, who himself took a famous pilgrimage to Jerusalem, but its wisdom works just as well in our agnostic-Christian home.
On the Camino, I saw people participating in spiritual practices together all the time, whether they believed in God or not. I am sure that many of those travelers had an experience with the Divine along the way, and I certainly felt bonded to the fellow pilgrims who suffered through blisters and uncomfortable hostel beds alongside me.
We were all on the trail together. Some days I would walk with one set of travelers, only to have to split up due to an injury or need for a rest day. Then, a week later, I might run into the same group at a café midmorning, and we would hug and kiss the sides of each other’s cheeks like long-lost family members.
There is a famous line of poetry about spiritual pilgrimage, that “the way is made by walking.” In many ways that’s what Josh and I are doing in our mixed-faith marriage: making our own trail, walking together, sometimes losing each other for days. Inevitably, we find each other again, and when we do, we hug and kiss each other’s cheeks. We hold on tight, then let each other go before we start out again on the trail.