Camino de Santiago – Silence – Deacon Gerry Palermo

Traditional catholic Albergues welcome all pilgrams. The standard is they present a las credentiales, showing the progress of your journey. Theoretically a person is briefed when receiving the booklet prior to the journey.

Social Room. Dormitories are stacked bunks, co-ed with little room but to sleep.

Tomorrow plan.

Silence. I mean this in multiple ways. I could not send Saturday blog due to connectivity. Silence in that these walks offer significant timespans of worldy silence. Here are a few photos so you can imagine how.

But I want to focus on Divine Silence.

Let’s take the Incarnation, discarding a falsehood first. In the incarnation the Father was silent but he was a supreme gift giver: the second and third person of the Holy Trinity. During the Incarnation, the Holy Spirit Permanently came to live in the Blessed Mother, then (simultaneously or in sequence depends on your bias) Jesus was incarnate by the Holy Spirit. All by the silent desire and silent dreams of God.

Please reference Leonardo Boff, Thoughts and Dreams for deeper take.

Saint Joseph is given no speaking lines in the New Testament. Did he speak, yes, two ways. Like the Lord he dispensed divine silence in his action roles. He also spoke words as that’s the only way we know. Know he dreamed.

God dreams of you and then acts on it. Joseph dreamed about Mary and then acted on it. Dream, please.

So I mentioned that this is a penitential pilgrimage. So included in that is a continuous recollection and recounting of my faults and failures. But God went silent. It is tempting to be annoyed with him, yes?

But each fault I brought up silence spoke otherwise. In the silence I went deeper. If you are okay with Freudian or Jung psychology you may recognize the process as root analysis.

Me: I am impatient, Silence: you don’t feel respected. Me: I am prideful, Silence says you covet things you think I will take them away from you.

It is good to confess objective actions as these are the doing. But Silence wants to fix the root cause. The root cause may also be sinful but MORE LIKELY the sin of our refusal to engage the silence that dreams dreams and acts on them.

Comforting Images that only speak when you consider them.