On the walls of a museum, we come face-to-face with two views of life. Both have the power to shake us to our roots. Both look like madness. And both are roadmaps of the human journey. But only one is true, and you can tell it by the tears. Pilgrimage 2012, Day 6: Madrid [A note to the patient pilgrims: After wrestling with jetlag and some personal baggage---not the kind subject to customs inspections, but carried with me on the pilgrimage no less, and seriously over the … [Read more...]
Not every encounter on the pilgrim path is with Christ and his saints. Not every experience is a mystical insight. Not everything you learn has spiritual significance. But it's all part of the road. It's worth taking a breather to note some of the things we've learned and experienced and encountered on this pilgrimage. They weren't necessarily on the agenda, but they'll stay with us at least as long as the dates of the Spanish Reconquest or the number of dining rooms in the Royal Palace of … [Read more...]
To build castles in Spain is an 800-year-old idiom meaning to daydream, to indulge in idle fancies. But we spent a day with Teresa of Avila, who built an interior castle in Spain as solid and lasting a fortification as the walls that circle the city of her birth. Pilgrimage 2012, Day 5: Salamanca to Madrid, via Alba de Tormes, Avila, and Segovia Spain's an odd place. It looks golden and sunny, with yellow plains stretching out under bright blue skies as far as the eye can see, but the soul … [Read more...]
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