This is a scene from my Camino novel-in-process. Please see the first excerpt, “The Messies,” which introduces the novel and why I’m posting this writing in its raw state.
Two massive wooden doors block the cathedral entrance– they’re at least twenty feet high and ten feet wide, each. They’re made of slabs of oak six inches thick joined together, carved with birds and flowers and creatures and vignettes from the lives of the saints, with enormous latches and locks. Martha doesn’t have a prayer of opening these doors. But then she notices, in the right corner of the right hand door, a little door. It’s about five feet tall and two feet wide, carved to blend in with the massive cathedral door of which it is a part. She tries the human-sized handle. The door creaks on its hinges. She pulls the small door toward her and steps onto the bottom piece of oak over which the door swings. She perfectly fits this little door. She stands on the threshold, peering into the darkness beyond, and stops.
She thinks, I’m no longer who I was, and I’m not yet who I’m going to be. If I go in, I’m no longer out. But backing out doesn’t seem to be an option. Neither is staying put. I seem to have lost part of myself.
This inner darkness will change me. Do I want to be changed?
After some moments, Martha steps onto the stone floor of the cathedral. She feels the rough stone through the sole of her shoe. It’s cold and hard. She sets her backpack down on one of the hundreds of rush-seated wooden chairs, takes off her shoes and socks, and begins walking through the dark cathedral. She feels every hill and valley of the cold hard floor with her sore tired blistered bare feet. One foot in front of the other, one step at a time, arms outstretched, hands wide open, she walks, eyes looking up and around as the dark begins to be cut with dust-filled shafts of light from clerestory windows so high she can’t see them, only the sunlight they admit into this filmy cavernous space. She breathes the old cold air stirred by currents of incense and lilies. In the north transept is a shrine to St. Agatha, who’s proudly holding her platter of breasts. Martha sits on the wooden pew in front of the altar. One lone candle burns at the saint’s feet
I should be MOVING. Yet here I sit, inside this quiet cold dusty ancient space that seems to be abandoned and empty. I have crossed the threshold. I’ve entered the unknown space. I’ve answered the invitation.
Now what?
A hymn tune wafts through her mind: “Immortal, invisible, God only wise, in light inaccessible hid from our eyes. Un___ing, unchanging, the ancient of days la la la la la la thy great name we praise.”
Martha hears those words as if for the first time. How rude. If God doesn’t change, and being unchanging is the ideal, now can little in-process me ever hope to be holy? Did the Desert Mothers strive for unchangingness? Was that their goal, with their fasting and praying and body-denying life?
I don’t want to do that. I want to make peace with being a woman in process. And not only make peace, but celebrate. Affirm. HONOR. Honor my yearning and striving and efforting and growing – HONOR my fits and starts and dead ends. Because they are all part of the process. Even the years I’ve spent stuck were part of my journey. What a load of bullshit – that there’s only one way to be and my job is to find it and be it and never change it. God the Father will never be an affirming God for me. Never.
So here Martha sits, inside this Spanish church, having entered through the little door. She’s getting better at waiting for the next step to show up. She’s learning not to rush. It’s taking awhile to learn not to rush. Some days she’s only walked ten kilometers. It may take her three months to get to Santiago. Maybe longer. But she’s so tired of going in a straight line from point A to point B, never deviating, focused on the goal, covering the material with > 80% success as determined by weekly benchmarks, quarterly testing, and annual achievement scores. She just wants to sit and wait and be a human woman who sits and waits when waiting is called for, and who moves with purpose and strength when movement is called for.
This time, in this dark church, is a time for waiting. She’s given up questioning these seemingly strange impulses that seize her unpredictably. She’s becoming an instinctual being – following a deeper, more rooted guidance system than the map in her backpack and her frenzied brain. She’s becoming feral – a creature following her gut and her heart and her nose, rather than Brierley’s* stages. Sometimes her body throms, like at the track to Eunate*. And she’s learned to pay attention to salivating as a sign of portents.
Martha’s been seeing drawings and paintings in her mind for awhile now, on the Camino. She sees the ink and water colors she’d use to paint THIS place. The clerestories far above, where the sun shines in straight lines, illuminating the swirling dust – the windows would be ink drawn in strong lines. The shaft of sun is yellow watercolor. The stone of the church is blueblackgrey wash. And the dust is droplets of some dark color, splashed over it all with a fine spray from a toothbrush.
And what does the shaft of sunlight illumine? For the sun has climbed higher in the sky so the shaft reaches further down into the sanctuary, the heart of this dark cavernous space. Martha sits and watches the sun as it moves lower and deeper into the darkness — slowly, inexorably illuminating a gilded altar, upon which are a cloth, two vases with plastic flowers, two unlit candles, and a crucifix.
She’d hoped for more – a sign, a symbol, a portent. What she got was more of the same.
Perhaps the waiting – the responding and the waiting – was the point.
She heaves herself up onto her hurting feet, feeling the stiffness and the cold that’s seeped into her bones from this tired cold place, and walks back through the dark church to where her shoes and backpack wait beside the little door inside the big door. She heaves it open and steps over the threshold back into the bright, hot Rioja sun.
Time to find a bar, have a café con leche* and something sweet, she thinks, then walk a few more miles before finding tonight’s albergue*. A little time sitting in the sun would feel so good. I’m tired of feeling cold. Maybe Cola Cao* instead of café? Mas calories y menos caffeine.
Martha walks to the bar across the plaza from the church. She hadn’t noticed it an hour earlier when she’d crossed this plaza, feeling pulled toward that little door and wanting to know what was on the other side of it. Now, sitting in the sun with a cup of hot milk, a packet of Cola Cao, and a slice of tortilla*, she rests her feet on the plastic chair opposite her and looks critically at the church. Templar* architecture, she now sees. All thick walls and fortress lines. It fairly bristles with animosity – full of the self-righteousness of those men who built her a thousand years ago. Of course there was nothing there for her. Why had she expected otherwise?
The Camino, she realizes, is the same. Or could be, depending on how a peregrina* walked it. It could be a straight line from Point A (SJPP)* to Point B (Santiago), walked with focus and no tolerance for deviation from the goal, following Brierley’s* stages religiously. One could learn something about one’s self that way, she supposed – that’s how education is set up, after all. A linear progression from Point A (preschool) to Point B (grad school). Or, she thinks, the Camino could be a jumping-off point for exploration and return. It could be organic, although the pilgrim who walked it that way would definitely be swimming against the prevailing current. A pilgrim could use the Camino for general direction, swirling away and coming back as inspiration and yearning struck.
So why doesn’t anybody walk it that way? And why couldn’t I walk it that way?
Maybe I got meaning from that cold hard church after all.