My Camino de Santiago 2023

If you haven’t read my ‘About Me,’ I encourage you to. It sets the table for how and why the Camino de Santiago saved my life.

To understand my journey on the Camino de Santiago, you need to understand a bit more about how I see the world. That is through my relationship with God.

God might be a familiar or distant presence in your life, but in mine, He remains everything—my guide, my director, my compass. Yet, true to the nature of any relationship, He also perplexes and occasionally frustrates me.

Growing up in a Methodist, tradition-steeped faith, I was instilled with the view of God as the all-Seeing, all-Knowing Authority. In this setting, I learned to see God as a provider, not necessarily a comforter. The premise was simple: obedience leads to a flourishing life. Despite my occasional rebellious tendencies, I’ve always been a perfectionist. Highly critical of myself, my performance, and my abilities. This critical lens extended to how I perceived God, the Greatest Critic of all. Constantly aware of all my imperfections and set on correcting them.

The solutions to my problems seemed clear until the problem of death emerged. The sudden loss of my brother ignited a cascade of doubts and questions about God’s role. What power did He hold? What investment did He have in our lives?

Amid the pain of losing my brother, I found a profound intimacy and comprehension of God’s closeness and His yearning for a relationship. I discovered that He offered not just a clear path through the forest but also a shoulder to cry on. And so, I closely followed that path with my life.

As an adventurous perfectionist with a touch of paradox, my life unfolded along the path I had always anticipated, believing it to be the journey God had mapped for me. From my spirited husband in the Navy, who became my fellow adventurer, to my two beautiful children brought along on my escapades, and the clandestine discovery of my love for the ocean—it all seemed harmoniously planned.

Yet, God’s plans have a way of unfolding in unexpected directions. Last year plunged me into one of the most agonizing and darkest detours of my life. A decade after a shattering divorce and faced with a recent, nearly fatal health scare, I found myself compelled to confront myself and God, asking, “How on earth did I get here?” and more importantly “How did you let me get here?” I thought I did everything right—attended church, kept journals, and prayed diligently. But instead of reward, what I encountered was confusion, chaos, and profound pain.

In the depths of my despair, I had no answers, only a barrage of questions for God. I delved into every question in the book, screamed and cried until my voice grew hoarse, pleading for resolution with no answer. Why would God subject me to so much suffering? As a perfectionist, my mind raced to “fix” myself into a better destiny, yet God remained silent, distant, and, worse still, indifferent to my cries for help.

In utter desperation, yearning for a breakthrough, a response from God finally came when I learned about the Camino de Santiago through my niece. She contemplated this pilgrimage after her best friend’s new newfound mental and emotional clarity. Encouraging me to consider it as well, she hoped I might find answers to the profound questions that lingered between God, myself and my purpose. 

Through research, prayer, contemplation and doctor approval, I made the decision to say yes. I had a UK wedding for a niece in August, the timing seemed to fall together perfectly. 

This would be my first time out of the country, on a trip for myself in 2 years. 

At first glance, the idea of a pilgrimage might appear outdated or dismissed as some form of “hippie” nonsense. We often playfully jest about the notion of “finding ourselves,” envisioning individuals without a clear direction in life, wandering barefoot in Peru with Ayahuasca in one hand and a pan flute in the other.

However, in today’s overstimulated, over-medicated, and socially isolated Western world, I firmly believe that a pilgrimage is precisely what many of us genuinely need. For me, it was a vital opportunity to pause, reflect, and engage in a profound reckoning with God about what had gone so incredibly wrong in my life.

I am a perfectionist – a doer, an executor who plans meticulously. The idea of doing nothing but walk, and contemplate my existence — not packing  my schedule to the brim- was beyond odd to me.

However, reflecting on the true essence of a pilgrimage as a journey to discover oneself and connect with God for meaningful transformation, I realized this wasn’t a regular trip. It was my attempt to achieve enduring healing on spiritual, emotional, mental, and physical levels that I desperately needed.

Considering even Jesus, as God himself, embarked on a pilgrimage in the wilderness for 40 days and nights, preparing for the sacrifice of his own life, it made me recognize the importance of taking the time to contemplate and find inner peace. If Jesus saw the need for such contemplative space, why shouldn’t I?

These next blog entries are pathways into the intimate, and profound revelations unrecovered in my mind, heart and spirit in the journey back to myself. In a place where I reached the end of myself, the very edge of my shadow, I stepped into what I can only describe as the unfiltered, untamed path of God.