Winter 2025: Keeping Time
Letter from Our Editor
Fellow Pilgrims,
Alpha and Omega, the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, throughout Christianity have been displayed together to symbolize God’s infinity and eternity. Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. Pilgrims who journey to the Catedral de Santiago de Compostela may be familiar with a monogram on the mullion between two arches at the cathedral’s southern doors. There, the letters are displayed in reverse, Omega and Alpha. The end is the beginning. Having reached Santiago, a new pilgrim way of life begins.
We began the 2024-2025 La Concha editorial year with the theme RHYTHMS OF THE WAY, which considered the cadence of the Camino through the cycles, repetitions, and patterns of pilgrimage. In this final issue of the editorial year, we come full circle—the end is the beginning. Returning home, what rhythm and tempo do pilgrims set? We invited contributors to explore the ways they’ve brought the rhythms of pilgrim life and daily life into syncopation–as in music, when various rhythms are played together and interrupt the regular flow.
This La Concha issue explores the theme KEEPING TIME. We have book reviews about an atheist on pilgrimage and about the life and work of a parish priest posted to a mountaintop village whose painted yellow arrows would start an avalanche that is the modern-day Camino de Santiago. We also have a review of the film The Way, My Way, on the cusp of its long-awaited U.S. release. We have reflections from fathers who walked with a son or daughter and found a new appreciation for the nature of parent-child relationships. We hear from pilgrims whose Camino experiences helped them transcend once-unhealthy relationships with time to live more intentionally, and from a minister whose pilgrimage was a season of sacred time to prepare for the coming ordinary time of retirement. Others tell us about daily practices they’ve taken up—involving sunlight, systematic reflections, and even a smartphone app—to sustain a pilgrim way of life. We hear about lessons in group dynamics, compassion for self and others, a friend’s selfless gift, the importance of storytelling, and ideas to cope with post-Camino blues. We have poems that mark beginnings and endings, one that reminds us that to be a grateful pilgrim is a practice, and another that recognizes that the Camino continues for as long as the journey takes.
Join us in this exploration of the many ways we recalibrate our back-home routines and reset our internal metronomes to keep our pilgrim hearts beating and our connections to the Camino vibrant as we carry on in daily life.
May your journey be sacred,
Amy
Winter 2025 La Concha Content
American Pilgrims News
Letter from the Chair – Winter 2025
Winter 2025 letter from American Pilgrims on the Camino Board Chair Joe Curro, plus a summary of the October 2024 meeting of the American Pilgrims Board of Directors.
Chapter Happenings – Winter 2025
A Winter 2025 compilation of American Pilgrims on the Camino chapter happenings.
Ambassador of Spain Accepts Invitation to Serve as Honorary Patron
Spain’s Ambassador to the United States H.E. Ángeles Moreno Bau accepted an invitation to serve as the first honorary patron of American Pilgrims on the Camino.
Camino News
A Pilgrim’s Point of View on the 2024 Annual Symposium for Pilgrimage Studies
A pilgrim reports on her experience attending the 2024 Annual Symposium for Pilgrimage Studies hosted by the Institute of Pilgrimage Studies on the William & Mary campus in Williamsburg, VA. While the conference is designed for scholars, she says anyone interested in world pilgrimage and religious tourism is welcome.
Walking the Via Turonensis from Paris to Chartres
A pilgrim provides a synopsis of his 70-mile trek on the lesser-traveled Via Turonensis from Paris to La Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Chartres in France.
Hospitalero Corner
The People Provide
A Ribadiso Welcome Service volunteer discovers that it isn’t the Camino that provides, as the timeworn saying goes, but rather it’s the people we encounter along the way who make the real magic of the Camino.
Pilgrims Way: Reflections on the Theme "Keeping Time"
A Lesson in Compassion for Self & Others
A graffiti-scrawled message on a Camino waymarker challenges a woman to reconsider the rules for pilgrimage that seemed so clear and straightforward to her nearly a decade earlier and to find compassion for herself and others making their own way.
A Modern Means of Keeping an Ancient Practice
During Vespers in an ancient convent, a pilgrim on the Camino de San Juan de la Cruz is delighted to discover the townsfolk and friars in attendance using a smartphone app to follow the Evening Prayer. Ever since, on most days he accesses the app on his own phone to pray the Liturgy of the Hours, finding a modern means of keeping an ancient practice.
A Pilgrim’s Obligation
Upon returning from her first Camino, a woman speaks with a priest who tells her pilgrims have only one obligation once they come home: they must talk about their pilgrimage, to share the experience. Fourteen years later and so many pilgrimages since, the self-described natural born storyteller is still talking about her Camino.
Bringing the Camino Home
A pilgrim offers advice for coping with the post-Camino disorientation and sadness some can experience upon returning home.
Continuing Community
Being active with his local American Pilgrims chapter helps a man find a sense of continuing community that allows him to relive his Camino experiences anew while helping others foster their own.
Foibles & Lessons Learned in Planning for a Group Camino
A man embarks on a Camino with four other older gentlemen, and along the way learns lessons about the trials, tribulations, and tensions that can arise on a challenging journey amidst group dynamics. Despite these many lessons, he is still grateful for the experience and his traveling companions.
Homecomings
A woman realizes she is the most organized, most patient, and best version of herself on the Camino, and she wonders how she can reboot herself to be that person at home.
I Hope You Know I Love You
A man who lost his father before he turned 30 and chose a career caring for those facing the end of life taught his son to make every moment count. When that man died, his son sought to carry on his father’s example, creating meaningful experiences with his children, including a 12-year-daughter with whom he walked the Camino. Connecting with her in that moment helped him feel connected to his late father, too.
Keeping Time With Sunlight
As she sits in a rustic, rural church on the Meseta, a woman notices a patch of light dance across the sanctuary wall, and in that moment senses a spiritual invitation to “Always look for the light.” As she continues on her Camino, she finds abundant time with sunlight to recognize how her soul experiences God. Back home, she makes a daily practice of noticing how the shifting sunlight draws her pilgrim soul’s attention to the light of God within her.
Keeping Up With the Times: What to Know Before You Go
A woman spots an infographic in Santiago that heightens her awareness for how we can all do our part to be good citizens of the Camino.
Marking Sacred Time
A woman embarks on a transitional journey of sacred time. It helps her feel a sense of accomplishment for a larger journey of faith and calling and find a way to frame her journey into retirement and experience the sacred to be found in ordinary time.
Mother Time
Through a pilgrim way of life, a woman who had once felt a long-standing battle with a paternalistic, regimented sense of time, discovers a more nurturing, maternalistic appreciation for being present in the moment.
Experiencing Real Time
The daily rhythm of the pilgrim’s life helps a woman experience real time. Back home, she looks for ways to maintain that sense of time.
Camino Déjà vu: Reliving My Camino Day by Day
A few months after returning home, a man takes up a chronological daily practice of reviewing photos, personal reflections, and route details from a given day in his original day-to-day records of his walk. This practice helps preserve his memories of each day and ward off the post-Camino blues.
A Gift of Time: A Father and Son Camino
A father and son share priceless time together on three Caminos and deepen their relationship along the way.
Returning Empty Handed, Forever Changed
In the tektite piece he leaves at the Cruz de Ferro, a pilgrim finds a fitting metaphor for the pilgrim experience.
My Friend’s Camino Gift to Me
Two friends embark on a Camino together. When one abruptly ends his Camino and heads home, the other feels hurt and confused but forges ahead on a solo journey. When the solo pilgrim returns home and reconnects with his friend, he learns the surprisingly generous reason behind his friend’s rash decision.
Time as Currency: How Do You Spend Yours?
On Camino, a busy executive, community leader, friend, wife, and mom, who devoutly worshiped at the altar of busy-ness, receives the gift of clarity about time. Back home, she now gives reverence to the blank spaces on her calendar and is more intentional about how she spends that most precious resource—time.
Transcending Generations
Shortly after the death of his father, with whom he had a complicated relationship, a man embarks on Camino with his own son. Along the way, they engage in heartfelt conversations and experience a deepening connection founded on mutual respect and affection, helping him find a new appreciation for the nature of father-son relationships.
Poetry
A Pilgrim is Grateful
In this prose poem, Shoshana D. Kerewsky reminds us that a pilgrim is grateful even when they don’t feel like being so, and that gratitude is a practice.
A Pilgrim on the Way
In this poem song, Tom Friesen describes that particular feeling that is the Camino’s call.
Beginning to End Ghazal
In this poem, Cathy Hollister reflects on what each day on the Camino holds for a pilgrim, to begin anew with anticipation for the joys and challenges on the long road ahead.
May 26, 2024
In this poem, Taryn Deckard captures a slice of the pilgrim experience through what she observes and feels on one specific day on the Camino.
Sunset at Finisterre
In this poem, Jen Manglos captures a fleeting moment on Cape Finisterre as the sun slips beyond the horizon, marking the end of one journey and the beginning of another.
The Return
In this poem, Suzanne Doerge finds, thanks to the pilgrim lessons we hold on to, that even in returning to the busy highway we left behind, we can continue to stroll with all the souls of the Camino to the ends of the Earth.
So Long Santiago
In this poem, Rebecca Conrow-Bayles recognizes that in bidding farewell so soon after arriving in the city long-sought by pilgrims, that her Camino continues for as long as the journey takes.
Unwind Camino Time
In these song lyrics set to the tune of Glen Campbell’s “Gentle on My Mind,” Robert Bain writes of the pilgrim’s journey after spiraling inward toward a destination, back outward on a return journey home as we unwind from Camino time.
Book & Film Reviews
Film Review: The Way, My Way
Joe Curro reviews The Way, My Way, a film adaptation of Australian filmmaker Bill Bennett’s 2013 memoir of the same name. Curro writes that this enjoyable film will resonate with accomplished pilgrims and the merely Camino-curious alike.
Book Review: Pilgrim Spirit
Rebekah Scott reviews the newly released English translation of Pilgrim Spirit: Elías Valiña and the Revival of the Camino 1959-1989 by Luis Celeiro Álvarez and translated by Laurie Dennett. This historic document, while dry and not meant to be an “easy read,” serves as an invaluable compendium to historical researchers about the life and work of the parish priest posted to the mountaintop village O Cebreiro and whose painted yellow arrows would start an avalanche that is the modern-day Camino de Santiago.
Book Review: An Atheist on Pilgrimage
Jerald Stroebele reviews Leonard Vance’s An Atheist on Pilgrimage: Tales of Humanity from the Camino de Santiago. Stroebele calls it a “beautifully written, entertaining, and informative” memoir about a man’s adventures along the Caminos Via Serrana, Via de la Plata and Sanabrés. The details an observant Vance provides might also make this an ersatz guidebook to these lesser-traveled Camino routes.
2025 La Concha Themes
The Annual Gathering of Pilgrims marks the unofficial start to a new pilgrimage year. The theme for the 2025 Gathering of Pilgrims planned for May 15-18 and co-hosted by the Canadian Company of Pilgrims and American Pilgrims on the Camino, celebrates the theme “Bridges of the Camino: Connecting Cultures and Hearts.”
We have drawn on the Gathering’s overarching and supporting themes to form a cohesive set of quarterly topics to guide a year of shared reflections, poetry, and imagery in La Concha. We invite you to think ahead to how your personal experiences, scholarship, creative works, and insights intersect with these themes La Concha will explore in upcoming seasons:
- Unity & Friendship (Spring 2025): Many pilgrims on the road to Santiago experience a special sense of unity and amity. Those walking concurrently may band together as a Camino family. Some find life partners along the way. Others walking beside a family member or friend may experience a deepening relationship or sense of reunion as they connect with their walking companion anew. Even those making a largely solo journey may feel a sense of kinship as they head in the same direction as those sharing the trail that day, walk in the footsteps of those who have gone before them, or contemplate others who might one day take the same path. In this issue, we’ll consider the varied ways we experience Camino companionship—with the global pilgrim community, with a fellow traveler, and even with oneself.
- Cultural Exchange (Summer 2025): As Camino pilgrims, we take part in a centuries-old tradition of journeying to an unknown or foreign place that holds special significance. We have opportunities to experience religious and spiritual traditions; explore the lively and complicated histories of a place; and enjoy the art, music, and cuisine of other people. We move, eat, and rest amidst people from all corners of the globe, of all ages and abilities, and of all faiths and none. We hear and practice languages besides our mother tongue. We are challenged to leave behind what’s comfortable. And we may find new appreciation for our own customs as we are enlivened by others. In this issue, we’ll explore the interchange of traditions, tales, and tenets we carry on and bring home from Camino that enrich the journey for all.
- Connection & Reflection (Autumn 2025): We may journey as a means of passage or transition, in celebration or mourning, for healing or growth. We may journey in search of a new or expanded connection to self, others, the natural world, a divine being, or a higher purpose. As we step away from the hustle and bustle of daily life, move at a slower pace, and more fully engage our senses, we gain a different awareness and connection to the landscape and life around us and to our own thoughts, understandings, and intuitions. In this issue, we’ll ponder the link between our outer, physical journyes and our inward, introspective pilgrimages.
- Support & Solidarity (Winter 2026): A line from the pilgrim’s blessing adapted from text in the Codex Calixtinus, the oldest known guide for pilgrims on the Way of St. James, requests: “May you remember that a step backward to help another is more important than a hundred steps forward without awareness of those at your side.” How did you step back to help a fellow pilgrim in need? How did a villager, hospitalero, or fellow pilgrim assist you in your time of need? How do you experience a sense of mutual support through your local pilgrim chapter or through an online Camino community or social media group? In this issue, we’ll highlight the ways we, as pilgrims, foster a sense of mutual support, just as bridges uphold those who cross them.
We invite American Pilgrims members to share their pilgrim experiences and insights on these themes over the coming year. Watch your email for our call for submissions and associated deadlines for La Concha. If you would like to submit materials, but are not yet an American Pilgrims member, learn more at americanpilgrims.org/membership.
Your contributions can take the form of:
- Personal reflections, essays or poems,
- Original artwork,
- Photographs, or
- Personal interest stories on the events and people that have provided that spark you needed to deepen your engagement as a pilgrim.
Please limit essays to a maximum of 400 words.
Submissions to the Spring 2025 Issue Close March 22
Access the LA CONCHA SUBMISSION FORM for complete submission guidelines and to submit your creative work. We include as many submissions as possible in each issue. We may defer some items to future issues.
Team La Concha – Winter 2025 Volunteers
- Amy Horton, Editor-in-Chief
- Carol Guttery, Web Designer
- Francine Mastini, Creative Director
- Copy Editors & Proofreaders: Rebecca Balcarcel, Kelly Bates, Julie Gianelloni Connor, Anna Harris, Pruitt Layton, Jeanette Mills, Gigi Oyog, Sasha Reber, Thom Ryng, and Lise Yale
Communications Chair
- Tom Coleman
Archives: Explore our archive of back issues of La Concha in PDF format (through Winter 2024) or find fresh content on our La Concha homepage.
Thoughts and opinions expressed by La Concha contributors are those of the individual and do not necessarily represent the views of American Pilgrims on the Camino.