To Be in the World, But Not of the World: A New Perspective on Walking the Camino de Santiago

The Camino de Santiago is often described as an occasion to step aside from one’s ordinary, daily routine for five or so weeks in order to reconnect with God and one’s spiritual life in a powerful experience. For those who do one of the long walks, for example, the nearly 500-mile “French Way,” the pilgrimage is frequently portrayed as a transformative moment with an ineffable God. For those who walk with a small group of other pilgrims, sometimes called a Camino family, the weeks together form bonds of friendship that can last for years. For some, walking the Camino is a kind of rolling Benedictine monastic community, but on the move.

Walking the Camino de Santiago is all that — and more — but it is also an occasion for stepping into, not out of, one’s quotidian life, learning to appreciate the routine events that make up our lives, and in so doing, show us a glimpse of God not as transcendent, but as incarnate, in our world. Another way to look at walking the Camino de Santiago is to see it as an opportunity to be in the world but not of the world.

Sitting in the airport in Paris during the summer I was planning to walk the Camino de Santiago, and waiting for the train to southwestern France, I noticed several people with backpacks that looked oddly out of place for an international flight or long-distance train ride. Of course, backpacks are ubiquitous in 21st-century life, but these looked out of place in ways I could not explain. Sure enough, as soon as they picked up their backpacks and threw them over their shoulders, there was a scallop shell, the universal sign of the Camino, revealing that they were heading south to St. Jean Pied de Port to begin their pilgrimage.

A friendly smile with a question as simple as “Camino?” was returned with another smile, words of greeting, and the acknowledgment that we were all fellow pilgrims. In no time at all, I reveled in the ability to speak to anyone identifiable as fellow walkers as if they were friends since childhood. Where are you staying? What kind of trekking poles do you have? Which app are you using for directions? These and other queries turned into standard ice-breaker questions. No longer was I in a world where anyone asked what I did for a living and where I worked. It was almost as if I were Dorothy waking up to a world full of blazing color, after having spent years in a black-and-white existence. In my old life, strangers do not start random conversations with each other in public places, especially not in most of Europe.

From St. Jean Pied de Port to Pamplona to Burgos to Leon to Sarria to Santiago, I loved each city. I loved it when the rustic wild trail turned into an empty country road, which turned into a suburban street, which turned into a major thoroughfare into the heart of a city. And in each city, I delighted in signs of God’s presence in the seemingly mundane and ordinary tasks of life. In Pamplona, I sat in a café watching city employees construct stages for the Feast of San Fermín and its famous running of the bulls when two guys who turned out to be from Germany pulled up to a table next to me with their daypacks.

Although I am not normally someone to talk to strangers in public, after even just a few days on the Camino, I felt empowered to speak to almost anyone. “Camino de Santiago?” I asked, to which they answered in English, “Yeah, we’re from Munich.” I shared my experience of having spent a summer in Munich decades earlier, and off the conversation went. Considering that these were two complete strangers to me, I was struck by how quickly we started to talk about the spiritual life, the idea of pilgrimage as a spiritual practice, and when we first thought about walking the Camino. We talked about our hopes and fears — all over some cappuccinos and croissants.

In Burgos, I needed a new converter for my multiple electronic devices and walked over to a shop that specialized in Apple products just a few blocks from the cathedral in the midst of a neighborhood of upscale cafes, shops, offices, and residences. Expensive cars lined the streets, beautiful clothes covered the pedestrians, and the focus of attention seemed, at first, decidedly non-spiritual. I was wrong. In the shop, the sales clerk asked if I were walking the Camino, where I was from, and where I had started. He had walked a portion of it several years earlier with his high-school class.

We talked about the Camino as a fun outdoor break from urban life for him and his friends. But then the conversation shifted to how he found that after he had done a short one-week version of the Camino with his friends, he kept coming back to his reflections on those days again and again, thinking about it as a potential religious experience and not just as a vacation. He’d read a lot about it over the last few years, and was planning to do a portion of it again, but this time with one of his best friends and each of their girlfriends, and this time with a spiritual bent to the experience.

In Santiago, I first went to the newly established Casa Anglicana Del Peregrino, a new Episcopal hostel for pilgrims, to drop off my backpack and clean up a bit before walking over to the cathedral only a few minutes away, for what I thought was going to be my final destination. What a delight after all those weeks to meet not merely more friendly faces and kind voices, but the familiarity of the Episcopal Church so far from home.

But what moved me even more came after visiting the cathedral. I walked to the northern edge of the old city, across the street to the Alameda Park and up the hill to the 12th-century Santa Susana Church, surrounded by an oak grove, now home to the new Anglican Pilgrim Center, a sister mission to the Casa Anglican Del Peregrino. The church — a center of hospitality led by an Episcopal missioner, the Rev. Anna Noon, for both local people and arriving pilgrims for Evensong, Eucharist, and spiritual conversation — was in the center of a park full of children playing, older people strolling, young couples talking while sitting together on benches, and groups of middle-aged people in a café. From the edge of the park was a view of the old city and the cathedral. On the way back down the hill from the church, sitting with an ice cream cone on a bench near an ice cream truck surrounded by the city’s residents with hardly a pilgrim in sight, I started to feel as if I had stepped back into the real world after my weeks of walking. Once again, I was wrong.

An elderly man came up to me with an ice cream cone he had just bought for himself. “Camino?” he asked in English. “Yes,” I said. “I walk it every year,” he said, “but now, only from Sarria. When I was young, from France.” I tried to imagine him as a young man walking the 500 miles from France and now, just walking the shorter distance from Sarria, less than 100 miles from Santiago, but still enough for him to earn his Compostela certificate. We sat for a long time, long after our ice cream cones were gone, talking about God, about faith, about the world in which we live, and our lives, our regrets, and even now, our hopes for the future.

A train station waiting room, a café, an Apple shop, and an ice cream truck. None of these are typically recorded in accounts of the Camino as places of revelation, of epiphany, of an experience of the holy and the sacred. And yet, at least for me, they all had the marks of an encounter with God, places definitely in the world but not of the world.

The Rev. Dr. Stephen Kirkpatrick Arbogast is school chaplain at St. Mark’s School of Texas.