Skip to main content

Tarshish



There was a thunderstorm last night and it was pelting with rain when we set out at 7:00 this morning for one of the dullest days of the Caminino. The path was beside a canal for a couple of hours and a road for the rest of the day on a flat straight walk of about 35km to Carrion de Los Condes, a medium sized provincial town. The province of Palencia through which we are now walking has some money, and public facilities, including the camino, are maintained well. Their idea of upgrading the camino was to ask a traffic engineer to do it. The result is a long straight, level path which moves people as efficiently as possible but has no soul whatsoever. Not that I am disappointed. One of the points of the Camino is that it progresses through all sorts of places: beautiful and ugly, urban and rural, ancient and modern. Just like the rest of life. Clemency's legs are pretty much healed, by the way, a tribute to the knowledge and skill of pharmacists.

We leave the Camino on Monday evening, in just a couple of days. We won't make it to Leon but by then we will have walked 400km, which is half of The Way of St. James. We hope to return to walk the rest of it in the Northern Hemisphere autumn of 2011, but we'll see. This song of Brooke Frasers has been haunting me a bit lately. Listen to the words and you'll understand why:

If to distant lands I scatter
If I sail to farthest seas
Would you find and firm and gather 'til I only dwell in Thee?
If I flee from greenest pastures
Would you leave to look for me?
Forfeit glory to come after
'Til I only dwell in Thee

If my heart has one ambition
If my soul one goal to seek
This my solitary vision 'til I only dwell in Thee
That I only dwell in Thee
'Til I only dwell in Thee

Scattering oneself to distant lands isn't something new, and lands don't come any more distant than this one. Dig a hole in my back yard straight down and deep enough and this is where you'll end up. Spain. Tarshish, as it was once called. Jonah, an old friend and companion, fled to Tarshish to escape the Lord. Paul the apostle thought that if he made it to Tarshish his life would be complete. Tarshish is the end of the world: the bit you get to before you fall off the edge. And here I am walking across it. Trouble is, am I being Paul or Jonah? Finding a completion of something or escaping from the place where the Spirit's work really has to be found and worked out? Or both?

This holy track has a presence, in the same way that some holy buildings have a presence. Wonderful things happen on this trail every day of the week, and the energy of the track is bright and positive and life giving. It is such a buzz being on it that people return again and again, and while I can understand that, getting addicted to the Camino Santiago isn't the point. The point is what that 20 something kid Brooke Fraser keeps trying to point out to me: to walk not away but towards God and in the lessons of el camino, learn to live more wholly for him. To refine and sharpen myself with every step

'til I only dwell in thee.
Labels:

Comments

Anonymous said…
"Finding a completion of something or escaping from the place where the Spirit's work really has to be found and worked out? Or both? "
Well, you've often talked about life presenting us with paradox after paradox...
400 kilometres is still an amazing feat, all things considered.
Brooke F. probes great depths, doesn't she? I heard that song often when Helen was at home.
Love to you both,
N xx
24 May 2009 at 08:57
Alden Smith said…
The fact that you have walked 400kms reminds me that the accumulation of distance is won by continually placing one foot in front of the other - not unlike life itself - and I am reminded by your musings along the way that the cliche "it's the journey not the destination that matters" is indeed true.
24 May 2009 at 17:33
Verna said…
I used to have a poster on my wall, of a sailing ship, with the caption "Life is a voyage, not a destination". May you both find this voyage one where you "only dwell in thee". Great that Clemency's legs are getting better and thank God for angels!
24 May 2009 at 22:26
Anonymous said…
That particular Brooke Fraser track is appropriate on 2 counts - as you noticed, the words are relevant for your journey - God finding and reaching out to us wherever we go (and vice versa, too). Secondly - the song is beautiful - but is really only one musical phrase repeated over and over. Good accompaniament for monotonous stretches of landscape, putting one foot in front of another. I got so bored with it, I wrote a second half to use with the last half of each verse - and played it to the teenager who introduced me to the album in the first place. (Am sure that Ms Fraser would be as unimpressed as Teenager was...)
Andiamo!
Jo F
25 May 2009 at 14:50
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede
Post a Comment
Read more

Kindle

 Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been  using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on.  I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incompatible formats
10 comments
Read more

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

    The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse  - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire.  Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon
Post a Comment
Read more

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and the
3 comments
Read more

Return to Middle Earth

 We had a flood, a couple of weeks back, and had to move all the stuff out of the spare bedroom, including  the contents of two floor to ceiling book cases. Shoving the long unopened copies of Sartor Resartus and An Introduction to Byron into cartons, I came upon my  copy of The Lord of the Rings . Written in the flyleaf are the dates of its many readings, the last one being when I read it aloud to Catherine, when she was about 10 or 11, well over 20 years ago. The journey across Middle Earth took Catherine and me the best part of a year, except for the evening when we followed Frodo and Sam across the last stretches of Mordor and up Mount Doom, when we simply couldn't stop, and sat up reading until 11.00 pm, on a school night.  My old copy is a paperback, the same edition that every card carrying baby boomer has somewhere on their shelves. The glue has dried and hardened. The cover and many of the pages have come loose. I was overcome with the urge to read it again, but this old
Post a Comment
Read more