Issue nº 235

To comment this newsletter, click here

The Arrival

The arrival, the difficult arrival. When we don’t walk very far, we want to go right back home. When we walk greater lengths; we feel a strong urge to keep on the road until we are overtaken by tiredness.

On the plane back to Brazil, I kept thinking only on absurd things: one of them was about my luggage. During these 90 days of travel, celebrating the 20 years of my pilgrimage through the Saint James’ Path, I packed 44 times. And I unpacked just as much, meaning that I looked into my suitcases, mulling over its contents a total of 88 times.

Sure, there must have been more interesting things to think about, but my heart is empty.

My heart is completely empty now when I look at Copacabana Beach. The only thing I am able to contemplate is my homeland, the ocean, listening to people speaking Portuguese and be happy to be stepping on the ground where I was born. At the same time, I let myself be taken by this mysterious sensation of being a stranger to myself.

“That’s bad,” one part of my brain told myself.

I replied to myself that it is great. Only truly vacant hearts can be filled with new things. And after this entire route took me through four continents, the fact that I kept thinking only of how many times I packed and unpacked my luggage isn’t exactly something I would consider to be a problem. My heart will be filled with everything I have experienced; but for that to happen I need time and I do not intend to speed up the process.

When I finished the Saint James’ Path in 1986, I stayed for six months in Madrid, having the same sensation. I am used to it and it doesn’t scare me, because I know that at some point I will understand what I have just experienced. That is a decision I took at a certain moment in my life and on which I shall bet everything: the answers will come up as I get on believing that nothing happens by chance, that everything has a meaning.

Every philosophy student knows the skepticism found in the work of the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. Few know of a short excerpt from “The Words”:

“I needed God. He was given to me and I received Him without entirely comprehending what I was seeking. Then – because my heart didn’t let Him set roots there- God ended up dying inside me. Today, when people mention Him, I say – like an old man trying to revive an old flame, ‘Fifty years ago, if there wasn’t a misunderstanding, if there weren’t certain mistakes, if there wasn’t the accident that separated us, both of us would have had a beautiful love story.’”

At this moment, I am having a love affair with Divinity.