Buen Camino

Tomorrow morning, my wife will become pilgrims.

We will walk the breadth of Spain, upwards of 500 miles, over Pyrenees Mountains, on foot, to visit the remains of the apostle James.

I’ve never been a pilgrim before. I’ve never thought of myself as a pilgrim. What even IS a pilgrim?

Contrary to American thought, a pilgrim is not someone who wears a hat shaped like a traffic cone. A pilgrim is someone who journeys for spiritual reasons. Someone who wanders through a foreign land, looking to be changed.

That’s me, I guess. I’m seeking. Although I’m not sure what for.

Maybe I’m seeking to be something different. A stronger version of myself. A healed version.

I’ve been trying to heal ever since I was 11. I grew up under the weight of suicide, domestic abuse, and gun violence. My dad’s last night was spent in a homicidal rage wherein he tried to kill his family.

On his final night, my father was holding my sister and I hostage. My mother escaped and ran for help. The sheriff deputies bursted into our home with riot guns. Dad was arrested. That was the last time I ever saw him. He was dead the next day, shortly after being released on bail.

But my reason for a pilgrimage is more than that. I was raised in fundamentalist household. We were a cult, really. The cult of Puritanical American Evangelicalism, which is a shallow religion.

We were not taught to look for healing. We were taught bullet points. I come from people who told you, upfront, that God loved you no matter who you were and then gave you a long list of exceptions.

Mainly, I was taught that beer was evil, to shun rock ‘n’ roll, and heedeth not the wicked ways of “I Dream of Jeannie.”

But the older I get, the more I’ve been getting to know God. The real One. And He’s a neat Guy. He’s got a great sense of humor.

Moreover, He’s nothing like they said. For starters, He doesn’t have a Greek name. Nor an American one. And He likes rock ‘n’ roll.

The people in my childhood claimed to have an exclusive distributorship deal worked out with God. If you wanted to know Him, you had to follow their 12-step lesson plan. The older I get, the more I realize that anyone with a beating heart already knows God. And it really is that simple.

So here we are. A world traveler. For upwards of six weeks, we carry only backpacks. I am carrying a fiddle.

No laptops. No phones. My phone will be buried in my backpack, turned off. Thus, I won’t be taking many pictures or answering texts or scrolling Amazon to buy useless crap I don’t need such as—to pick a recent purchase at random—a bouncy castle.

I won’t be posting on Facebook. I won’t be writing much. I will disappear.

Instead, I’ll send various images and text to our friend, Laura Beth. So if anything appears online during my trip, it will be coming from her.

Namely, because my wife and I will be too busy walking. We will walk to the gravesite of history’s first martyr. I want to pay my respects to him. I want to rediscover the simple blessing of my own life.

And above all, I want to thank James’s boss for healing a middle-aged fool in spite of himself.

Buen Camino.