Choose hard, sacrifice for others: lessons learned from the Camino
Bette and Larry Lindley had a special routine of praying for people as they walked the Camino in 2013. (Submitted photo)
(Editor’s note: A record 499,239 pilgrims from all over the world walked the Camino pilgrimage route in northern Spain in 2024. The Criterion has invited people from the archdiocese who have made all or part of that pilgrimage to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Spain to share how that experience has influenced their life and their faith.)
Eighth in an occasional series
By John Shaughnessy
A journey along the Camino is often filled with many gifts and blessings, but the pilgrimage also comes with the challenges and hardships that test the body and the spirit.
Bette Lindley knows that reality from the pilgrimage she made with her late husband Larry in 2013. The treks up the mountains and the descents on the steep, rocky roads took their toll on her body while a miserable case of homesickness sapped her spirit.
Yet, what kept her going was “a simple idea that Larry had before we left Terre Haute,” recalls Lindley, a longtime member of St. Patrick Parish in that city. “He sent out a request to our family and our church friends to share their favorite Bible verse.
“He compiled each name with their verse on a small paper, which we carried with us to Spain. And each morning, we drew a name and prayed the rosary for that couple or person and walked for them all day. When I needed ‘attitude adjustment,’ as one French woman told me over the pilgrim meal one night, I thought about the person on that paper and realized that God wanted me to shift my attention from me to the person I walked for all day.”
That approach made “the blisters, snorers and shoulder aches more manageable,” Lindley says.
“Pilgrim life stayed the same all the way into Santiago, but knowing the Lord was expecting me to pray and sacrifice for someone else made the hundreds of miles not any easier, just more doable.
“Today when I have to do something hard, I choose someone and do that hard thing for them. A lesson learned on the Camino.”
‘God was there with us at each moment’
God had a different plan for Bill and Beth Reedy as they traveled along the Camino. (Submitted photo)
(Editor’s note: A record 499,239 pilgrims from all over the world walked the Camino pilgrimage route in northern Spain in 2024. The Criterion has invited people from the archdiocese who have made all or part of that pilgrimage to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Spain to share how that experience has influenced their life and their faith.)
Eighth in an occasional series
Like many of the plans we make for our lives, God had a different one in mind for Beth and Bill Reedy.
The couple from St. Augustine Parish in Jeffersonville had planned to travel across the Camino in a different way than most pilgrims. They had arranged to bike from Portugal to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in 11 days. Yet on the first day of their pilgrimage, Beth had an accident on her bike.
“My ring finger immediately began to bleed and hurt and swell around my great grandmother’s wide, gold wedding band, eventually turning my whole finger quite a few interesting colors. I thought I had broken a finger,” Beth recalls. “Our next steps required a slew of Ubers to move us and the bikes to our hotel and to the three hospitals we visited before the ring was removed, and X-rays showed no broken bones.
“Luckily, every single person we encountered truly had our best interests at heart. They gave us great medical attention, drove us to the correct hospital—finally—helped my husband with the bikes, carried my luggage, and Google translated us through all the ins and outs of the Portuguese medical system. Every one of them was in the right place at the right time to be God’s presence on our pilgrimage.”
With Beth’s injury, the couple changed plans, opting for a rental car to take them to their scheduled stops along the Camino. Even with that change, one part remained constant, she says—God’s providence.
“We didn’t have the privilege of riding through each small village or meeting very many pilgrims along the way, but we did spend time in beautiful medieval cities, visited churches big and small to get our credentials stamped, searched for sea glass along the Atlantic Ocean, and spent a great deal of time in awe of God’s beautiful creation,” she says. “God provides.”
Every day offered more instances of God’s presence and humanity’s efforts to honor him.
“We were awed by the actions of our faith-filled ancestors who built beautiful cathedrals, monasteries and statues in places that would have been extremely difficult and dangerous to get to in earlier centuries,” she says.
“We visited the port of Baiona, Spain, where Christopher Columbus’ boat,
The Pinta, brought the first news of the New World to the people of Europe. And where we also visited the Virgen de la Roca [Virgin of the Rock]—a 50-foot-tall statue of Mary holding a ship which is perched high on a hill overlooking the port.
“We attended Masses with cloistered Dominican sisters, with pilgrims from all over the world at the Cathedral of Santiago, and with the Catholics of Vigo, Spain, at the feast day Mass at Our Lady of Fatima Church.”
Beth believes God gave them just the right pilgrimage he had planned for them.
“God was there with us at each moment,” she says. “He gave us more than we needed. And he always has. His love and care were just more evident to us on The Way.” †
