From the Camino: Simone Hivert began her first segment of the Camino back in 2001. She spread the experiences over several years, taking four different trips of one week each. The last covered only the last 21 kilometers when she walked into the City of Santiago on October 27th, 2020.
She began her first leg of the Camino when she was eighty-one and didn’t complete her last one until she was one hundred years old. By the time she finished, she was deaf in one ear and blind in one eye – but that’s not how she perceived herself. What she knew was that she still had good feet, one good eye, and one good ear. Isn’t it always a question of perspective and gratitude?
She had certainly experienced her share of difficulties over the years, but she remained positive and upbeat, looking forward to new discoveries and the pleasure of encountering other people. She didn’t let her physical struggles get in her way. In fact, her friends said she was notable for her upbeat, people-centered, spirit.
She has had many hiking experiences, not restricted to the Camino, as she says in her own words, “We have great surprises…We meet people from everywhere, of all ages, we move forward together and, we realize that we are far from being able to carry what they are carrying and yet they are smiling! It gives humility, you know.”[1] It’s a lovely description of the Camino, even if she was speaking more broadly.
Gen 7:6 – “Noah was six hundred years old when the flood came upon the earth. 7 Together with his sons, his wife, and his sons’ wives, Noah went into the ark because of the waters of the flood.”
For reflection: Child bearing and rearing can hold travel at bay. Finances can stretch too thinly to set out in our early years, and necessity overrides piety. But then comes retirement…in which some die quickly. My mother spoke of women in her childhood who, at 50, put on black clothes and spent the next 30 years dying, saying in refrain, “What can you do?” It was one way to approach the final decades of life…but why would we do that?
With retirement comes new possibilities, including the empty space to listen attentively to God, the time to travel, and the combination of these two in pilgrimage. The elderly have the time and the will to set out on pilgrimage to far off holy sites. They have often waited for decades for the opportunity.
Genesis says that in his 600th year the Lord asked Noah to enter the ark he had been building, leave his home, and set off on a crazed, God-enraged flood. His age is clearly a massive amplification; even so, with all the metaphor and layered symbolism of this story, and the wild exaggeration of Noah’s age, it makes the case that God’s call can come at any age.
There is no abandonment of the mission of our lives due to longevity. At whatever age we find ourselves, the purpose of our life, the great mission of our life, may yet lay before us. Who’s to say that the most important, most God driven act of your life, might not happen when you’re 87?
Are you letting your age get in the way, unnecessarily? Genesis 7 suggests, Noah set off on his wildest, most purposeful journey, for the survival of the species, at the mythic age of 600. Do your best to top him.
[1] LaCroix International: “100-year-old French woman to finish the Camino de Santiago,” Wednesday, July 20, 2022.
