Slow Camino - My Adventure on the Camino de Santiago Pilgrimage by Terence Callery
When I was a high school freshman, I had never been addressed by anyone who immediately struck me as truly enlightened. The prior of Portsmouth Abbey School was Father Aelred Graham, and I had never met anyone so at peace with himself. At 23 he entered the Ampleforth Abbey in England to study for the priesthood with the Benedictines. He was ordained in 1938 and was named Prior of Portsmouth Abbey in Rhode Island in 1951. Around that time, he began a long correspondence with Thomas Merton. A Trappist monk, Merton wrote 70 books on spirituality, social justice, and pacifism. Merton’s bestselling autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain (1948), was so powerful that it sent a whole generation of young men, including many World War II veterans, into monasteries. Both men were authorities on comparative religion, and both had a deep understanding of Buddhism. They were among a handful of Western thinkers who opened a dialogue with prominent Asian spiritual leaders, including the Japanese writer, D. T. Suzuki, and the luminary Dalai Lama. Merton published Zen and the Birds of Appetite in 1967. In 1963, Prior Aelred’s influential book, Zen Catholicism, was published. It was the fall of 1965, and I was lucky to have my timeline intersect with Prior Aelred’s who would shortly leave Portsmouth Abbey in 1967 for three months’ sabbatical in Japan.
He looked enlightened with his shaved head and round glasses. He spoke quietly in a measured cadence with his hands crossed. He made a unique clicking sound with his tongue against the roof of his mouth when he said certain words. The entire student body of 200 boys sat there in the church as Prior Aelred began to speak to us about meditation.
“When discussing meditation, we commonly think of meditating on or about something. We have a theme for our meditation. This makes sense as giving a focus to our minds. But whatever theme we choose, we usually find that it turns out to be rather banal, and that it cannot hold our attention. So we become distracted, our minds wander, we daydream—which is a form of wishful thinking, of craving, therefore—and meditation becomes frustrating, perhaps more frustrating than any of our normal everyday activities.
“Here I would suggest that the fine point of meditation is not to think about something, however edifying, but just to be something—in this case to be our true selves. Whenever we are doing anything that requires external action, we are never quite our true selves. We are actors, doers, assuming some necessary role or other, though it could be a highly virtuous, even an heroic role.
“Yet at times we need just to be ourselves—for it is only when a man’s actions flow out, so to speak, from his true being, that they make acceptable sense. It is commonly admitted, I think, that we are our best selves when we are wide awake and aware. Not self-consciously aware, in an egoistic self-preoccupied sense, but insofar as our consciousness is actualized--existentially (to use a current phrase)—so that in some quite indefinable way our being and our knowledge merge. Momentarily freed from distractions—we just are.
“To achieve this condition implies, not that we should think about something, but rather that we should think about nothing (no-thing). However, our minds being what they are, this seems almost impossible. As soon as we strive to think about nothing, that too becomes a thing (perhaps an image of a circle, or an empty hole), and we are as badly off as ever. What we can do, though, if we are sufficiently alert, is not to cling to any thought—to let all thoughts flow by, detach ourselves from them, so allowing them to fade away into nothingness from lack of attention.”
I was hooked. I was always wary of anyone who told me what to think or believe, especially if it seemed like dogma. I had been exposed to enough of the world to come to the conclusion that there was no one truth but rather many truths. Here was a man telling us to fill our minds with “no-thing.” This was a “those who know do not say–those who say do not know” experience for me. All 200 boys spent the next half hour doing an exercise in meditation. Prior Aelred told us to sit comfortably in our seats with our backs erect and relaxed. Our hands were open and lay in our laps. We closed our eyes. We were told to imagine that sand was filling up our feet, then our ankles, then our calves. We focused our thoughts on just our bodies. The sand filled up our thighs, our abdomens, and our chests. We imagined sand filling up our arms and shoulders, our necks, and finally our heads. At the end of his talk, Prior Aelred quoted St. Augustine from memory to us boys. “Recognize in thyself something within, within thyself. Leave thou abroad both thy clothing and thy flesh; descend into thyself: go to thy secret chamber, thy mind. If thou be far from thine own self, how canst thou draw near to God? For not in the body but in the mind was man made in the image of God. In his own similitude let us seek God: in his own image recognize the Creator.”
I remember it as if it were yesterday, even though it took place 50 years ago. I was given a special gift by Prior Aelred on that day, which I would not fully unwrap for five decades. While I had moments of intense awareness that I called the “infinite moment,” I never systematically took the time to reserve a portion of my day to meditate. Perhaps it was that a walking meditation was more natural for me than any sitting meditation exercises. I would fully unpack this gift on my first Camino, when almost every day I slipped into a Zen meditation as I walked. I wonder how many other gifts I was given over the years that also were overlooked and unrealized. How many yellow arrows pointing the way had been obscured by a narrowly focused consciousness and passed by unseen.
When I was a high school freshman, I had never been addressed by anyone who immediately struck me as truly enlightened. The prior of Portsmouth Abbey School was Father Aelred Graham, and I had never met anyone so at peace with himself. At 23 he entered the Ampleforth Abbey in England to study for the priesthood with the Benedictines. He was ordained in 1938 and was named Prior of Portsmouth Abbey in Rhode Island in 1951. Around that time, he began a long correspondence with Thomas Merton. A Trappist monk, Merton wrote 70 books on spirituality, social justice, and pacifism. Merton’s bestselling autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain (1948), was so powerful that it sent a whole generation of young men, including many World War II veterans, into monasteries. Both men were authorities on comparative religion, and both had a deep understanding of Buddhism. They were among a handful of Western thinkers who opened a dialogue with prominent Asian spiritual leaders, including the Japanese writer, D. T. Suzuki, and the luminary Dalai Lama. Merton published Zen and the Birds of Appetite in 1967. In 1963, Prior Aelred’s influential book, Zen Catholicism, was published. It was the fall of 1965, and I was lucky to have my timeline intersect with Prior Aelred’s who would shortly leave Portsmouth Abbey in 1967 for three months’ sabbatical in Japan.
He looked enlightened with his shaved head and round glasses. He spoke quietly in a measured cadence with his hands crossed. He made a unique clicking sound with his tongue against the roof of his mouth when he said certain words. The entire student body of 200 boys sat there in the church as Prior Aelred began to speak to us about meditation.
“When discussing meditation, we commonly think of meditating on or about something. We have a theme for our meditation. This makes sense as giving a focus to our minds. But whatever theme we choose, we usually find that it turns out to be rather banal, and that it cannot hold our attention. So we become distracted, our minds wander, we daydream—which is a form of wishful thinking, of craving, therefore—and meditation becomes frustrating, perhaps more frustrating than any of our normal everyday activities.
“Here I would suggest that the fine point of meditation is not to think about something, however edifying, but just to be something—in this case to be our true selves. Whenever we are doing anything that requires external action, we are never quite our true selves. We are actors, doers, assuming some necessary role or other, though it could be a highly virtuous, even an heroic role.
“Yet at times we need just to be ourselves—for it is only when a man’s actions flow out, so to speak, from his true being, that they make acceptable sense. It is commonly admitted, I think, that we are our best selves when we are wide awake and aware. Not self-consciously aware, in an egoistic self-preoccupied sense, but insofar as our consciousness is actualized--existentially (to use a current phrase)—so that in some quite indefinable way our being and our knowledge merge. Momentarily freed from distractions—we just are.
“To achieve this condition implies, not that we should think about something, but rather that we should think about nothing (no-thing). However, our minds being what they are, this seems almost impossible. As soon as we strive to think about nothing, that too becomes a thing (perhaps an image of a circle, or an empty hole), and we are as badly off as ever. What we can do, though, if we are sufficiently alert, is not to cling to any thought—to let all thoughts flow by, detach ourselves from them, so allowing them to fade away into nothingness from lack of attention.”
I was hooked. I was always wary of anyone who told me what to think or believe, especially if it seemed like dogma. I had been exposed to enough of the world to come to the conclusion that there was no one truth but rather many truths. Here was a man telling us to fill our minds with “no-thing.” This was a “those who know do not say–those who say do not know” experience for me. All 200 boys spent the next half hour doing an exercise in meditation. Prior Aelred told us to sit comfortably in our seats with our backs erect and relaxed. Our hands were open and lay in our laps. We closed our eyes. We were told to imagine that sand was filling up our feet, then our ankles, then our calves. We focused our thoughts on just our bodies. The sand filled up our thighs, our abdomens, and our chests. We imagined sand filling up our arms and shoulders, our necks, and finally our heads. At the end of his talk, Prior Aelred quoted St. Augustine from memory to us boys. “Recognize in thyself something within, within thyself. Leave thou abroad both thy clothing and thy flesh; descend into thyself: go to thy secret chamber, thy mind. If thou be far from thine own self, how canst thou draw near to God? For not in the body but in the mind was man made in the image of God. In his own similitude let us seek God: in his own image recognize the Creator.”
I remember it as if it were yesterday, even though it took place 50 years ago. I was given a special gift by Prior Aelred on that day, which I would not fully unwrap for five decades. While I had moments of intense awareness that I called the “infinite moment,” I never systematically took the time to reserve a portion of my day to meditate. Perhaps it was that a walking meditation was more natural for me than any sitting meditation exercises. I would fully unpack this gift on my first Camino, when almost every day I slipped into a Zen meditation as I walked. I wonder how many other gifts I was given over the years that also were overlooked and unrealized. How many yellow arrows pointing the way had been obscured by a narrowly focused consciousness and passed by unseen.