Each day I wake up around 5am, if not earier, and leave by 6am, walking until Noon or 1 until I reach the pilgrim hostel.  There I line up to wait with other pilgrims to see if we have a bed.  Why is the Camino crowded in early May?!  Once inside, I shower, do laundry, and then eat, by which time it´s 3pm, and I´m exhausted.  So a nap follows or, if I'm lucky, I see the town.  Regardless, the early evening includes shopping for food for the following day and making plans for dinner, usually at a local restaurant which serves a pilgrim´s menu. The menu de peregrino costs about 8-10 Euros and entails a 3 course meal with bread and wine. After dinner it´s back to the hostel to take my laundry off the line, chat for a few minutes, and then bed by 9 or 9:30.  That´s left little time for posting here.

However, I thought today about the pilgrimage so far and one very lovely thought emerged.  Several times on the way, I´ve thought back over my life.  There´s nothing significant in that, since walking along long stretches of empty road will lead to that.  But for me the significant part is that when I do look back on my life, sometimes I am overcome by a grand, enveloping sense of love and peace.  I am struck that all around me is a providential love that has been present from the beginning of my life until now, and sometimes it is made palpable on this road in Spain.

Yesterday morning I left my main group of friends that have been with me since the beginning.  They stayed in a small village, but I walked on to the next town since I have less time.  Once on the road outside of town I was struck by the wide open feeling of being alone, on my own, with no one around.  My first inclination was to trek in the silence and solitude, but eventually I wanted to sing. So, since I was by myself, I began to belt out songs I know by heart, which are almost all hymns.  I started with a few poetic hymns from my Methodist days (Praise to the Lord, the Almighty and Sing Praise to God).  But then all these songs from my childhood welled up, and I sang some of them for the first time in ages -- He Lives, Christ the Solid Rock, Just As I Am.

I don´t love everything about these songs, but they are such a part of me that I remember all the verses, and I was struck that they are about trust, surrender, and openness.  For some reason, as I sang them, I could look back on my life and see a thread of grace, an ongoing presence which now, and has always, been a yes in the center of who I am.  And that, the enveloping sense of love across time, made me cry.  Silly, I know, but it was a momentous gift to be on the road alone and to feel that, from age to age, a presence of love and grace has been present, and were I to fully realize it, it would be too much for me.

Several times such glimpses into grace have happened.  They don´t tell me that I need to become a Baptist again or to sentimentalize my childhood.  They tell me that God´s love can bring together, like a drawstring, all the various parts of my life into a whole that speaks now and always a yes, a deep, reverberating, indefatigueable, irresistible yes that is so larger than I am that it brings me to tears to be caught up into it.

There is so much more to say and better ways to say it all, but in the few minutes I have I wanted to say a thanks, not only to God and the universe around me, but to all those people who have made my life such a wonderful and beautiful thing.  I am humbled, especially as I walk a road so many others have walked, to know I live in a world that has been made gracious and wonderful long before I ever arrived and which offers me the great gift and joy to be here and now, in this particular place on the road, but also in every place on the way of my life.