2. Departure - The Moment Of Radical Innocence

2. Departure - The Moment Of Radical Innocence

 October 29-30, 2011

The changing of the clock to winter time has left me confused and I’m at the Galway coach station two hours too early.

Today is Laura’s first birthday, Michael D Higgins has been elected President of Ireland and I’m moving towards the Camino. It feels like standing on the edge of a cliff, taking a step into the unknown mystery of the future. In confession this morning the priest told me not to look back but to move forward in the Spirit. Apt advice for this journey.

So here goes! People have poured a host of negative questions on this trip - will I be able for it, it’s a terrible time of the year, the weather will be awful and I will be isolated. Of course I listened and had my doubts but the greater power is in the call to this pilgrimage.

“...when I think I have lost my foothold, your mercy Lord holds me up” - a psalm from todays Mass and from St. James himself “...the testing of your faith gives you the power of going on in hope”

No doubt my foothold will be lost many times, my faith and my very being will be tested but  I will go and I will trust.

In Santiago they will ask me my reason for doing the Camino. On a conscious, deliberate level, I am walking for repentance, conversion and reparation - in theRefiner's Fire. To learn to travel light again. But mostly I am following and unspoken calling, the pull of the Spirit that is akin to the call of the sea. 

The TGV train from Paris to Bayonne is a thrill that has awaited me a long time and now it’s mine for 8 hours or so. The fields are tranquil, some harvested, some ploughed and shades of autumn that I haven’t see for years. Ancient trees almost flame - red, yellow, rust - forests of them. Haze. There’s a stillness in France. Water a perfect mirror of sun, sky, trees - a lake, a river. The colour cast by sunlight is glorious. Nothing moves. Only the speeding train.

“To return to the moment of radical innocence” - from the book I’m reading. “Songs of Innocence and Of Experience” is the title of the book being read by the young man next to me. Innocence! Like the Camino, innocence calls me. Not a return to an earlier innocence that I’ve lost but there is a new radical innocence to be arrived at, revealed. Innocence understands very simply that its soul is beautiful and that it is loved.