Leaving the Weight of Our Losses Behind Us

I just got back from my seventh hike of the Camino de Santiago yesterday. One of the highlights for a peregrino (pilgrim) is arriving at the Cruz de Ferro, an iron cross at the highest point of the hike. Pilgrims bring rocks with them that symbolize something they then literally place at the foot of the cross.

In the movie The Way, the hikers get to the cross. And it invites them to leave something they’ve been carrying behind. One of the group, Sarah, to that point in the movie has shown up as prickly. But at the cross, she came what she had to do, vulnerably reading a prayer she’d written.

Sarah came from an abusive marriage and aborted her baby because she didn’t want her husband to have another person to hurt.

We see Sarah explaining it to another character, Tom. “I got rid of my baby girl, Tom,” she says, still broken inside. “Sometimes I hear her voice, my baby.”

More than 2 million pilgrims hike the Camino each decade. When you go to the Cruz de Ferro, you see the stones they’ve left behind. So much pain. The pain behind each rock, unique. But the pain we share as humans, universal.

I looked down at the pile of rocks before me and took a photo.

One little stone had the name “Pauline” neatly inscribed on it. Who was she to the person who laid the stone there? What kind of pain exchange was she a part of?

I remember when I went through one of the greatest betrayals of my life. It was night and I was out of my mind with the shock of it. The places I’d considered safe – the very fabric of my reality – were a lie. And I didn’t know what was real anymore.

In that place, God reached me and showed me that I had the choice right then and there between bitterness and forgiveness. It was in the words of Sheldon Vanauken, a “severe mercy.” Of course real forgiveness and healing would take me years, but I didn’t have to carry the great stone of bitterness with me.

Walk down any city street and if you could see what the R.E.M. song video expresses, you’d see that “everbody hurts.” Nobody escapes unscathed. But there is a cross and there is an offer, we can lay down the weight we are carrying. We can choose a path of freedom.

Backing up from the Cruz de Ferro, I saw small flowers growing, flowers representing “beauty for ashes.”

And on the bus home, thinking about Pauline and all the Paulines walking the streets around us, I wrote this poem.

The Stones on Cruz de Ferro 

We are pilgrims 

Carrying the rocks

Of our rejection

And broken living

Deep in our pockets.

We scramble the hills

And splash the ruts

Telling us it will 

Always be so,

Pulling our gaze down

To mud trudging.

Santiago’s Camino at

Its highest and most cloud-bound

Holds a cross calling out

For pilgrim stones,

Calling for an end to aching,

Offering freedom in exchange.

Mine carried my dream;

A nearby rock carried Pauline

and all she carried

In the heart 

Of the pilgrim 

Who left it there.

Cruz de Ferro – 

It’s not a tract,

It’s not theology,

It’s not a creed,

It’s just the heaviness 

Of a hundred generations 

Piled high, showing us

We are not alone,

Letting another carry our loss.