The Privilege of Intimacy

     As my date of departure approaches the 'themes' of my Camino become clearer.  Again and again recently, out of the swirl of emotions, half baked preconceptions, quiet meditative moments, and sometimes very physical anguish that roils my imagination, body, and heart, one notion separates itself out and breaks over me quite clearly: intimacy.  

     I think of how I'll long for intimacy.  I already think of my wife and children--I know I will long for them to share what I see and feel as I walk and adventure.  I will long for her tender touch.  I will long for their laughter.  The moments of everyday intimacy that make the life of marriage and family such a gift.  So many days apart will make me ache for that intimacy.

     I think of the intimacy of 40 days with Peter, my walking partner.  He and I have been friends for, what, 15 years now?  What will we speak of on day 15?  Where will we go as we plumb the depths of the Spirit together through liturgy and laughter?     

     As I thought about how I might draw those I know, somehow, into my pilgrimage, I came up with a riff on the idea of the prayer stone.  Traditionally, the pilgrim carries a stone from home, a weight symbolizing burdens, and at some point leaves it along the way, burdens lifted by The Way.  I set upon the idea of taking prayers, hopes, dreams, dreads, and visions, from folk at home, and offering them up daily as I try to follow The Way.  The response has been both gratifying and  terrifying: intimacy of a sort that I imagined, but am even now beginning to taste.

     I put up an envelope at my church and many in my church family have placed their prayers there for me to take. Others, including family and cousins and friends from afar, have used email.  I've read their prayers and been overwhelmed.  A heart laid bare, a word of anguish, a dream for a child, a hope for the future, a scream against the darkness of the death of a loved one--these have come to me, appeared in the inbox, and shaken my day.  I have had occasion to minster to the dying over the last 5 years.  I have taken to describing that experience as a sort of savage grace: a laying bare, a stripping of all pretension.  These prayers are that as well--savage grace.  To offer the sort of intimacy to another that friends and family offer to me with these prayers is so deeply moving I have not words for the privilege I feel, and the terror too; the terror that I am and will never be worthy of the offerings.

     In the Great Thanksgiving Prayer of our communion feast we plead for the intimacy of being made "one".  We plead,  "By your Spirit make us one with Christ, one with each other, and one in ministry to all the world, until Christ comes in final victory and we feast at his heavenly banquet."  At our earthly banquet we speak of an intimacy yet to come.   But the meal we share--the bread and wine, and I am sure in the same way, these  prayers I carry, are here and now that feast table of heaven, here and now, 'made flesh'  first fruits of the intimacy that is to come. 

     I walk soon in Spain.  I carry prayers, intimate prayers.  I am privileged to bear them.