Pilgrim Reverence as a Pathway to Ecological Conversion: An Analysis of Phenomenological Journaling along the Way

Abstract

By fostering reverence, walking The Way can facilitate a critical tool in the promotion of what Pope Francis calls ecological conversion in his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’. Re-reading a series of personal phenomenological reflections she wrote during the course of her 2012 and 2017 pilgrimages along the Camino Frances through the lens of philosopher Paul Woodruff’s theory of reverence, the author explores the emotional sources of reverence pilgrims experience through the course of pilgrimage. Cultivated through a body of non-religious but characteristically pilgrim-oriented ceremonies, ritual activities, and acts of perception, the pilgrim reverence the author experiences and observes does not seem to draw from any single theological lexicon; it seems rather to extend, in all cases, into and beyond a feeling for the human community, to the earth itself. It is a spiritual exercise open to humanity itself, where pilgrims have the opportunity to foster recognition that everything is connected in our social, environmental, and economic ecologies.

1. Introduction: Laudato Si’ and the Call to Ecological Conversion

In his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’, Francis addresses humanity in its entirety, entreating people of every nation to pursue universal communion with the earth and all creation. Such communion, he argues, is only possible through large and small acts of liberation. Various global forces—anthropomorphism, technocracy, and free-market consumerism—weaken the bonds of communion by exploiting the cultures and gifts of small communities, diminishing and obfuscating the value of individual labor, and treating the whole of creation as the material wealth of people, political, and economic entities who own or otherwise possess it. In this, he aligns himself with the sustainability movement, which recognizes environmental policy is intrinsically tied to economic and anthropological interests—to consider one body of concerns without the others is akin to cutting off the leg of a stool.

Directing his comments specifically to Christians at the beginning and end of the encyclical, he calls for an ecological conversion, where the Christian’s relationship with Christ is marked by a commitment to protect creation in its entirety. Being “protectors of God’s handiwork is essential to a life of virtue;” he reminds practitioners of the faith, “it is not an optional or a secondary aspect of our Christian experience” (Franciscus 2015, III.217). Christians are to be stewards of creation, not to presume right of dominion. This ecological conversion, which must lead to a vocational commitment to protect and serve the entirety of God’s creation, is only possible by cultivating the eye of the heart. Persons of faith transform their relationship to the world when it is something they see with wonder, awe, attentiveness, joy, humility, and love. Francis draws on Martin Buber’s (1958) I and Thou as an intertext, remarking that just as each human being is a Thou to God, a “subject who can never be reduced to the status of an object […] it would also be mistaken to view other living beings as mere objects subjected to arbitrary human domination” (Franciscus 2015, III.82).

Extending his comments to all members of the human community through the text, Francis argues that a return from the abyss of “self-interested pragmatism” will be critical for the preservation of our common home. The protection of the earth and creation will necessitate adopting new models of global development, enacting new laws and policies, and continuing community activism. More importantly, he argues, it necessitates the transformation of individuals’ perceptions of themselves relative to the world. Although he does not cite Aldo Leopold, Francis’s words echo the foundational tenet of “The Land Ethic”: “In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and respect for the community as such” (Leopold 1989, p. 204).

While Francis aligns the new humanity with Leopold’s vision, he goes beyond Leopold’s systematic approach to a land ethic, addressing the phenomenological shifts that must occur within each individual to make it possible. It is only through seeing the world and one another through the eye of the heart that a universal communion with the earth and its creatures will ever be possible. It is love that will save us—specifically, philia. To draw from philosopher Charles Starkey, reframing our perceptions will foster “a fundamental change in moral perspective, because it internalizes the recognition of interdependence and in doing so changes our vision of the land, not merely the scope of our cost-benefit calculations. Just as we “see” people differently if we consider people, as people, worthy of some baseline level of respect, so we see the land differently if we consider it worthy of a baseline level of respect” (Starkey 2007, p. 91).

According to Francis, the new eco-ecumenism will entail revolutionizing the way we see ourselves and locate ourselves in the world, and will involve experiencing an authentic love for every single thing, to recognize its beauty, its dignity, and its Being. In order to see that everything is connected and begin to act accordingly, Francis states, our “concern for the environment thus needs to be joined to a sincere love for our fellow human beings and an unwavering commitment to resolving the problems of society” (Franciscus 2015, V.91).

Since reading the encyclical in 2015, I have felt that the Camino de Santiago offers a space for a transformative encounter such as Francis calls for, in so much as it compels the pilgrim to negotiate the cultures and gifts of small communities, and no matter what mode of transport they take, gives them a more deeply embodied experience of encountering the land communities they move through. Moreover, and equally importantly, it is an increasingly ecumenical space within which individuals can experience diverse cultural perspectives.

Between 1985, when the Archdiocese of Santiago began recording pilgrim arrivals (2491 pilgrims reported), and 1993, when UNESCO inscribed the Cathedral de Santiago as a World Heritage site (99,439 pilgrims reported), the pilgrim routes of Santiago de Compostela welcomed an exponential increase in the number of pilgrims visiting the rural agrarian regions of Rioja, Galecia and Castilla Y Leon in northern Spain (Bader 2018). Nearly 350,000 pilgrims journeyed to Santiago in 2019 (Oficina del Peregrino 2019); while the number dipped to around 50,000 during the initial year of the COVID-19 pandemic (Oficina del Peregrino 2021), based on data the pilgrim’s office in Santiago has reported each year, the numbers of pilgrims can be expected to continue rising exponentially for the foreseeable future.

Importantly, given Francis’s appeal to all of humanity to seek encounters that lead to authentic love for the world and its inhabitants, the percentage of pilgrims who do not walk for religious reasons is increasing relative to the total of pilgrims. At the completion of their journey, pilgrims are asked by the Oficina del Peregrino whether their motives were “Religious,” “Non-Religious” or “Religious and Other.” The percentage of pilgrims who identify as not walking for religious reasons has increased from 6.14% of the total population of pilgrims who arrived in Santiago in 2011 to 20.43% of the total population of pilgrims who arrived in Santiago in 2021. Rather than being a statistical outlier, this increasing percentage of pilgrims who walk for non-religious reasons has trended significantly upward over the past decade. More details are shown in the comparative table of responses (see

Table 1. Table documenting a sample of statistical trends in the motives of pilgrims over one decade of data collection by the Office of Pilgrims in Santiago.

Year	Religious and Other	Religious	Non-Religious
2011 (Oficina del Peregrino 2011)	93,147	78,969	11,250
	(50.80%)	(43.07%)	(6.14%)
2014 (Oficina del Peregrino 2014)	120,474	101,042	16,467
	(50.62%)	(42.46%)	(6.92%)
2018 (Oficina del Peregrino 2018)	156,720	140,037	30,621
	(47.87%)	(42,78%)	(9.35%)
2021 (Oficina del Peregrino 2021)	77,298	65,063	36,551
	(43.2%)	(36.37%)	(20.43%)

).

2. Writing in Place: A Pilgrim’s Phenomenological Method

Through my childhood and early adulthood, I had only the most cursory relationship with the earth or my impact upon it. Having sensory processing issues, I avoided many of the sensations I encountered outside, and became quite bookish. I intellectualized my relationship with the world, and while I was an early adopter of certain sustainability-oriented activities such as recycling and a concern for water rights, the land communities I moved through as I grew up were largely a backdrop to my existence. As the evidence of human impact on our environment has grown, and the existence of a global environmental crisis looms large, I began mitigating some of my behaviors and voting for policies that supported systemic change in our consumption-production-use practices. Over the past decade, however, my concerns for the ecological crisis have moved away from an investigation of what solutions and mitigations can be found in public policy and legal oversight, and toward an investigation into cultivating my emotional experiences in both the land communities I belong to, and those through which I merely pass. Like environmental writer Rudolph Bahro, I now see the present moment, and every moment, as providing an opportunity for a shift in the individual and collective conscious. As he notes:

The ecological crisis is a unique occasion to develop a new mode of consciousness to save humanity from destruction. We must widen and perfect our self-awareness in order to free ourselves of the conditioning of our birth and socialization.

(Bahro 1994, p. 219)

With heightened self-awareness, I can engage in the land communities I move through as intentionally as possible. In furthering my resolve to pay attention to them, I have elevated the importance of attention in my life. As I will explain below, phenomenological writing assists me in this engagement. As a writer, I have discovered that describing my lived experience within the dictates of phenomenology is a natural attention practice with revolutionary ends.

It is not coincidental that my focus began turning inward in 2012; the shift correlates with my first pilgrimage to Santiago that year. As a consequence of long hours walking in silence and near silence through meseta, forest, wine grove, and more, I found myself engaging in recording my apperceptions throughout the journey. My journaling during the sojourn focused on developing brief imagistic snapshots of how I experienced the places that I moved through, and the other lives within them. Take, for example, the following journal entry, typed on a smart phone during a break in the day’s walk on 31 May 2012:

Outside the Autoservicios

a dog is tied up,

pacing

in search of its master.

 

Its cries are sharp

as a rock in the heel,

the tender sliver

of longing.

 

They bloom wild and azure—

blue as the morning glories

covering the steel roof

across the street—

mounting one another

in perfect desire

for the sky.

Upon my return home, as I archived each of the brief impressions I had preserved in writing alongside my pilgrim’s credential, I realized how much the apperception of each encounter fostered within me a sense of profound spiritual intimacy with those places and the lives within. The fact of it encouraged me to continue this mode of writing as a way of grounding me and enlivening my sense of place wherever I happened to find myself.

3. Notes on Methodology

By the occasion of my third pilgrimage in 2017, a habit of writing my phenomenological experience of place had been formed. It had become more narrative through the years. I now habitually carried a journal and well-appointed black pen which were exclusively devoted to these exercises. Adoption of an older writing technology allowed for more discursiveness-in-writing along the Way. My short imagistic snapshots of being-in-place were replaced by more sustained impressions such as this, penned on 17 June 2017 during a rest stop at the side of the pilgrim’s path:

Along the red clay road, the white granite stones lie here and there, clinking softly when we scuff up against them, sending them knocking into one another. Strange to think, but they are both a perpetual part of this landscape, and utterly mutable at the same time, being scoffed and kicked, blown and weathered through the ages—moving, moving, ever moving from ditch line to ditch line, like pilgrims, I suppose. Stones like pilgrims. Pilgrims like stones. We may as well be the smallest rocks in this rural land, bouncing off one another without comment, fighting the erosion of this place, never wedded to the bedrock.

Before dawn, when we set out, they were invisible on the road. N set to shuffling in short steps, perhaps afraid of rolling her ankles. As the sky lightened, they became shadowless and formidable in their density, like tiny black holes. I later noticed her gait became longer, more confident.

Now they reflect the sun at an almost uncomfortable intensity, blazing like the hottest part of a flame, their long blue shadows extending toward our feet. It is no more comfortable to look to the horizon, where the origin of their light burns. I close my eyes and see them ghost-imprinted along the landscape of my inner eye—a negative relief of dark stone against bright road.

Over time, my writings have evolved in style and in scope. I have expanded the phenomena included in my observations to include reflexive thoughts I am engaged in while pursuing an activity, and include observational reflections of behavior demonstrated by myself and others. These decisions are not merely aesthetic, but philosophically founded—an evolving poetics-at-work informed by the ideas of Merleau-Ponty and the explicit phenomenological method outlined by Herbert Spiegelberg in The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction. Spiegelberg was a philosopher who studied under Alexander Pfänder and was well-acquainted with Edmund Husserl. Spiegelberg’s life’s project was to train individuals in phenomenological observation—encouraging both individual practice and workshop participation. The project, for him, was deeply ethical. It was a way of diminishing our solipsistic objectification of the world, and a way of elevating the possibility of what he called ‘inter-subjective agreement.’ There are our perceptions of what we encounter, there are others’ perceptions of what they encounter, and beyond that, the world as it is—a collection of beings we shall never have full grasp of. The four steps he identifies in the process are intuiting—holding the encounter with a phenomenon in your awareness, analyzing—examining the phenomenon and the scope of the encounter, and describing—writing down your description as if the reader had never had the experience. Through the process of writing, the careful and ethical practitioner must also outline their intuiting and analyzing processes (Spiegelberg 1960, pp. 659–75).

The humility undergirding this practice is apparent—and something which I find deeply attractive. As is the emphasis it places on individual experience as an epistemological method. If I mean to know the world, I should not sticker it over with concepts or derivatively ascertained knowledge—I must pay attention to it—how I perceive it, the emotional veil through which I perceive it. Attending to our encounters and their emotional tinctures with deep attention and mindfulness is, for the classically trained phenomenologist, a first and final act in human freedom and ethical engagement. For me, it is the only practical means by which to foster a lifetime of devotion, a sense of responsibility.

Merleau-Ponty’s writings, which I had first read as a philosophy undergraduate, and which I revisited in the years between the first and third pilgrimages in the hope of honing my phenomenological practice, has also informed my practice in three ways. In his seminal work Perception and Phenomenology, he posits that humans should not regard the body as a biological or physical thing, but as the locus of all experience, the source of all knowledge. As he states,

But our body is not merely one expressive space among all others, for that would be merely the constituted body. Our body, rather, is the origin of all the others, it is the very movement of expression, it projects significations on the outside by giving them a place and sees to it that they begin to exist as things, beneath our hands and before our eyes. […] The body is our general means of having a world.

(Merleau-Ponty 2012, p. 147).

The body is our general medium for having a world. We have no access to the world without the fundamental tools of our perception. Reminded of this premise after revisiting his texts in 2015–2016, my subsequent writings began to reveal more care to examining the body, my body, as a locus of knowledge, documenting the nuanced responses it has while navigating specific environments a great deal more. This has meant, in part, focusing a great deal more on how each of my senses engage in my environment and give rise to acts of perception, memory, and desire. It has also invited me to shift my investigations into how specific spaces, natural, curated, and created, invite bodies to engage with them in specific ways.

A second notable way that Merleau-Ponty informed the evolution of my phenomenological practice during the re-encounter was by granting me a more-than-creative license to observe others’ behavior—in particulate and as a collective, and to present it in the context of what I am experiencing. As he will later state in “Phenomenology and the Sciences of Man,” “Nothing prevents me from explaining the meaning of the lived experience of another person, in so far as I have access to it, by perception” (Merleau-Ponty 1964a, p. 65). In other words, phenomenologists can encounter others’ behaviors as phenomena; as the perceiving subject perceives these expressions, they are indeed a logical and appropriate subject for those seeking to engage in a philosophical observation of phenomena.

All this to say that the scope of what I was attempting to do with these writings was initially much smaller than is usually warranted attention in an academic journal. As phenomenology has been adopted for use in the social sciences under the name of participant observation, there is something of an expectation that first-person experiential writing has limited or qualified use as particulate evidence—a testimonial, perhaps, or to serve as echolocation for the interpretive I of the researcher. As indeed it should when used as an evidentiary method within the realm of the social sciences.

Phenomenology, however, originates as an existential enterprise, emphasizing an individual’s acts of the will (and creative processes) as a first and final vehicle of meaning, freedom, and agency. My phenomenological writings are undertaken in this more fundamental spirit—to hone my attention to my experience of the world. By heightening my levels of sensory awareness to that which surrounds me and how I engage with it, I become more sentient of and sensitive to the beings that exist in a shared context with my own. As David Abram articulates, “this genuinely ecological approach […] strives to enter, ever more deeply, into the sensorial present. It strives to become ever more awake to the other lives, the other forms of sentience and sensibility that surrounds us in the open field of the present moment” (Abram 1996, p. 272).

That being said, my reflections, accompanied by analysis and in an intertextual reading with Paul Woodruff’s Reverence below, reveal a pattern of engagement which may be useful to other pilgrims as they seek to develop an ecological consciousness. As Merleau-Ponty himself suggests in Sense and Non-Sense, the particularities of my experience, or yours, or his, are the portal to shared understanding. “We will arrive at the universal not by abandoning our particularity,” he reminds us, “but by turning it into a way of reaching others, by virtue of that mysterious affinity which makes situations mutually understandable” (Merleau-Ponty 1964b, p. 92). I believe this. And so I write.

There will be readers of these passages who recognize they have experienced phenomena in a similar way; there will be others who are invited into a deeper engagement with their own phenomenological encounters by reading mine. And there will be others still who demand quantitative evidence to support what is perceived as a generalized argument about the pilgrim experience. I will redirect this third group of readers back to the project of phenomenology as Spiegelman and Merleau-Ponty imagine it, and as I have embraced it.

4. Reverence and Its Emotional Origins

In a slight volume titled Reverence, philosopher Paul Woodruff carefully resuscitates reverence, that “ancient virtue that survives among us in half forgotten patterns of civility.” As he notes in the earliest passages of his text, “We have the word ‘reverence’ in our language, but we scarcely know how to use it. […] right now it has no place in secular discussions of ethics or political theory” (Woodruff 2001, p. 3). For Woodruff, as well as Francis, the project of restoring humans to their proper place and giving them a vision for a common future is an intercultural and ecumenical enterprise.

I had the good fortune of coming across Reverence as I was returning to the reflections I had written during my 2017 pilgrimage. My own writings suggest that the cultivation of reverence may be a foundational experience at the heart of the pilgrim experience, as well as the more general phenomenological experience of authentic love that Francis discusses in Laudato Si’. In accordance with Woodruff’s argument in Reverence, the reflections suggest that the cultivation of pilgrim reverence for creation—human and non-human—is fostered through the ritualized and highly ceremonial experience of three linked emotions: respect, humility, and awe.

His brief treatise on the emotional sources of reverence helped me discern patterns of respect, humility and awe that I experienced as a pilgrim but had not heretofore identified or named. These emotions arose in a series of ritualized, embodied practices I had undertaken during the course of the pilgrimage and deepened my sense of care and concern for our fragile planet and our fragile human community to a point of felt mutuality—as if we were bound in an intimate spiritual relationship. It felt like an ecological conversion, indeed. A conversion that had not arisen through religious practices, rituals, or ceremonies, but within decidedly pilgrim practices, rituals and ceremonies. Given the increasing numbers of pilgrims who do not walk for religious reasons, I found my own experience to potentially be an illuminating and invigorating ecumenical opportunity for others as well.

The narrative examples below attempt to illustrate how the journey of four weeks along The Way possesses the potential to engage a pilgrim in ecological conversion. Within each, I read my original phenomenological reflections, written in 2017, in dialogue with Paul Woodruff’s theory on reverence, which I read in 2019. It should be noted that each brief essay is a composite of three or more discrete reflections I made through the course of the journey and is written in the third person. To give the reader a better idea of where the initial phenomenological reflections begin and end, I have italicized the passages I have taken from them and provide the original text with dates in Appendix A.

5. The Singularity of Things: Rituals of Respect

Within several days of initiating their pilgrimage, pilgrims’ bodies adopt a new circadian rhythm. For all but the deepest of sleepers, the flight of nocturne is light and lyrical, taking on the serene character of duck slumber on a still pond. It is entered easily, and departed easier still—the sleep of those thrown into a strange new intimacy with strangers. Without alarms or other accoutrements, a rustle or a shift heard just before dawn within the dormitory sends pilgrims gliding into awareness, shedding sleep as if it were water. Thus, by five in the morning, many awake (A1). Some immediately slide out of their bunks and softly tred toward the bathroom; others begin the stealth process of packing what little they have had out back into their backpacks.

And here begins the first lesson The Way has to offer: a lesson on the singularity of things. At the beginning of each day, hands are compass; by them and them alone the pilgrim sets her course. Within the habitude of darkness, everything that is touched, used, or organized, identifies itself by texture alone. By the raw weave of its t-webbing straps, a toiletry bag is found. By its silky cord, a travel wallet is lifted and secured. By the soft angle of its heel, a sock is oriented, scrunched up, put on (A2). Again and again, over the course of thirty or more days, each object is touched, pulled out, unrolled, rolled, folded, stuffed, packed, with a respect not observed in consumer culture, where our relationship with things is utterly mediated by their use or social value. One pilgrim dresses, another slowly pushes his sleeping bag in a stuff sack, a third applies sunscreen; things are used and stowed away in backpacks without haste and with a consummate sense of intimacy (A3)—pilgrim hands assessing each object with a level of deliberation and respect that it is not given anywhere else. To be sure, the things the pilgrim carries are respected because they cannot easily be replaced, and because they are useful—they would not be there otherwise. This makes sense: a thru-pilgrim on The Way will have no more than ten percent of their body weight packed in their backpacks. Often, this means no more than a change of clothing, a small toiletry bag, a quick dry towel, a needle and thread for blisters, shower shoes. Nonetheless, this careful attention to the things themselves, the sojourner’s ritualized care for them, shifts the frame of their shared existence. The things carried are not merely things possessed, things of use—they are things with a particulate nature of their own; they are things with which the pilgrim has a relationship … they are things in his or her care.

As the pilgrim attunes herself to the particularity of things, the world is reinhabited as well. Wrought at the speed of footfall, one’s attention is drawn toward a world that illuminates itself—a bee nosing dozily in the arms of a lavender shrub, the sharp ochre color of an ancient cistern beaten by afternoon light, the wizened blue grey shadows of a ventricular chestnut tree. For years to come, the pilgrim’s journey will be recalled not through an itinerary, nor through a sequence of episodic events, but through these flickering encounters with flora and fauna, rock and wind, air and water.

Such encounters play a critical role in the formation of a sense of place for the traveler, while more often than not the character of cities and villages remains largely ahistorical. Attempt to prompt a pilgrim’s recollection of their journey by saying the name Villafranca Montes de Oca and you’ll be unsuccessful; the words hang together loosely, signifying a shadow of meaning, like a murmured rumination said under the breath, heard from another room. But the place will materialize again and again in body memory, through its own being (A4). Thousands of miles away and years removed, the pilgrim can and will return to the steely shale paths of the steep hills and wooded pine groves that brace the place carrying that name. Images of shrub bouquets of raspberry are set as a seal upon the heart, as is the mesmerizing dance of the thousands of butterflies summering there.

There are occasions when a preoccupation with weather, injury, or illness pulls the pilgrim’s attention away from the particularity of things. When his early-morning attention wavers, the ritualized space in which the pilgrim interacts with things is diminished. On one such occasion, a British pilgrim descended from the monastery dormitories at St. Juan Ortega in the grey darkness of a day that forebode rain. Without turning on his head lamp, he felt around for his poles in the corner and found ones he believed to be his, based on where he had left them in the stand, their height, and the nicked foam grip on one handle. The overcast day was breaking an hour and a half later when he discovered that they were not his. He had already walked four and a half miles when he discovered the error. I and my daughter encountered him nearly an hour into our own day’s journey, just as the rain began. He was returning to the albergue in the hope of finding the owner.

It is no surprise, then, with this new habitude of focusing on the particular character of things, that we begin to recognize other pilgrims by their things. As I came into Logrono on my last pilgrimage, I recognized a man who had stayed in the next bunk of an albergue I had stayed in 50 kms before—not by his face, voice or manner, for he was standing silently with his back to me at some distance. I recognized him by his light grey towel—the same towel that had been pinned to the back of the pack that leaned up against the lower bunk when I first arrived to the albergue three stations before. It was unextraordinary and rather non-descript by aesthetic standards. But it was particular.

Later, when I was handwashing clothing in a utility tub outside, he came past me to hang the towel on the line in the late afternoon sunlight. Although we had never spoke or been in one another’s presence during our earlier encounter he warmly smiled in greeting and tapped his head, looking at my wide fuchsia headband, as if to say ‘It is you, I recognize you by your headband. Hello again.’ I returned his warm greeting (A5). Ours was a mutual recognition of the singularity of people whom we will pass and encounter, but whom we will never know. It was made possible by cultivating an appreciation for the singularity of things.

6. Night Walking and the Alien Body: Ritual Humilities

Thirty to forty minutes after rising the first pilgrims will begin walking. They are soon followed by others, and then others, leaving in solitude and in pairs (A6). Through the dark before dawn, the pilgrim’s path is more whisper than song. For this, its missives are easily misunderstood.

Night walking after sunset seems to be fairly uncommon, except for those few pilgrims who commit to walking forty or more miles a day, or who get a late start. It is, however, very common to begin walking before dawn. And for as common as it is along The Way, for many pilgrims walking before daybreak it is both an unsettling and centering practice—one that makes pilgrims acutely aware of their own vulnerability.

In nearly all cultures, night and its missive, wilderness, are realms of danger. During their early-morning walks pilgrims are reminded of the primordial fear they have inherited from their earliest ancestors. Each, to a certain degree, feels a nascent vulnerability under the veil of night. They subdue it by harnessing all their senses, putting them to service on behalf of the present. They attend to each step, each sound, each shape that merges from the shadows, as if it were a singular point of focus. Completely engrossed with the task of navigating their way through the darkness, many will lose awareness of time, of people, of thoughts and distractions. Their headlamps jive and bobble, illuminating tree roots and fences, dolmen and dells. The feeble light jostles the horizon of the just-beyond, articulating the hazards at their feet with slow syllables of shadow. Until daybreak, it is the single measure of certainty (A7).

Through the early hours, the path’s blazes are veiled in obscurity. Pilgrims strike out on the day’s journey, only to find The Way obscured by darkness. At an intersection on a barren street or at a divergence in the stony path they find themselves forced to choose when no clear choice presents itself. And this provokes a second anxiety—the fog of discernment (A8). Some will plod on through what Frédéric Gros has called “the tremulous fear of choosing” (Gros 2014, p. 6). Those who are unwilling to make the choice will stop until daylight breaks (A9), others will take a false turn and find themselves at some point forced to double back, sometimes for miles (A10).

If, as Woodruff has noted, “reverence begins in a deep understanding of human limitations” (Woodruff 2001, p. 3), night walking germinates its tiniest seed, offering pilgrims conditions in which they are moving through strange and unfamiliar places with heightened sensitivity to both their bodies and their surroundings. Pilgrims who dare to walk beneath the cover of darkness attenuate their capacities to be present to whatever lies beyond their control, and to be centered by it. The shifting torchlight horizon and shadowy crossroad that lie before them offer uncertainty.

This uncertainty is the first gift of humility, a gift re-given every day. After arriving in Santiago, pilgrims are reminded of the instructive humility they have been given at the hand of night—how it compelled them to walk more by faith than by sight for hours and hours at a time. “Your night that lacked light has now become a torch of living faith,” a sign in the Pilgrim’s Office in Santiago reads. One can imagine that no matter what name she gives to her religion or spiritual tradition, no matter whether she possesses any at all, the pilgrim will read that sign and once again feel the soft humility of uncertainty during her night walking, giving the experience its due reverence in a new day.

Night walking offers pilgrims a second gift as well: an unadulterated experience of their own bodies. As our ancestors did before daybreak, we walk more by ear, and less by eye. A pause just beyond the eclipsed threshold of the albergue reveals the river’s song somewhere to the east. Perhaps the leaves of the trees loft and murmur, as if in mimicry. Somewhere, too, wheat stalks and grape vines stiffly shudder, few songbirds sing. And then the first step: the striking, alien sound of one’s own footfall on an ancient Roman road or even more ancient riverbeds, an empty city sidewalk or spare forest trail (A11).

The second gift of humility is enfolded in the lonely song of one’s own step, taken in a mostly silent world. At no other time of day is the pilgrim so aware of the alien sound of the self as in the morning—the silence of the world frames it so starkly. This second gift carries on well into the day, the week, the journey. From the first hours, their bodies betray sojourners time and again, announcing itself through alienness, awkwardness, and pain. Through long days of walking in well-worn clothes most pilgrims become intimately familiar with their own odor, unmasked by cosmetic and detergent indulgences. As the sun climbs high, the skin breathes heavier and heavier. The scent that rises is elemental, composed of the fragrances of foods one has consumed, of salty sweat mingling with bacteria, of greening wind and radiant sun. It may be outright appalling; for all, it is somewhat alien as well—the bloom of one’s body steeped in its environment (A12).

The scent will be tamped down at the end of the day by the fragrance of the water one bathes in; it will change again as one passes through the stone sanctuary of a church or takes in food once again (A13). In most cases the relational and ritualized cycle of the body’s scent with its environment does not mortify pilgrims until they begin encountering ‘fresh’ sojourners who, with well laundered clothes, are doing shorter or day trips during the last one hundred kilometers of the journey (A14). It does, however, recover them to what their contemporary lives have stripped them of—an intimate sensory experience of their bodies breathing in and out with the world.

Countless pilgrims will suffer from tendonitis, severe scrapes, or bruises during their journeys, injuries that will slow them or force them to reengineer their walking habits. And no matter how many months a pilgrim has spent breaking in boots before beginning the journey, blisters will often crowd within the tender canyons of one’s toes or rise like an archipelago across one’s soles. Such injuries are more than awkward—they are instructive, crippling the expectations of those for whom the destination is the goal. Elevating the body and humbling the will, they remind it of its weak and unstable footing in the world.

7. The Time of the Snails: Rituals of Awe

The Way wends west toward Fisterra, a place named for what the ancient Celts believed was the end of the world. The sunrise is never witnessed except by those pilgrims who, like Orpheus, turn backward. The snail’s rise, however, can be witnessed by pilgrims every morning, and it is a remarkable sight.

As the steel sky blanches into tin, the nocturnal kingdom of the European garden snail (Helix aspersa) reveals itself. In the darkness they have held their congress within the forests and fields bracing the path or roadside, but they are creatures of earth and water, not wind and fire. Their soft feet and antennae slowly undulate beneath their tiger eye shells as, guided by a remarkable homing instinct, they cross the road, finding their way back to their cool burrows before the sun regains its command. For as far as the eye can see, these tiny caravans punctuate the Way. So does the fine lace of their mucus trails, which glisten like the quicksilver stripes of a zebra fish darting through a coral reef (A15). Pilgrims will transect hundreds and thousands of these translucent trails for miles without realizing the kinship that they possess with these tiny mollusks. They have entered the time of the snails.

For one, over the next thirty days or more they will feel a shift in how they perceive and speak of distance. How far something is will be felt and articulated by landmark, or by time of day—not in arbitrary measurement units such as miles or kilometers. “How far are you going today?” one pilgrim asks. The other replies, “Logrono,” or “I’ll see how I feel after I stop for lunch.” Even those who possess a guidebook, who regularly pull out its maps and possess a well-planned itinerary which was designed with daily mileage in mind … even they begin to conceptualize distance from the vantage point of the position of the sun, of bodies in space (A16).

And this remarkable time of the snails is not merely characterized by slowness, but by a return to navigating by instinct. Like his snail brother, the pilgrim possesses an acute ability to find clean water. He will enter an unfamiliar city or village and find his way to a fountain or community water source (A17) with no more effort than it takes to arrive. Therein he will fill his bottle and rest, rest and rise and walk again, as if he too possessed the snail’s extraordinary capacity for finding his way home to a place he has never been.

At the end of their journey, many pilgrims will walk on to Fistera to watch the sun set at the edge of the world. Although the blazes will guide them for the fifty miles it will take to walk to the small village that bears the name Finis terrae—they will use that acute ability to find life-giving water in order to navigate the way seven additional kilometers to the peninsula beyond which, jutting out into the sea, marks the farthest western point in Europe. Through the night they will hold their congress, feast amid the flora and fauna, these creatures of earth and water … and then they will discover that the time of the snails is not easily left.

The next morning, before the sun rises and regains its command, nearly all will take a bus back to Santiago—the first motorized transportation they have been in for a month or more. They are awestruck to discover what, at least at a conceptual level, they already knew: what would take an hour in a vehicle on the interstate takes three or more days by foot. Just as the person who has eradicated sugar from her diet begins to sweat or feels heart palpitations when she has a glass of wine or a rich cream dessert, so the pilgrim feels the effects of the vehicle’s sounds, smell, speed. She suffers acute symptoms, (A18) physically feeling that which studies have for some time already revealed: speed, automatization, the false value that we place on it in our lives lived elsewhere, is a violence to our systems.

In The Land Ethic, Aldo Leopold remarked, “Conservation is a state of harmony between man and land. Despite nearly a century of propaganda, conservation still proceeds at a snail’s pace” (Leopold 1989, p. 207). Of course, in saying this, he is decrying the slow laborious level of human investment in conservation initiatives, yet had any of the variables in his life led him to walk The Way and enter the time of the snails, he might have been more optimistic. As the pilgrim knows, a snail’s pace has much to teach us about living harmoniously with the land.

8. Concluding Remarks

One may fall in love quite suddenly, but entering into and sustaining a relationship with one’s beloved requires intention and attention. So it is in our relationship with the Earth. While respect, awe, and humility are the necessary phenomenological conditions for fostering a sense of ecological communion, fostering a sustaining relationship with the Earth is like any other. To this end, there are intentional practices such as phenomenological writing that I have normalized as a pilgrim. It has fostered an ecological conversion that I have taken back into my engagement with the land communities I belong to at home. Other pilgrims may find phenomenological writing to be such a source of eco-spiritual formation as well.

As Woodruff argues, “Reverence survives and flourishes within [an agnostic age] because it is something that human beings need in order to face the most obvious, common, and inevitable facts of human life—family, hierarchy, and death. When rising doubts cloud the certainty of religious claims, reverence is all the more important (Woodruff 2001, p. 110). We live in such an age. But if Laudato Si’ provides a blueprint for a common future by reminding us to observe reverence for creation, the Caminos of Europe do what Francis’s encyclical itself cannot, as the percentage of pilgrims who do not walk for religious reasons increases. Pilgrimage helps to foster the phenomenological conditions for reverence—the reverence so needed in this age. It does so by altering our ritualized relationships with objects, ourselves, the earth, and one another, creating a truly ecumenical space where people of all and no faiths can exist with one another and the world in an ‘authentic humanity.’

Many hikers would note that this phenomenological experience of marked by rituals of awe, respect humility is characteristic of any long distance thru hiker’s ethic; however, I would suggest the great narrative tradition of the Catholic church, and the spiritual dimensions of pilgrimage, enriches the experience for religious, spiritual, and non-religious pilgrims alike. For centuries, the Church has recognized pilgrimage as a foundational spiritual exercise in reverence. It lays bare the pilgrim’s physical, emotional, and psychological vulnerabilities—because vulnerability—not certainty—is the only space where spiritual growth can occur. It is the place where we are reminded of our humble place in the web of creation, to respectfully give and receive from community, to find said community where and when we can. The message, it would seem, is transcending its origins, as new generations of pilgrims are drawing on and cultivating this age-old virtue of reverence, transcending the painful certainties by which they heretofore framed their existence.