Soul’s Code

Sometimes God’s work gets in the way of a person’s relation with God. In no profession is that more true than being a pastor, a new study shows. Six out of every 10 Christians feel their hectic schedules keep them from spending time with God, it reports. Two thirds of pastors surveyed said their overloaded pace of life interfered with growing in the Lord.

If these people have no time to contact the Divine, how can lay people manage it at all?

The super busy are increasingly multitasking their spirituality. A workout turns spiritual when you do yoga. Artists and politicians mix their religious lives with their work.

Perhaps the best way to retain your connection to God is to try seeing His signature in everything — the Buddhist notion of, “Open yourself to love.”

Picking up from David Deida’s insightful book . . .

We arrived in Santiago on the 14th two days ahead of time in the rain, we walked 18 days and covered about 250 miles of up and down hill, lots of rocks and tough going. But it has been a fantastic experience.

We attended the pilgrim mass the day we arrive, got our Composela, the certificate that we had walked the whole way, and we stayed two nights in a 17th century monastery.

Yesterday we took the bus, how heavenly, to Finisterre, the end of the known world in medieval times. The sea was wild and beautiful and after a rainy morning the sun came out for our walk to the end of the earth.

This stage of our pilgrimage is over. We have endured and with the help of many made it here. It is a wonderful feeling.

Phyllis the Pilgrim

We made it over the second of two mountain ranges on the route to Santiago. We were struggling and I mean struggling up one particularly difficult section on a road and gasping for breath when we heard the plop, plop, plog of a jogger. Yes, a man well past his prime, possibly nearly my age, jogging straight up the mountain. We were inspired to plug on. The views from the mountain tops are spectacular and our walks are accompanied by the buzzing of the bees in all the flowers, the tinkle of cowbells, and the songs of birds. I think I even saw a wolf one morning in a deserted section.  We have seen lots of skinks; ugly, ugly huge black slugs; an eagle; many, many storks; and a great variety of other birds and butterflies.

We took a bit of side trip to Samos yesterday. It is a famous monastery, dating from the 6th century. A nice walk along the river to get there past groves of wild foxgloves and huge shade trees that must have been hundreds of years old. We were disappointed in the monastery since it was refurbished in the 18th c. in ugly Baroque. We stayed in the pilgrim hostel there which turned out to be a mistake: very crowded and noisy. We attended vespers where the monks do Gregorian Chant, but with an organ accompanying the monks, that missed too.

We are bit worse for wear, but no worse than many of the other pilgrims. We are in a larger city today so we are staying in a hotel. What luxury. Our own WC and privacy.

We wish we had more Spanish or at least another European language. But we manage and people are very kind. Looking for the hotel where we are staying we went astray, and one man in a car with his wife and child, stopped and got out and gave us gesturing directions. Thus we manage with the kindness of strangers.

My Internet is coin operated so I will close. You are all in my thoughts as I pray with my feet on the road to Santiago.

Phyllis the Pilgrim

There’s no doubt American poet Wallace Stevens was a searcher. He wrote surrealist, transcendental poems such as “Of Mere Being:”

The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze distance.

A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.