Pilgrims reflect on the walking the 500-mile Camino de Santiago If life is a journey, then the Camino de Santiago is the ultimate metaphor. “A friend once told me that once you realize everything you need in life fits in a pack on your back, life becomes a lot easier, except for the realization that a lot of what we have in life is a burden,” said Matt Shepardson, who has walked the Camino three times in the last seven years. “The most prominent experience I’ve ever had in my life is hiking the Camino,” Shepardson, 57, a retired airline pilot who lives northwest of Philadelphia, told Our Sunday Visitor. Shepardson said he hopes to walk The Way of St. James for a fourth time. “It’s become such a part of my existence, there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about something related to the Camino,” he said. A group of hikers walks down steps along the trail of the Camino de Santiago. Photo courtesy of Greg Daly For more than a thousand years, pilgrims have walked hundreds of miles through the countryside in France, Western Europe and the Iberian Peninsula to venerate what tradition holds are the relics of St. James the Great in the Santiago de Compostela Cathedral in the Galicia region of Spain. Shortly after the relics were discovered in the ninth century, the Camino became a majorpilgrimage route. In medieval Europe, countless pilgrims made Santiago one of Christendom’s great pilgrimage destinations, alongside Jerusalem and Rome. St. Francis of Assisi himself is said to have walked the Camino from Italy. The Camino de Santiago attracts more than 200,000 pilgrims a year from all over the world. Many are Christians, but countless others come from different faith traditions or none at all. What they often share in common is a search for meaning and clarity, which have become increasingly difficult to find in secular modernity. “People on The Way are searching for ‘the more,’ not more material, but something that’s beyond this life, because they know they’re made for something greater,” said Lisa Gulino, a parish employee in Maine who walked the Camino in 2014. Gulino, 57, who facilitates classes for the University of Notre Dame’s STEP program, told Our Sunday Visitor that she walked the Camino to reflect on her life as she turned 50 and as she hit a milestone of working 30 years in parish and diocesan lay ministry. She also wanted to commemorate the Year of Faith that Pope Benedict XVI declared from 2012 to 2013, in which he asked the faithful to reflect on their lives as disciples. “My friends would talk about it, but I didn’t really feel called to do the Camino until the Year of Faith,” Gulino said. She carried six pounds of prayer intentions in envelopes during her Camino, which she began at O Cebreiro, a tiny Spanish village where a Eucharistic miracle occurred in 1300. A lesson in humanity The Camino de Santiago actually refers to several routes in Spain, France and Portugal that end at the cathedral in Santiago, Spain. The most popular route is the French Way — the Camino Frances — which attracts about two-thirds of the pilgrims every year. The Camino Frances starts just over the border from Spain in St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port, located in southwestern France in the Pyrenean foothills. From there, the 500-mile Camino winds through four of Spain’s 15 regions. “It’s a long route,” said Shepardson, who like many in the last decade was inspired to walk the Camino after watching “The Way,” the 2011 movie about the Camino de Santiago de Compostela that starred actor Martin Sheen and was directed by his son, Emilio Estevez. “It was one of those things in faith, the inspiration, it just wouldn’t go away,” said Shepardson, who was still working at the time and had two teenage boys at home. Two years later, after getting time off work and buying hiking equipment, Shepardson was on his way to Europe. “The Way works great as a reference for about the first week of the Camino,” he said “By the end of the second week, the actual experience brings you so far past what the two- dimension of a movie can communicate.” Still, the film captures some slices of life along the Camino pretty well, most notably the camaraderie and friendships that develop between pilgrims throughout the entire six to seven weeks that they’re journeying through the Pyrenees and flatland regions of Spain. “There were so many personalities,” said Jason Steidl, 36, of Brooklyn, New York, who walked the Camino in the summer of 2011. “The friends I made on the trip were from Australia, Denmark, Germany and Italy. You really do make an international group of friends. Those relationships were incredibly special to me. I’m still in contact with a lot of those folks,” said Steidl, a visiting assistant professor of religious studies at St. Joseph’s College in New York. Steidl told Our Sunday Visitor that some of the people he drew closest to during the Camino were atheists or secular in their outlook. “A lot of people are doing the Camino for many different reasons,” he said. “For me, the diversity of perspectives really enriched the Camino. We could bounce ideas off of each other and share our very different backgrounds.” Fran Szpylczyn, 63, an office manager for the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Glenville, New York, told Our Sunday Visitor that “all pretense is stripped away” on the Camino as pilgrims walk alongside one another, bearing each other’s burdens, and often sleeping in the same “albergues,” or pilgrim hostels. “There’s no artifice. People are snoring, farting. … One guy snored like you could not imagine. This was like seismic activity snoring,” said Szpylczyn, who walked the Camino in the fall of 2016. Steidl added that one realizes “how human we all are” when walking the Camino. “Staying in the albergues, you’re very close to other people, sometimes sleeping just a few feet from other people,” Steidl said. “You know, people make sounds. People have bodily functions going on. People snore. People smell. It’s just a very human incarnational experience, beautiful in some ways but also sometimes very challenging.” Over the course of the Camino, Steidl said he learned to avoid sleeping in the same room as a Hungarian woman who snored loudly. Szpylczyn mentioned one woman who developed a reputation among other pilgrims as “the annoying, bossy Italian lady.” “You see all these different personalities, everybody is just kind of thrown together, like a river of people moving along,” Szpylczyn said. “But you know, everybody’s seeking something when they’re on Camino.” Fran Szplyczyn hikes along the flat, open plains of central Spain known as the meseta during her pilgramage of the Camino de Santiago in 2016. Photo courtesy of Fran Szpylczyn Opportunity for discernment For Michael Rogers, 40, a legislative aide at the Massachusetts State House in Boston, walking the Camino in 2014 and 2017 gave him the clarity he needed to discern his vocation. “There were things I wanted to think and pray about,” said Rogers, who was an ordained Jesuit priest when he traveled to St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port in 2014. Walking the Camino in two stages — he had to stop in 2014 because of bad blisters on his feet — gave him the courage to leave the Jesuits and seek laicization after realizing that he had not been allowed to discern his vocation for himself, and that he had been effectively “pushed” into the priesthood and religious life. However, in an interview with Our Sunday Visitor, Rogers emphasized that his leaving the order was not acrimonious and that he still loves and has a good relationship with the Jesuits. “Right now, the road’s open,” Rogers said. “I know what the next destination is, but I don’t necessarily know what each stop along the way looks like. That’s a lesson you learn on the Camino.” Pilgrims walk the Camino de Santiago on cobblestone streets. Photo courtesy of Greg Daly The Camino also gave Greg Daly the clarity he needed to see that the life of a Dominican friar was not his life’s calling. “The Camino for me became a good opportunity to take five or six weeks to think. But in the end, I did a lot less thinking than I thought I would and a lot more — I know it’s a cliche — just being,” said Daly, 46, the editor of Leaven, a new digital magazine for Irish Catholics. Daly, who lives north of Dublin, Ireland, told Our Sunday Visitor that he had been a Dominican novice in the months before walking the Camino in May and June of 2014. He noticed that many people on The Way were at various transition points in their lives. “More than anything, there were people who were there in between stuff, whether they were in between jobs, just retired, just finished college. There were a lot of people reconsidering things, and that’s where I was. I had been gearing up for religious life for years, and it hadn’t worked out,” Daly said. Walking everyday with a friend, Daly would say the Rosary as he hiked through the countryside in France and Spain. He was mindful of the countless others who had walked and prayed those same paths over the previous millennia. “You’re still walking a route that has been hallowed by century upon century of people praying, people hurting, people sharing their physical sustenance, their prayers, their stories,” Daly said.