Camino Reflections: Whirlwind Experience
2025 Sheridan Camino Group at Santiago de Compostela Cathedral
The past week has been a physical and mental whirlwind experience in northern Portugal and northwestern Spain for Husker Jane and I.
Last Sunday, we met up with a group of 16 friends from our Sheridan Lutheran of Lincoln church family to experience walking the last 102 km of the Portuguese Way of the Santiago de Camino (also known as the Way of St. James). We started that 5 day journey in Vigo, Spain anchoring the southwestern coast of the province of Galicia. We hiked the path from Vigo to Arcade on day one (15 mi), from Arcade to Pontevedra on day two (9 mi), from Pontevedra to Caldas de Reis on day three (13.5 mi), from Caldas de Reis to Padron on day four (12 mi) and from Padron to Santiago de Compostela on day five (14 mi).
It was a fabulous experience, albeit a challenging one both mentally and physically for the 18 of us ranging in age from 12 to 76. We shared lots of joy and care together, met many fellow pilgrims from around the world — many who were doing either the 300 km from Porto or 621 km from Lisbon— along the way.
Beautiful Galician countryside through villages, farms, rural neighborhoods, cities, rail lines, mountains, forests, and stream and river beds was our environment for the hike.
It was wonderful (and somewhat of a relief) to finally climb in to Santiago de Compostela and to reach the Cathedrale of St. James on Saturday—that day with over 3,000 others who had been journeying from all of the other routes from across Western Europe—-many of them for over a month or more.
My reflection and constant reinforcement during the journey was how much we are all God’s children and at our core are all the same, with so many of the same struggles, joys, daily challenges, and blessings. While our cultures, our backgrounds, our upbringings, our educations, our nationalities, our physical or mental abilities, political persuasions, family structure, who we love or how we love them may be varied and diverse—we are all indeed children of God and share so much more in common than not.
The greeting on the Camino to fellow travelers is “Buen Camino” — which literally means “good road”. Time and space while burning through those 63 miles gave me the blessing to really ponder and remember that my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ in the gospels calls us to love one another, no matter our diversity, or what individuals or institutions in the world may do to distort or twist that message like we are seeing so vividly rampant in our culture at the moment, was a Buen Camino well worth the journey.
Ronnie Green
Camino de Santiago Pilgrim