Pilgrim or Walker?

I was looking up some information on a camino forum about one of the sections I’ll be walking when I saw a conversation unfolding that I found intriguing and had me asking myself – Am I a pilgrim or a walker?

I looked up the definition of pilgrim which said:

Noun: a person who journeys to a sacred place for religious reasons.
Verb: travel or wander like a pilgrim.

The Camino de Santiago is steeped in deep religious beliefs since the original walkers were Catholics on a pilgrimage for penance.  Since that time, the choice to walk the camino is very personal.  Some will walk for religious reasons, others as a very introspective time, and some as an adventure.  I am not Catholic and believe as a seeker this will be a very ‘higher learning’ journey for me.  The path is ancient, filled with the spiritual energy of others who have walked it going back to the ninth century; and, is described by those who have walked it a source of profound renewal.  Each person travels the path for his or her own reasons with the hope that one day the purpose of the road will reveal itself and be understood.

While the physical goal is to reach Santiago, the path invites us to be personally transformed and inspired.  Charles Foster wrote in The Sacred Journey, “As conventional churchgoing plummets, the number of people taking to the road rises.”

Pilgrimages take place around the world for many religions and you might have heard of Peace Pilgrim who walked more than 25,000 miles across North America on a personal pilgrimage for peace from 1953 to 1981. This silver haired woman was on a mission!

Back to the forum post – it was about one of the well known points on the camino – an iron cross called La Cruz de Ferro located between the towns of Foncebadón and Manjarín. The custom is to bring a rock from home, carry it with you to this point, and then leave it on the mound at the foot of the cross asking a blessing or as a symbol of leaving their burdens or sins behind.  Some symbolically leave with the stone a problem or issue they for long have been carrying.

Rituals are very powerful and very personal. The woman who started the forum thread was deeply religious, had recently experienced deaths in her family, with another one ill, and had carried her rocks looking forward to this momentus time. She assumed other pilgrims would treat the shrine as a sacred place and observe the sanctity of the ritual. As happens sometimes with assumptions, she was upset and shocked to find that pilgrims were walking all over the mound, blindly stepping on the sacred stones left behind by others. She said, “there were several walkers (I will not call them pilgrims) who were deliberately mocking the Cruz de Ferro with consciously ridiculous poses, competing with one another to see who could have the most mocking photo taken.” The unfolding conversation was very interesting as people weighed in whether they were pilgrims or walkers. Some held that this cross was sacred and should be held with the same reverence we would a church. Others said it is just a pile of stones going back to Celtic times to mark the strategic location of the road until the cross was placed there in the early eleventh century. Over the years, the tradition began of placing a stone along path then called it Cruz de Ferro.

Millions of people have walked the camino and each pilgrim adds to that energy.  It’s really quite profound.  In years gone by, people walked from their homes in Italy, Belgium, Germany, Holland and France – all headed to the well-worn path that stretches across Spain to the Cathedral in Santiago.  Each walker or pilgrim comes to this path with their own intention for walking the path.

Over the last few days, as I walked here locally – both over the pavement sidewalks and on the trails in the woods – I asked myself, “Am I pilgrim or a walker?”   I came to the conclusion that I’m a walking pilgrim or a pilgrimaging walker; that, for me I am both as I walk with the current intention of readying myself physically for the camino while staying present with the experience I am having right here, right now.

“Walker, your treads are/the path and nothing more;/walker, there is no path,/ the path is made when walking.
When walking the path is made/ and when looking back /you see the path that never / has to be walked again…
When the goldfinch cannot sing./When the poet is a pilgrim,/when praying has no use./Walker, there is no path,/the path is made when walking…'”

~Antonio Machado, Spanish poet