"Once Upon a Camino" by Matthew Wilson

Actor Martin Sheen starred in the 2010 movie The Way, a story of a father who walks the Camino de Santiago to connect with his son who died in an accident on the trail. The 400-mile pilgrimage crosses northern Spain, from the French border to Santiago de Compostela in northwest Spain, is based on a true story. The Camino is actually much longer, a network of routes stretching across Europe, but it it’s the Spanish segment that is the best known. The movie was released in 2010, but re-released this year.

Australian writer Matthew Wilson walked the Camino in 2010, and his experience became the basis for his second novel, Once Upon a Camino. It’s a story full of improbables, including time travel, but it rather surprisingly works, and works well.

 

Tom Anderson is a 20-something London investment banker, full of thoughts about his career and his girlfriend Ana, who’s Spanish but also lives and works in London. Tom wants to marry her, and off he goes to Spain to ask her grandfather for his blessing. Ana’s parents had died in an automobile accident, and she was raised by her grandparents.

 

Matthew Wilson

The grandfather, however, throws a wrench into Tom’s plans. To prove his love, the grandfather tells Tom he must walk the 400-miles Camino de Santiago. Tom’s up for the challenge, sort of, and he takes a train to the starting point and promptly falls asleep. When he awakes, the train journey has ended, he’s alone, his backpack (including his passport and mobile phone charger) is missing, and all he has left is his Apple iPhone, which has little battery left.

 

Then he discovers that it’s not 2010 but 1954, and he finds himself stumbling into the pilgrimage and trying to understand what has happened. He walks with a few companions, and their story gradually becomes part of his story. He will learn that one of his companions is the considerably younger grandfather of Ana, and that he himself has a mission to accomplish. If he fails, Ana will never be born.

 

Once Upon a Camino is a story of love, pilgrimage, sacrifice, and redemption. Tom Anderson will find himself attacked, stabbed, hunted by the national police, and often questioning his own sanity. And he will learn about true love being the act of self-sacrifice.

 

Wilson previously published The Devil’s in the Detail (2012). He lives in Melbourne, Australia.

Some Monday Readings

 

On Shakespeare’s Two Heroic Friends That Saved the Bard’s Plays From Being Burned – Gregory Doran at Literary Hub.

 

Van Gogh would have loved to have seen the National Gallery’s exhibition on Hals – Martin Bailey at The Art Newspaper.

 

Kayaking with Lambs – Brian Miller at Front Porch Republic.

 

From A to Z, the Abecedarian Isn’t Just for Chaucer – Poetry Prompt! – Tweetspeak Poetry.

"The Way is Made by Walking" by Arthur Paul Boers

Sometime about 2005, Arthur Paul Boers went on a hike. Not just any hike, but the 500-mile-long Camino de Santiago in northern Spain. Already an experienced hiker, he made the journey in 31 days. And he wrote about his experience. 

But he didn’t simply write a travel diary of what he saw and where he stayed. Instead, The Way is Made by Walking: A Pilgrimage Along the Camino de Santiago is about the experience of pilgrimage itself, what it means and signifies, and what the idea of pilgrimage suggests for the Christian life. It isn’t a primer on pilgrimage, or even a step-by-step guide to the Camino de Santiago. This is the Christian life as a pilgrimage.

 

Boers explains why he was drawn to pilgrimage, its Christian roots, and its lessons for spirituality. Like the pack he carried on his back, a pilgrimage is always about the need to simplify, carrying with us only what’s vital and necessary. (He became such a stickler on this point that he tore out sections of the book he read along the way as soon as he finished reading them. The book was Don Quixote.) 

 

He goes on to consider the challenges of faithful pilgrimage, the opportunities for hospitality, what happens even to secular seekers along the way, and how to put pilgrimage into daily practice. And he sees walking as a spiritual practice.

 

Arthur Paul Boers

Just so you know, Boers also wrote about the blisters on his feet, the good and bad food, and some nice places to sleep along with those he’d rather forget about. And four appendices discuss recovering and reclaiming Christian pilgrimage, planning a pilgrimage, some well-known pilgrimage destinations, and resources specific to the Camino itself. 

 

The book, first published in 2007, so impressed the late Eugene Peterson that he wrote the foreword. 

 

Boers is an ordained minister and Benedictine oblate, and he served for many years as a pastor in rural, urban, and church-planting settings.  He served for six years he held the R.J. Bernardo Family Chair of Leadership at Tyndale Seminary in Toronto, Canada, and taught pastoral theology at Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary in Elkhart, Indiana. He’s also published Our Work, God’s World; Living into Focus: Choosing What Matters in an Age of Distraction; and Servants and Fools: A Biblical Theology of Leadership.  He received his D. Min, degree with distinction from Northern Baptist Theological Seminary, and he also holds degrees in pastoral counseling and peace studies.

 

You don’t have to travel to Spain and walk the Camino de Santiago to appreciate The Way is Made by Walking. You can practice the idea of pilgrimage in your own neighborhood or town. And while the 500-mile Camino might be too challenging, I’m thinking about the 120-mile path from Winchester to Canterbury.