It was 2019 when my wife and I paused for a short while in the square over looking El Camino De Santiago in Northern Spain. Pilgrims with pain and delight written in their last few steps on a long journey filed past us. In this special moment I wrote two thoughts. Firstly a small poem, romantic and about love and the end of loneliness and secondly a note on the power of pausing to drink in the moment.
Contemplation requires more than sitting or stopping it demands our attention. The pilgrims before us were not at the end of a journey but the realisation of a goal, to discover God in an experiential way. On the surface faces seem to display emotion, tears were common place but not likened to sadness, for inner joy caused their flow. For some maximum energy had been brought to the long walk to others the distance covered was more in thought than meters.
Two people arrived at the front of the cathedral placed their backpacks down and looked at each other for a few seconds. Then with tears they simply wrapped arms in an embrace which said nothing about victory or conquering. They were not marathon runners beating a time or achieving a physical goal. These were people of faith who knew they had had their spiritual eyes opened.
Paul the apostle wrote to the church in Ephesus saying that in prayer he hoped that the eyes of their hearts may be enlightened, so that they would know what is the hope of God’s calling, what are the riches of the glory of God’s inheritance. He went on to talk about the amazing indescribable power of God and the profound affect to faith encountering God can have. I have no doubt that those people I saw in 2019 will never be the same again. They had contemplated the wonder of God and the place they hold in the heart of God. Yes they had given all their physical strength, neither looked athletic, and they had emptied their emotional tanks leaving their soul naked and open to the influence of a transcendent God.
We might sit on a wall with a cup of tea or walk a 1000 miles on pilgrimage but the true journey is one of contemplating the majesty and availability of God to an open soul. Thomas Merton wrote: True contemplation is the work of a love that transcends all satisfaction and all experience to rest in the night of pure darkness and naked faith. This faith brings us so close to God that it may be said to touch and grasp Him as He is, though in darkness. I think Merton recognised, hence his use of the word darkness, that our profoundest and deepest encounters with God are a small glimpse through a keyhole, shrouded in darkness, leading to the light.
I suspect no matter how amazing the encounter with God is, we know normalness or humanness breaks in and we have to find a way back to the sacred moment that brought naked transcendent faith. Those two pilgrims promised each other to return to that very spot. As I took their camera to take a picture I knew the spot to return to was not El Camino De Santiago but to where the eyes of their hearts had been enlightened
Rob Wykes 