Day 080s: Arriving before the Arrival … (July 03, 2019)
I ended up meeting up again with my Canadian friends, who like I had decided to walk the alternative route offered that day – a route that led to the relatively secluded wonderment that was the church of Eunate. Eunate had been one of the small handful of places I intensely wished to revisit* on this, my second Camino pilgrimage, and as it turned out it was the only one of those few places that still shimmered with a “magic” that in any way matched my memories thereof. And yet it wasn’t so much the place itself that brought the peace I felt that day, as much as it was witnessing what that particular place (and the longer, hot walk thereto) had done for David’s son, Peter – an amazing young man who resided somewhere on the autistic spectrum; an amazing young man who had walked next to me the entire way to Eunate; an amazing young man who was extremely worried that the church would be closed when we got there – and who was as enamored by the cornfields we continually passed as he was worried that the church would be locked up tight. And so it was that I was greatly blessed that day – blessed by a truly profound sense of peace; a peace that came not from arriving at my intended destination or from the thick calm that emanated from Eunate’s walls, but rather from realizing that I had played my own small part in getting Peter to arrive there – to see his joy upon finding that the church was indeed open – and to read that he himself had found great solace there …
“When you can no longer tell a distinct difference between being yourself and being Love, you can know that you are not far from Awakening.” ~ via Eric Micha’el Leventhal
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