Walking Toward Fire

The flames rose twenty feet into the Spanish night.

It was June 23rd, 2019, my second day on the Camino del Norte, and I had come down from the ridge above San Sebastián into a city gone joyfully mad. The Feast of San Juan was in full swing: music, parades, whole neighborhoods gathered in the plaza. And when the last festive notes faded, the crowd sipped their cervezas and watched the flames perform their own flamenco against the silhouettes of talkative neighbors and centuries-old apartment buildings.

Then young people began moving through the crowd, handing out tiny slips of paper. Using my elementary Spanish, I was able to discern that we were to write down the thing you no longer wish to carry; something you are done with.

I stood holding my slip of paper long after the people around me had surrendered theirs.

What I finally wrote took only a few seconds, and half a century. You’ll find those words later in this book. That night they went into the blaze, and when the fire had burned low, a fellow pilgrim, Thekla from Germany, took my hand. We jumped over the embers the way the children were doing, two by two: a sixty-three-year-old had-been pastor from Wisconsin leaping over fire in the dark, sensing, without any language for it yet, that his life had just shifted somehow.

I’ve told the story of that night so many times that I sometimes wonder whether I’m remembering the fire itself or only my last telling. But I remember, to this day, the two dreams that came in vivid color just hours afterward. The flames lit that night still burn like embers that refuse to be put out 7 years later.