Welcome to this Camino Blog. If you are new it might be best to start with the introduction. Otherwise, carry on.
Location: Villafranca
Distance: 20.3km – 247.6km total. We were planning to have a short day and stop at Tosantos after 14km, however, felt okay so decided to carry on. Turns out Tosantos was fully booked so it was meant to be.
Weather: Nicest weather day so far.
Terrain: Very smooth path.
Physical condition: Pretty good. Feet might be coming right slowly. Here’s hoping. The owner of last night’s Albergue has walked the Camino 17 times! His advice is to “listen to the body not the mind” to avoid blisters and other issues. Worth a crack.
Other: Nice communal meal yesterday with 10 others. Albergue owners are friends of Paulo Coelho, who wrote The Alchemist. They have all his books and promote him heavily but are also very dedicated to the Camino and those that are walking it. Crystal is on fire and caught us up (we started a bit late). We are staying in the same place. Quite a large albergue.
SB 12 – Everything will be made new.
Recently I celebrated a significant birthday. When trying to give a speech outlining the 10 years since the last one I found myself unable to complete. Clearly I had not dealt with my shit.
I feel similarly when thinking about this SB.
One day all this shit will be stripped away and everything will be made new. We hold onto the promise that all this world with it’s pain and suffering will be renewed and we will all be revealed as we were supposed to be.
“We don’t yet see things clearly. We’re squinting in a fog, peering through a mist. But it won’t be long before the weather clears and the sun shines bright! We’ll see it all then, see it all as clearly as God sees us, knowing him directly just as he knows us!”
(1 Corinthians 13:12)
I hope they don’t mind me discussing this but at our church we have a few children with downs syndrome and autism. The fact that their parents find Ilam Baptist a church they can attend is one of the reasons I go. I sometimes wonder what will be revealed about them when everything is made new. I like to think they will shine bright as the sun.
We may be surprised on that day. We will see people for who they truly are. What they are really like when all of life’s constraints and experiences are stripped away.
The following is a you tube link to Dave Dobyn’s “song of the years”, a song adaption of a James K Baxter poem. If feels relevant here
”He will give me a white stone with my true name written on”
Until that day…….
Pictures
Dinner
Our albergue last night
More vapour trails
Nice old church with stork nests
Rough against rough 
Beautiful again J – loving these!
The Dobbyn/Baxter song/poem is pretty much perfect – I love to sing it with abandon, especially the line about the stone. Saw Dobbyn at the Theatre Royal as a kind of wedding anniversary thing (20 years!) a couple of weeks back. Was pretty crook at the time (me, not him), but still a great night.
This SB is the hardest one for me to grasp at the moment, and I say that as a natural born optimist! The concept the Scholarship History students have been given to work with this year is “History as Progress”. It’s a challenging one. Your Gapminder-types would say it’s obvious and true, but I’m not sure what to do with it in spiritual terms. Is living longer, more materially abundant lives what it’s about?
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Thanks.
If you want an argument for why things improve try “the rational optimist” but I am sure you are on to that.
I too am not sure about the spiritual/material link. Aka the econ/theology stuff I have been thinking about. You might like to listen to the “helplessness blues” by the fleet Foxes for some other thinking https://youtu.be/7HHgedNNQco
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