We’re getting down, as my old mentor used to say, “to brass tacks here.” Number 47 of this 50-post blog. Time to address the Big Question of my walk on the Camino de Santiago.
Did I find god on The Road?
Before I answer that, I should remind myself (and you) that this was never a religious pilgrimage for me.
But yes, as I've mentioned, I was reminded of my Catholic upbringing in every town along the way. In some, I re-lived -- or experienced anew -- moments of my old Catholic longing and reverie. Several times during the walk I felt deep spiritual stirring, soul energy and connection to things outside myself — birds, rocks, the dirt on a path.
If I had to describe it beyond “my Camino,” I would say this about my walk: It was a sacred spiral, a labyrinth, an experience of detaching from and opening to. From whom or to what I cannot exactly say. A little bit of everything I imagine.
As I’ve hinted in other posts, I am guided by a 12-step program. In that program God (cleverly disguised as the word "Power" at first) pops up pretty early on the ladder. Rung No. 2: “We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.”
But, while I have faith in these steps, which have indeed restored me to sanity, I’ve struggled all the way with the who/what/if of God. The program does not define it but rather invites me to find a god of my own understanding. The challenge isn’t so much about believing in a capital G-style God, as believing in something, anything higher and more powerful than my own (often destructive) thinking.
I assume and accept that the what/who/if of "god" is will continue to evolve for me my whole life. That's the track record thus far. At the time I started my Camino walk last fall, I was getting comfortable with a faceless idea of god, an inner knowing, or, if you will, a still, small voice inside. A feeling, however, is not a fact. You cannot not see a feeling. I didn’t have direct conversations with that inner voice.
One morning as I was walking across Spain, the sun came out from behind the clouds and so I stopped and closed my eyes to the bright rays. I wanted to feel their warmth on my face and see that yellow red color that comes when you shine light through the eyelids.
A black dot appeared in the center of the yellow red. I realized, suddenly, that this wasn’t the first time. The dot appears whenever I close my eyes, and has been there for as long as I can remember. Sometimes, like this moment I am referring to, when the sun is directly in front of me, the dot is bright and clear and in the center of my lidded view. Other times, when it's darker out, I have to look for the dot. It is Hard to find. It moves around. If I anthropomorphize the dot, I say it sometimes asks me to search it out — an odd game of hide and seek.
But the black dot is always there, in sun or complete darkness. Right behind my eyelid. That day in Spain, when the fact of its constant presence came to me, I asked the dot directly: “Is that you God?”
The dot didn’t answer. Duh.
Still, there are moments since then when I find myself talking to the dot and I think maybe it IS answering — with the swirling motion around it, or its sliding left and right or moving up and down, or twirling in spirals.
No, I don't hear words with these motions. I’m not crazy. But sometimes they feel like communication none-the-less. Sometimes I think I hear (without actually hearing) something like a "Yes."
Yes to what? To the only question I'm ever really asking: Are you there? Which is really a lot of questions put together: Am I safe? Am I loved? Can I let go and be caught by you? Will all be well?
Each of us must be given the dignity to discover the God of our own understanding. I’ve studied a lot of faith traditions, each with its own Godface. All of them have given me something, some Grace, to hold on to. But none of them fit me fully, and none offered me what I thought I needed: proof of presence.
And yet that black dot has always been there. For as long as I can remember when I close my eyes.
Yes I know this can be explained away as a floater in my eye. Microscopic fibers within the vitreous fluid behind my pupil clumping and casting tiny shadows on my retina.
But I find, since realizing the ever-presence of my dot, that I don't want to explain it away with the science of the eye.
I want to believe that I have found the God of my understanding and that she, he, it is merely a black dot In my eye that I sometimes have to look very very hard to find.
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