An Impossible Dream: A Non-Believer on the Camino

By Peter Campbell

We live in disturbed times. Seemingly more now than at any time in the previous five decades, the planet appears riven. Against this troubling global background, An Impossible Dream traces author Peter Campbells six-week, eight-hundred-kilometre long walk along the Camino de Santiago across northern Spain, capturing what he saw and what he felt during the journey.

Using the Camino as a backdrop, Campbell looks back at the cultural and religious conflicts of the Iberian Peninsula in the Middle Ages, and he reflects on the history of the Crusades, the Knights Templar, the legendary El Cid, and much more, drawing comparisons between now and times past.

Through vivid descriptions and introspective reflection, An Impossible Dream portrays the physical, emotional, and psychological challenges Campbell faced as he undertook this epic walk, the relationships formed along the way, and the spiritual questions asked and answered. He considers his own conflicts and intolerances, and he offers an insightful reminder for anyone who has already walked the Camino, and a fascinating perspective for those who have yet to undertake that journey. He tells a story of a walk through lifea life lived, questions asked, and lessons learned.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press AU
• Release date: Jan 27, 2017
• ISBN: 9781504306362

Peter Campbell

Peter Campbell has been a traveller all his life, living, working, and visiting many countries across the globe, and undertaking treks on most continents on Earth. His professional background has been in adult education within the corporate environment, with his early writings being of a technical nature. Campbell now lives with his wife, Janet, in a peaceful, rural setting in the southwestern corner of Australia, close to the southern Indian Ocean, in the company of kangaroos and birds.

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Copyright © 2017 Peter Campbell.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-5043-0635-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5043-0636-2 (e)

Balboa Press rev. date: 01/26/2017

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Author’s Note

Glossary

Prologue

Restless

The Boy

At the foot of the mountain

Muy Hermoso, Muy Difícil

WASP … St Augustine of Hippo

Shoulds

Relativities

Unification

The Winds

Channelling John

The Path Less Travelled

Singin’ in the rain…

Marathon Man

Val-deri, val-dera

Silence

Somewhere …

Buen Camino

Not lost …

Boots off …

Cabaret

Time flies

Phew, that was close …

Open

Sunflower

Alice’s Restaurant

Doubts

Chided

La Doctora

Slow News Day

Lead and I will follow

Policía

Cruz de Ferro

Tolerance

Compressed

Impossible

Signs

Lazy

Camino Superhighway

Ramblings, Musings and Rantings

True

My Way

Proud

The Day After

Mañana en la mañana vamos …

Epilogue

References

The Impossible Dream

To dream the impossible dream

To fight the unbeatable foe

To bear with unbearable sorrow

To run where the brave dare not go

To right the unrightable wrong

To love pure and chaste from afar

To try when your arms are too weary

To reach the unreachable star

This is my quest

To follow that star

No matter how hopeless

No matter how far

To fight for the right

Without question or pause

To be willing to march into Hell

For a heavenly cause

And I know if I’ll only be true

To this glorious quest

That my heart will lie peaceful and calm

When I’m laid to my rest

And the world will be better for this

That one man, scorned and covered with scars

Still strove with his last ounce of courage

To reach the unreachable star

Copyright © 1965, Words Joe Darion, Music Mitch Leigh

Helena Music Company, Andrew Scott Music

ASCAP

I believe that the only true religion consists of having a good heart.

His Holiness the fourteenth Dalai Lama

For my parents, Tony and Patricia, my past; whose lives and actions shaped the boy of then into the man of today;

For Janet, my present; wife, partner, lover, friend. You accompany me on my journeys big and small, actual and metaphorical, and keep me grounded in many ways, so much more than the external world ever sees;

For Natalie, my hope for the future;

And for all those who through your words and your actions encourage me to find a good heart, and who willingly accept me for who I am. You know who you are; some of you are mentioned in these pages.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

M ANY PEOPLE HAVE played an important part in the development of this book, however to three I owe particular thanks.

Howard, for thoughtfully helping shape my deliberations, for challenging the fundamental precepts I have attempted to articulate, and for assisting me to find the language that sometimes eluded me.

Janet, for willingly accepting the seemingly endless hours as I sat in front of my computer turning my trip notes into this finished product, for checking the detail that in my enthusiasm I sometimes miss, and for supporting me unwaveringly in this project as she does in life.

And Kerri, who first walked just a few kilometres with me back on the 21st September 2015, and then re-walked the whole 782-kilometre journey with me as she read and re-read the various drafts I produced, forcing me to be clear in my thinking and succinct in my descriptions. Her final comment was "I didn’t travel many physical miles with you on the Camino, but this journey here, as we revisited your Camino, has been quite incredible. Thank you for allowing me to come along …" I will be forever grateful for the time she gave so willingly.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

T HE IMAGE ON page 79 is reproduced with the kind permission of Patty Blake of San Francisco, CA. The image on page 202 is reproduced with the kind permission of Melie Viera of Miami, FL. All other images in this book are the copyright of the author.

The blog excerpt on pages 145-148 is kindly reproduced with the enthusiastic permission of Kerri Daniels of Sacramento CA, to whom I owe a wider, deeper set of thanks.

The story on pages 222/223 has been subsequently verified with the subject and is included with his express permission.

My thanks to each of these people for their generous support.

The photographs in this book are chosen mainly to highlight a special moment or special relationships. Generally they are not technically very good images. A gallery of selected better quality images can be found at http://petercampbell.zenfolio.com/elcamino.

GLOSSARY

I HAVE INCLUDED TWO Glossaries, both intended to streamline my story. The first contains any Spanish word that is used regularly or which is a descriptor of an event or object. It is designed to avoid the need to repeat explanations or to assume that the reader recalls a description.

The second contains a brief description of the main historical characters who appear during the story and a page reference to them.

Spanish Words, Events or Objects

Main Historical Characters

PROLOGUE

All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveller is unaware

— Martin Buber (Austrian philosopher, 1878-1965)

I HAVE READ MANY books written by many people who have walked the Camino de Santiago, and specifically the Camino Frances, the ancient Christian pilgrimage walk that traverses an almost eight-hundred-kilometre path from the south of France to Santiago de Compostela in north-western Spain. In truth there are many routes for the Camino, the common factor being that the journey leads to the shrine of the apostle St. James the Great in the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, where tradition has it that the remains of the saint are buried. This is a story of my journey along the Camino Frances.

Many books that I have read about the Camino have been written from a perspective of the person looking to a way to heal something in themselves, or finding something that was lost in a relationship, or reconnecting with their own lost religious beliefs, or dealing with some inner demon. I applaud these people; an eight-hundred-kilometre walk is a serious undertaking, and I can readily see how such an endeavour heals both the mind and the soul, that uniquely personal combination of thoughts, feelings and emotions that each human possesses whether they are conscious or not. As I prepared for my own walk I felt I had no internal need to heal or find or reconnect or purge - to me this was to be an adventure, a thing of excitement and joy.

This prompts a seemingly simple question: "Why am I doing this Camino de Santiago?"

A simple and somewhat nostalgic answer might come from some forty years in my past when I had first seen the movie Man of La Mancha, based on Miguel de Cervantes’ four-hundred-year old book Don Quixote. Peter O’Toole, as Don Quixote, was captivating, magical, brilliantly mad. Sophia Loren, as Dulcinea, was beautiful, fragile, untouchable. The central themes of the movie revolve around matters of chivalry, decency, compassion, good versus bad, optimism, improving the world, and a hero who was mad. I was struck. It spoke loudly to my then idealism, an idealism that has never much lessened in me. A short time after first seeing the movie I was in New York. Most young blokes in New York in the 1970s headed off to the wild side - not me, I went to Broadway to see, wait for it, the stage version of the Man of La Mancha. Somewhere in that time the seeds were planted to go to Spain, to follow that impossible, quixotic dream.

Fast forward a couple of decades. At some point in the 1990s I recall reading Paulo Coelho’s The Pilgrimage, although its content has long faded into the cob-webbed recesses of my mind. It must have had an influence, although in truth I cannot consciously recall the detail.

Then at the earlier part of this century along came Martin Sheen’s and Emilio Estevez’s fabulous movie The Way. I loved this movie, and then even moreso their joint autobiography Along The Way, released a short time after the movie, thoughtfully given to me by a friend. Along The Way tells the story of these two men both in their own and in each other’s words, as well as the story of the making of the movie. More importantly it tells the story of their relationship with each other, and it served as a very powerful reminder of the relationship that I am saddened I never had in any such depth with my own father. Although I am clear in my mind that I am not walking the Camino as a way of working through issues to do with my relationship with my father, the Sheen/Estevez relationship and stories brought the Camino alive in a special way.

I struggled mightily with one major aspect of doing this Camino. To me, the word pilgrim has always had strong religious underpinnings, and I am clear that I do not want this to be, or indeed seen to be, a religious undertaking on my part. I have many friends who hold deep religious beliefs, and I readily accept them for who they are and that they have these beliefs. That I do not have any such beliefs does not imply that I think any less of them as people - I simply hold a different viewpoint to theirs. Conversely I have as many friends who proudly call themselves atheists. I’ve struggled with the notion of commonly accepted labels for much of my life - where I have been told that you’re an X or you’re a Y. I try not to think of myself in label terms. I believe American author and science communicator Neil deGrasse Tyson expressed it well when he said:

I don’t associate with movements. I’m not an ism. I think for myself. The moment when someone attaches to a philosophy or a movement, then they assign all the baggage and all the rest of the philosophy that goes with it to you, and when you want to have a conversation they will assert that they already know everything important there is to know about you because of that association. And that’s not the way to have a conversation. I’m sorry. It’s not. I’d rather we explore each other’s ideas in real time rather than assign a label to it and assert, you know, what’s going to happen in advance." ¹

As with so many people of my age I was raised with some elements of a Christian upbringing. During my first marriage I flirted with Catholicism for a series of very complex reasons, almost nothing to do with the church. My flirting led me to formally convert to Catholicism, an act that I felt at the time was somewhat inauthentic at best and downright hypocritical at worst, and yet with which I proceeded anyway. This ultimately turned out to be a, not the, contributing factor for the breakdown of that marriage. As a result I subsequently had little to do, and wish to have little to do, with the Church or with Catholicism in any formal sense. There were some painful learnings along that path as I sought to really understand what this period of my life meant, and how I had got to where I was. My thinking has evolved to the point where today I can comfortably declare my non-belief in an external god, and the freedom to live the life which that brings. Coalescing these thoughts, for the purpose of this book I have settled on the term non-believer as a description of what I am (or not). This doesn’t, by the way, mean that I don’t believe in anything. Quite the contrary. I believe in many things. Just not an all-seeing, all-knowing, omnipotent external god.

Does that then make me a hypocrite to undertake an endeavour that has not just religious, but strong Catholic roots? If I am looking for an adventure should I not simply return to the Himalayas, and to the Mahāyānan Buddhism of that region, which demands no mono-theistic belief system? Well, thankfully, no. A little bit of research has helped me out over the consternation I had associated with the descriptor pilgrim. The word pilgrim comes from the Latin peregrinus meaning foreign, and indeed in Español the word for pilgrim is peregrino/a. The Oxford Dictionary has come to my aid, defining, inter alia, a pilgrim as a person travelling to a place of particular personal interest and that a pilgrimage as being a journey to a place of particular interest or significance, these being also in addition to the definitions with a religious orientation.² So, foreigner and traveller I will be, as I have often been in recent years. This also sits very comfortably with my heritage.

My great grandfather, James Campbell, was an extraordinary traveller. I have on my desk relics from his travels to the Himalayas some 125 years ago, places where entirely coincidentally very close to which I would travel all these years later. That was just a small portion of his amazing exploits; his were more extensive journeys than many people attempt even today. His father, Matthew, travelled from his native Scotland over 160 years ago to start a life in the gold-rush town of Ballarat in the then Colony of Victoria, and both he and young James were present at the Eureka Stockade, a place absolutely central to Australian culture even today. Norman, my grandfather, travelled to South Africa and India, and indeed my father Tony to England, and again I have mementos of each of those trips, albeit that each of those were in times of war and therefore of a fundamentally different nature. My daughter Natalie has recently returned from a six months post-university world tour. Even though the reasons differ, over many generations we are each of us foreigners and travellers.

Having overcome the religious hurdle I had placed in my own path, the answers to why? have become somewhat clearer. However as I commenced my journey I was very conscious of the disorder in the external world, the wider world in which we all live, and this seemed in direct conflict to that about which one thinks of while embarking on a pilgrimage, religious or not. Around our current world, diverse groups of people are trying to randomly kill others, and our supporting political systems give the impression of being in disarray. One could be excused for feeling that this disorder is occurring more now than at any time in our history. What strikes me as I set out to walk my Camino, a Camino with strong and deep religious roots, is that so much of this disorder, this turmoil around us, is ironically created in the name of god. An all-seeing and all-knowing god whose supposed existence has some commonalities in each of the three great mono-theistic religions; Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the very religions that profess peace and yet whose followers (some of them, at least) seem to be waging a hateful war against each other. A god in which, after much reflection and after several dalliances, the existence of which I cannot believe. Indeed, a god in which I do not want to believe.

Given my declared orientation regarding religion, to set off on what is fundamentally a Catholic pilgrimage might seem like a very strange thing to do. Why would a non-believer set out to immerse himself in something that on the surface is at odds with his personal beliefs? It started as simply an adventure - a dream if you like - to undertake a long walk across northern Spain, to test myself both physically and mentally; to delve into the Spanish culture (linguistically, architecturally, gastronomically); to spend a very different type of special time with Janet; to put myself outside the routine of my normal day-to-day life and see what happens; to write it all down as both a reflection of my journey and a record for my future enjoyment and that of others. It ended up as that, and more. It became a journey, to borrow from Don Quixote, where one man scorned and covered with scars, still strove with his last ounce of courage, to reach the unreachable star. Not quite a quest, and not quite scorned and covered with scars, my journey all the same became an attempt to reach an unreachable star.

The book sets out to faithfully record what I saw and what I felt as I walked across northern Spain. It aims to inform and entertain, and also to inspire the reader to contemplate some of the wrongs in the world today by drawing comparisons between now and times past. Of course you do not need to walk the Camino to do this, although it is a wonderful journey and I would encourage anyone even the slightest bit interested to consider doing so. I ask no more than for the reader to use my story as a basis to reflect upon the world as they see it. An increased awareness as a result of that reflection will almost invariably cause a change in you, and I firmly believe that no matter how small, that will, in turn, cause a change in the wider world. As a result maybe each of us might become a little more tolerant, a little more accepting, of the next person, be that person Muslim, Christian, atheist, Jew, Buddhist, Hindu or agnostic. This, in the words of Don Quixote, is my unreachable star.

RESTLESS

Up, up and away, with TAA, the friendly, friendly, way.

– jingle for TAA, Trans Australia Airlines.¹

¹

1 955, MAYBE. I am four years old. A hazy, distant memory, unable to be verified, hovers just out of reach. It is tantalisingly real and frustratingly unreal all at the same time. A plane journey from Adelaide, South Australia, to Darwin, Northern Territory. Or maybe in the opposite direction. A TAA Douglas DC-10?

The detail doesn’t matter. This journey and many, many others that followed over my formative years set in train a restless way of living life that some six decades later has not left me, and that, in part, took me on this journey.

2015. Sixty years later. Accompanied by my wife, Janet, I wake early one September morning in the north-eastern Spanish city of San Sebastian and start a train and shuttle bus journey that, over the next few hours, will take me across the Spanish-Franco border to the town of St. Jean Pied de Port in southern France. From there, the next day, we will commence a five-week eight-hundred-kilometre walk back over the border and then all the way across northern Spain to the famed city of Santiago de Compostela.

This is the story of that walk. It is also the story of a walk through life - a life lived, lessons learned, questions asked.

THE BOY

Give me a child until he is 7 and I will show you the man.

– Attributed St. Francis Xavier (1506–1552) and others.

T HIS QUOTE IS widely attributed to St. Francis Xavier, a hugely influential figure in his time and still today. Xavier was born a nobleman in Javier, in the kingdom of Navarre, in north-eastern Spain. It seems therefore very fitting, and I am happy to accept its attribution, even if not completely accurate. History looks back kindly on Xavier, certainly more so than on some of his contemporaries, and I enjoy the thought, as I prepare to walk in the early part of our Camino journey less than forty kilometres away from where he was born, that his words have had some prescient effect on my life.

Like many of my generation, my upbringing was heavily