Still Thinking – The Film: The Way

The film The Way, currently screening in Melbourne is worth seeing.  It is the story of a man walking the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, also known in English as The Way of St James. The Camino – the road or the way - traditionally starts in St Jean Pied de Port in France and finishes in Santiago de Compostela, a distance of 780km traveling through Northern Spain.  For centuries it has been a spiritual and religious pilgrimage walked by pilgrims as an act of devotion and personal reflection.

I won’t give away too much of the story of the film but suffice to say that it is the journey of father who longs to be reconnected to his son.  Travelling The Way becomes for him like many pilgrimages, a metaphor for life itself.  As this man walks the road and covers many kilometres each day, he begins to find not only his son, but himself.  And this happens through conversations with the companions he meets on the road; through the many ordinary experiences of daily life that somehow point the extraordinariness of life and the unrelenting beauty, wonder and splendour of the landscape he passes through.  And slowly all this and the passing of each day does its work on his inner world.

During my “pilgrimage” to Jerusalem in 2007 the first words I wrote in my journal was a quote from the English writer G.K. Chesterton, “The traveller sees what he sees. The tourist sees only what he has come to see.”  As I set out on my own journey of discovery I wanted to see what was before and not just impose my preconceived ideas of what I should see or more importantly, what I had planned to see, on the travel experience.  So the three hour trip in the shuttle bus (the sherut) from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which could have been done in half an hour became and adventure rather than an inconvenience.  I spoke at length with Israelis, Germans and Americans about why they had come to the Holy Land and each responded with their own personal story.  In the film the experience of a stolen backpack takes the “pilgrims” on a rich and satisfying journey. 

Early in the film the son of the man we are following on The Camino says to his father, “You don’t choose a life, you live a life.”  And our capacity to let go of the life we think we should live and embrace life as it is lived is the key to life in all its fullness.  I am sure I have quoted the Irish philosopher and poet John O’Donohue when he wrote, “I would love to live like a river flows, carried by the surprise of its own unfolding.  Those words have become like a mantra for me because I see in them the challenge to surrender the false and egoist desires of life and embrace life that is. 

Thomas Merton the Catholic Monk had a very clear sense that we live either through the true self or the false self.  He wrote:

Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self.  This is the person that I want myself to be, but who cannot exist, because God does not know anything about him.

I find that helpful because if life is about anything it is about letting go of illusions and living into reality.  On The Camino the father through his own personal journal began to see who he was, what he valued and only then could he recover the relationship with his son.  He found the “isness” of life.  He found that truth in both in his travel companions and the landscape he travelled through, but most importantly he found his true self.  The self that is known only in God.

Christopher