Tuesday of the Fourth Week of Advent

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Baggage to Bethlehem

“On the Camino de Santiago, makeshift shrines along the way are littered with things pilgrims have left behind—an extra pair of shoes, a sweater, a razorblade, an inflatable pillow, a book, a pair of pants, a makeup kit. Nearly every pilgrim on the Camino, despite careful packing, discovers that they are carrying too much.” - Wes Granberg-Michaelson, Without Oars (p. 13)

Advent is my only pilgrimage this year. I walk the Camino de Santiago in Spain a lot and each time I challenge myself to carry less. Even after thousands of miles of walking with a backpack, I always realize that I carried something I never used.

Without Oars (2020) is among the latest additions to a hefty backlist of meditative works the Camino has spawned, scores of mostly self-published, and sometimes self-indulgent, titles. About twenty are truly admirable, Rebekah Scott’s A Furnace Full of God among the best. To my knowledge no other pilgrimage trek in the Christian West has inspired a continuously productive line of post-pilgrimage reflections, not Fatima or Lourdes or Medjugorje, or even Lindisfarne or Canterbury.

I think the Camino motivates writers precisely because it is an actual walking pilgrimage with abundant time to reflect. We all compose a life narrative out of our slow travel narrative. It’s the life narrative that we’re anxious not to forget and eager to share.

As for the objects and gear visibly left behind, they produce mixed feelings. Like impromptu memorials after tragedies, one day’s votive offerings are the

next day’s trash for trail stewards to clear away. Pilgrims leave things behind in hostels, often on a swap shelf. The gesture is less ceremonial, more charitable. I still have a compact yellow flashlight I acquired that way in Azofra. It reminds me to pray for the previous pilgrim owner.

Isn’t that just like barren Hannah, who had come to the Temple to pray earlier, only moving her lips to ask desperately for a son. The priest Eli first took her for a drunk, then blessed her muttered plea. She delivered a son, weaned him, then put him in her backpack with an ephah of flour, a skin of wine and put a halter lead on an adolescent bull for her return pilgrimage to the Temple. She left them all behind as offerings, even her son, returned home infinitely lighter. “Therefore I have lent him to the Lord; as long as he lives, he is given to the Lord.”

I write this during Advent 2020, a quarantine paring me down, leaving unneeded things behind. My life narrative is being rewritten once again. I want less baggage for Bethlehem. I hope that my next Camino, and 2021, will be light indeed.

George D. Greenia

William & Mary

Professor Emeritus

Institute for Pilgrimage Studies