From the Camino: Walking through Spain opened my eyes to some surprises. I found Spaniards who think bullfighting is barbaric. Many of them have blue eyes and blond hair. The weather along the northern coast is often cool in August. In fact, while northern Europeans flock to southern Spanish beaches to escape the cold, Madrileños flee the heat of central Spain for the country’s cool northern mountains and coastline. Tipping is not common (except with tourists) and sangria is more often served to tourists than locals who are drinking gin! I made all kinds of mistakes in Spanish which were usually ignored or kindly corrected (i.e., the word, at least in Spain, is reserva, not reservación, which I said I don’t know how many times). Different provinces have distinctly different ways of pronouncing Spanish, and they don’t all use the “th” sound for “c” and “z.” Almost all churches appear to be locked except shortly before and after Mass times. Mass was said in four different languages, Basque, Spanish, Asturian and Galician, while I traveled across the north of the country. If you surrender American expectations of when and what to eat to the Spanish times for meals you stand a much better chance of really enjoying yourself. Who knew?
Perhaps that seems a bit stream of consciousness, but these were some of the surprises for me in Spain. Getting past my American, Californian presumptions was all part of the adventure. But there were lots of surprises.
Getting past myself, on Camino was also a surprise. I found solitude much easier than I thought. At the same time, being alone in a crowded, noisy boisterous bar, night after night, with everyone speaking rapid-fire Spanish, was emotionally challenging.
It was profitable to attempt to see things through Spanish eyes, through pilgrim eyes, setting aside my own Californian lenses. It was easier when I took difficulties in stride and continued to find beauty. The days were far more filled with blessings when I was actively looking for them. There was a lot to learn, a lot to be fascinated by, a lot to revel in, a lot to grow, if only I took the time to see.
John 9:1-7 – 1 As he passed by [Jesus] saw a man blind from birth. 2 His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” 3 Jesus answered, “Neither he nor his parents sinned; it is so that the works of God might be made visible through him. 4 We have to do the works of the one who sent me while it is day. Night is coming when no one can work. 5 While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” 6 When he had said this, he spat on the ground and made clay with the saliva, and smeared the clay on his eyes, 7 and said to him, “Go wash in the Pool of Siloam” (which means Sent). So he went and washed, and came back able to see.
For reflection: I am told that magicians don’t care to perform for small children. For little ones, it’s every bit as likely that rabbits come from hats as cages. They don’t know to be fascinated by the trick. They’re just happy to see the bunny.
As we learn and age, though, we learn, codify and organize our lives. We recognize and establish boundaries and order. We develop expectations. We categorize. It’s easier if we can frame our world in ways that fit together in recognizable patterns. This process serves us, creating order, but also dis-serves us, allowing us to miss other ways of seeing and experiencing the world and other people and cultures.
Experiencing someone else’s culture is often an adventure into the unknown, where presumptions fail us, and life, and people, prove more complex, more dynamic, further outside the normal bounds of our horizons than we would have thought.
Donald Rumsfeld is famous for having said, “There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.” It’s convoluted, and Rumsfeld was mocked for it, yet his point is true. We don’t even know when, immersed in a different country, and doing things in our own typical way, we fail to understand the genius of the local way of doing things, and we can even offend people with a different set of expectations without even knowing it. And it also happens that others don’t have any way of knowing when they offend us. Just realizing this gives us reason to patiently work to understand the awkward and surprising.
In essence, there are places in our lives where we are blind, and don’t know it, where we are ignorant of other’s expectations and unintentionally slight, where we err, and haven’t figured it out yet.
In the quiet open spaces of the Camino we might revisit in an open way what we think we know. Can we, with humility, admit that we know less than we thought we did? Can we give God the glory for how varied and wonderful the world is, as well as those who populate it in the Divine image?
In our passage, Jesus, again, on that constant journey that marked his public ministry, passed by a man born into the world without sight. Where some see only his loss, and predicate sinfulness, Jesus sees an opportunity for healing.
Lord! Cure our blindness. We want to see!
