Phil’s Camino

I’m writing these days about walking and roads, and now it seems that everywhere I go I run into pilgrims.

What film could you go to see at both a church and the outdoor store REI?  What subject matter would interest both religious types and outdoor types?  I saw such a film this past week and its director said she has been promoting it at both venues, churches and REI stores. And at film festivals, where it has won prizes at 16 of the 25 indie film festivals where she’s shown it.

The film is called “Phil’s Camino” and it tells the story of a year or two in the life of Phil Volker.  It begins when he is diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, and he starts taking slow daily walks around his ten acre Vashon Island (Washington) farm, for his physical health and for his spiritual well being.  He imagines he is actually walking the pilgrimage route, the Camino, in Spain, which he has long dreamed of, and he starts marking his progress on a map as if he were passing from Roncesvalles to Leon to Compostela.  He invites folks to walk his farm route with him, to join him as fellow pilgrims. One day his doctors tell him his numbers are good enough for him to skip a chemo treatment and they encourage him to follow his dream and walk the actual Camino.  He goes to Spain, completes the 350 miles walk with various friends, and has touching encounters and adventures.  All this in a half hour film that is rich in landscape (green wet Northwest, breathtaking ancient Spain) and in spirit.  “I am walking not so I will be cured, but so I can find healing, which is peace and acceptance,” Phil says in the narration.

I saw the film practically by accident.  I happened to see a flyer for it in the library of my old seminary in Berkeley.  It was showing that very afternoon just up the hill at the Jesuit School of Theology.  Annie O’Neil the director introduced the film by saying she had come up from LA for a short Northern California tour, to show the film at a Sacramento REI, a church on the old army base Ft. Ord in Monterey (Phil is a former Marine), and now here at the Jesuit School to a class on Pilgrimage.  Actually at this point, waiting for the film to start, I knew nothing of the story, just the intriguing title.  I was here at my old school to give myself a few days of spiritual reading and reflecting.  I had no big plans that day.   OK, why not go see this movie?  Sounds like it’s something about the pilgrimage Camino, which has meaning for me.   I’ve walked part of that route in France, might be interesting.  I wonder who Phil is.

Phil is an older guy, thin, pretty fit if he could do all that walking, but still, there were also scenes of him getting lots of chemo, and talking about the cancer coming back, and even while walking he seemed a little frail, and he faints at one point in a Spanish church.  I wasn’t the only one sniffling a bit at the end when it seemed like he had walked his last steps as he finally made it to the church at Compostela.

Then the lights came up and Annie the director came forward and said, “Thank you, and let me introduce you to Phil.”  And up he comes, thin, a little frail maybe, gentle, sweet, smiling, shy, alive. 

Phil writes a daily blog on the Phil’s Camino website.  He says these promotional tours are a little tiring, but rich and gratifying in how touched people are.  He is a recent Catholic convert, and he says he prefers the talks at churches because they can talk about God more.  At REI the questions are more about the walking, although many of the outdoor hiker types who come to those showings turn out also to have walked the Camino as well.   He says that at the film festivals the God part makes people a little nervous.  But still, he says, we have won all those awards.  The film is also somehow touching those judges.

Recently he speculated about why pilgrimages are becoming increasingly popular, while church attendance is waning.  “Are they related? I never put that together before.  Is the trail the new church?  I know that from my wanderings there are different sorts of ways to belief, one based on knowledge and one on experience.  My stay at the Catholic Church has been brief, but what I appreciate most is the experiential quality of it. There is knowledge where I read and study and try and reach an understanding, but I get so much more out of putting my whole body into something.  Now that is just me, but the trail has that aspect, you have to admit.

“As one walks long enough and hard enough, part of us actually becomes the trail.  We sort of donate it.  We give it away.  We don’t need it any more.  And that sudden empty space in us is where God moves into.  It’s a holy implant.  God isn’t an idea any more.  This is the trail, the new church.”

Part of us becomes the trail, and we don’t need it anymore, so we give it away, and that empty space is where God moves in.  Even REI walkers get that point.  They might just call it a runner’s high, but anyone who has done long distance walking recalls that sense of empty strength, some mysterious persistence, the help from something beyond us that keeps us going.  You need more than just the right kind of hiking equipment for that kind of walk.  

Copyright © 2016 Deborah Streeter