Christmas on the Camino

We wake up on the blue, sheetless mattresses of the albergue, which are surprisingly clean and comfortable. So far, Spain takes great care of its peregrinos, the five of us feeling quite charmed by the two police officers who let us in for free and checked up on us later. The police are in charge of the albergue; nothing sketchy.

Our German and Danish counterparts, who came later in the night, leave some time apart from one another, but they know they'll see each other at the next albergue tonight. We stay in bed.

It's not that we're lazy, but with 30+ pound rucksacks full of our cold gear, computers, and more, we are feeling quite weighted down. Moreover, with the way that the rain has been peppering the landscape, paths are muddy (and I'm in running shoes) and streams are swollen. One of the streams, with deeply muddy farmland on either side of us, we ford by taking our shoes off and walking slowly and painfully along the rocks. Another we avoid, hearing from a cyclist that the water is chest-deep (verified by the German pilgrim), and take a several-kilometer detour along the guardrail of a very fast-moving highway. Yet so many cars are honking, so many folks in the town are glad to meet us, and we can't help but feel exhausted and touched.

We've been talking about small miracles lately. A waiflike, exhausted Merav opens her sleeping bag, borrowed from a friend, for the first time in the albergue to find a bar of chocolate––delicious Swiss dark stuff with Hebrew lettering––with a funny sketch of Merav and a note wrapped around it. Chocolate that has been there all the time showing up at just the right time. Miracle. Sunset and how we're inspired by it. Miracle. We wonder how we need to believe in these things, how the correlation of simple wonderment is too much to pollute by saying it is mere chance, how a miracle can remind us that God is still God, and God is good despite the world.

So we are in an albergue for Christmas, away from the consumerism, away from the two-thousand years of add-ons like Santa and the Christmas tree, away from all of that and... and Merav looks at both of us and says, "Merry Christmas." I fear I have been viewing this as a normal day––and perhaps it is, my scholarly heart knows that Jesus was really probably born in Spring––but as Ryan reads Luke and Merav wishes us Christmas wellwishings and we play Christmas carols and they get stuck in our heads then I realize what is the true miracle of Christmas. The true miracle isn't whether or not December 25 is Jesus' actual birthday or not, whether the magi convened on exactly that day with the shepherds and all of that, but rather that we come together as family and friends in community during the bleak midwinter when everything is dead and wet and tired and cold and we celebrate rebirth. By myself, Christmas is just another day, but in the presence of my loved ones and other of God's children, I see new life breathed into old bones.

Ryan feels like we've given up on the Camino, though all of us feel we have acted wisely. We are cutting it short because our packs are brutal and because of the rain and the fact that, as our German pilgrim friend tells us, the Via de la Plata is the toughest one of the five. Whereas the Camino Français has albergues every fifteen or sixteen kilometers, the day after tomorrow we would be traveling twenty-nine clicks without a town in between. So, for now, goodbye tying food onto our bags and goodbye socks dangling wet and putrid from them to dry. Goodbye also the long stretches of Spain, the wonderful people, and the good food, not to mention the combination of the nice Spaniard who gave us "chocolate for the Camino" yesterday. Sevilla is a nice place.

I don't feel this is a defeat. For me, I plan to come back, packed differently, with my bike and with whomever of you want to come, to do a whole route or two. I want to see Santiago and know more about this pilgrimage which, says our German friend who has hiked all of them (and some multiple times), is like a drug. For now, though, I have applications to finish and, if I am lucky, my family and Rachel to call. I hope, if you are set apart from your loved ones, that you see what is lovely around you, the small miracles like distant gorillas in the mist.

I am Western, I am Christian, I am complicit

Jaime is the leader of a small group of Jews in an old Jewish house in la Judería, the Jewish area of Córdoba. He is a young man, with dark black, curly hair, and it is a wonderful house, over five hundred years old, with a beautiful foyer with the Star of David inlaid in black and white stones in the Moorish style, before the Reconquista. We have seen other pebble mosaics in Spain but, as the small crowd of Jews gather around, somehow this one seems more powerful than the others. We liked the place because Jaime stocked it with CDs of singers from Israel whom Merav is familiar with, and one she knows; we love the place because they invite us in to celebrate Hanukkah.

Cheapskates, we visit all the sites that we don't have to pay for. The synagogue is nice, we see the statue of the Rambam (Rabbi Moshe Ben Maimónides), the influencial rabbi from the 13th Century who lived, taught, and doctored in Córdoba, and we wander the old streets within the city walls. We don't visit the old Jewish house except to view the gift shop, because then we would have to pay, and that pay could buy us churros or beer, of which a glass is nice when you don't have a home and wander around all day.

So Jaime stands at the large, iron Hanukiah, so tall that one of his fellows, an older man, pulls up a chair for him to stand to reach the candles. It is a small crowd, less than the ten men required to create a synagogue, and Jaime lets us know the ceremony will be in a mix of Spanish and Hebrew, not English, but to please ask questions later. He speaks (I find out later) about the meaning of Hanukkah, and how he is trying to create a Jewish community in Córdoba that is not Reformed, not Orthodox, not anything but simply Jewish. Religious tolerance, he says, is what we need, and my heart is with him. The older man gestures for Merav to light a candle, and does so with all of the other Jews, then he looks at me and holds out the candle for me to take. He must know that Ryan and I are not Jewish because of our awkwardness throughout the whole thing, not knowing when and what to say, like a Catholic church when I don't know when to kneel, but nonetheless I climb the chair, get level with the Hanukiah, and light the eighth candle of Hanukkah.

Feasting on the Hanukkah goodies in the museum part of the house––sugar donuts, challah bread and salt, anise liquor that reminds Merav of home, cookies, and thick, Spanish sweet wine made from raisins––I realize why there are not enough Jews in Córdoba to create a synagogue, and why there are only three old synagogues left in Spain: the Jews are either exiled or dead. I am further enraged as we stroll the incredible expanses of the Mezquita Catedral ("Mosque Cathedral"), among the nearly a thousand arches, wide open foyer of orange trees, a soaring minaret/bell tower, the many Christian side chapels and the magnificent cathedral among Moorish architecture: how two different religions expressed the glory of God. I am enraged because, in this converted church, there are glorious pictures of Christ opposite Spanish monarchs; a chapel of St. Paul holding a broadsword, the image of the Cross of Christ, which is odd for a man who had given up the sword; swooping battle scenes with angels butchering their naked opponents with the Cross/broadswords held high.

And as I see these things I think how unlike Jesus they are. How a church effective is very rarely a church that is richly adorned. This is not to tear down the cathedral, in fact, I think it is beautiful and one of the best spots in Spain––it is the Moor's capital and prize mosque––but when I think of Spain's history, I understand some and am baffled by other bits. I understand the 1492 Reconquista and the removal of the Moors: I understand why Ferdinand and Isabella would remove with violence what had been taken from Spain through violence. What I don't get, though, is how one could justify the Inquisition (which had its seat in Córdoba in a castle we did not go in) and the expulsion of all the Jews from Spain and, by a marriage promise, from Portugal. The culture lost! The lives destroyed! Granted, the displaced are long resettled, but I fear those attitudes still persist in the darker sides of our human nature, and if we do not educate about it then we will stumble into the horror again, just with a different religion, or a different race of people. I don't want to wade through the aftermath to find out we repeated what proud people just as human as us did five hundred years ago.

Merav is not really on fire

Merav is on fire. She yells, "It's not funny!" from the kitchen, but it is, and she tries to quench the flames with water. I tell her we fight fire with bread. And milk.

It is my night of making dinner and, faced with a lackluster pasta sauce––thrown out of whack by my choice of unpredictably sweet canned tomatoes––I dash the sauce with chilies. This doesn't do much for overall taste, but creates some sweaty faces 'round the table. Ian rocks back, exhales thoroughly, and says, "Are there chilies in here." Ryan loves the heat; Sally complains how she doesn't have any chilies as I wind up with chili after chili. Merav, however, is different. She gets one and covers her mouth like she is trapping a rampaging alien that comes to life with just enough pasta sauce combined with balsamic––and it is on fire, too; the terror!––and Merav, also on fire, runs to the kitchen, where she tries to wash the chili down with water, saying "It's not funny!" But it is.

Perhaps this is cruel. Well, yes it's cruel, but we have such jokes among friends, and we love Merav. We are on the move, through a country where giant legs of ham––jamón ibérico––hanging from their hooves in shops are as ubiquitous as the Spanish language, and this is interesting when traveling with an Israeli Jew. Yet we are unstoppable. We are headed from Málaga toward the Camino de Santiago and the Ruta Campostela and we are awesome, Ryan and his tapestry of digital pictures, Merav and her half-made didgeridoo in a hand-woven shoulder case, and, well, me, who flies on the wings of words like the mighty pterodactyl.

Climbing a mountain like ascending a staircase

We are rugged and awesome. Day by day we tread mountain paths fit for goats, with goats, to pluck olives and almonds, and provide animals with acorns, which will in turn provide them with life. There is so little water here that we don't bother to flush the toilet, we wash it down manually with the dark, cumulonimbus water which pours freely into our changing, chosen receptacles from the open pipe of the washing machine. We knife and devour prickly pears straight from the cactus and drink water we bottle ourselves from the stream at the top of the tallest mountain around.

Yes, we are awesome because of this, and more. Goats may tread this land and feed on it even when there is no grazing––on bark and twigs and such––but only we can claw out the rugged earth and conform its rocks to our stone walls. While mastering these things, a piece of clothing may rebel against us; it may say, "Nay! Let us not be put to such a test!" But when it agrees with a stick or stone that they should meet and tear, we subdue the troublesome clothing with thread and make it one piece again.

Actually, the earth was already cut for us, but the stones were heavy enough that we could only pile them with much gusto and manliness, the three of us, Ryan, Ian, and myself being the only human males on the farm, the women off somewhere else. When cigarettes are smoked here, though not by Ryan or me, they are only hand-rolled, and my forearms ache with a day's worth of hefting stones and mixing concrete.

To contribute to our hardcore awesomeness at this farm, we know Merav, a traveling Israeli who, like us, left making goats' cheese to come to Spain. In her case, she worked with troubled kids, teaching them simple life principles through agricultural labor and the stewardship of animals. In philosophy, she wants to be like Zorba the Greek, and though the book has topped my reading list for a while, I have not read it. She tells me about how Zorba worked random jobs, did random things, and kept life simple, enjoying every little moment along the way. As she speaks of Zorba, one can detect that, in her life, she would love to marry a man like Zorba and live in a mud-and-stone house that they built. Simple.

In many ways our lot is like the Old West. We are isolated, at least from the city; waterless to the extent that we took our first showers yesterday, after five days, and wear the same dirty, durable jeans; we live among scrub brush and hardy, centuries-old olive trees. When Ian and Sally moved here from England, there was no water at all, forcing them to construct a network of wells. They carved the road out of rock to get to our house from the main road, and when someone comes toward us, our doorbell is a pack of dogs, whose ears and bodies perk up with attention to what we cannot hear.

Now they have electricity, and even receive internet for free after allowing the company to use their land, if needed, to provide better access. But if you turn your back on the house, and block out the clicking hum of the power lines, then it would not be so surprising to see revolutionary pistoleros coming down the road, or perhaps a group of marching pikemen in their bright, feudal tunics, their regality suggesting that the local lord had a money, influence, and a penchant for fashion.