Charlie-Walking the Camino with Shalom

My name is Charlie Hammerslough. I’ve been coming to Shalom Mountain since June 9, 2011.

In the winter of 2019, I walked the last seventy miles of the Camino de Santiago. I went alone. I had no question to answer, and when I began, I couldn’t name a purpose.

Looking

By late 2019, I was in a sad place. I was separated and headed toward divorce. My wife and I had started a tutoring business together, and like the marriage, it was failing. A year earlier my job as a partner at a Chicago advertising agency had ended. At 61, I didn’t know where to point my life.

I needed to travel.

I’d knocked around Europe during college, and I wanted to return. My therapist had walked the Camino many times, and she told me about it. She never said I should go. She led by example, and in that spirit, I wouldn’t recommend walking the Camino to anyone, nor would I discourage it. The Camino draws you when you need it. It will be what you need, and it will be yours.

So I went. I saw the Pope at St. Peter’s on Christmas Day, and on December 27th, I flew to Spain and started walking.

The Way

The Camino is an ancient pilgrimage that ends at the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, in Galicia. There are many routes; I walked the French Way. I wore a scallop shell on a plain string around my neck, which marked me as a peregrino, a pilgrim, and people along the Way are kind and friendly to peregrinos. Stone markers called mojones point you toward the church.

I’m Jewish, and this wasn’t a pilgrimage to a cathedral with a reliquary, not in a religious sense anyway. I just walked. As sometimes happens in life, I wasn’t sure where I was anymore or where to turn.

I stayed in albergues, the small pilgrim hostels that serve a big peregrino dinner at night and a solid breakfast in the morning. Before leaving, I’d gather fruit, snacks, and water for my lunch.

Forty-five minutes into the first day, I understood something. We all walk a path, and we are all walking in the same direction, but we walk it alone.

Not lonely. Alone.

Okay, I thought. I get that. The Camino is a journey, not a trip, and like life, you walk it with presence and without fear.

Then I began noticing the side paths: a green glen with sunlight pouring into it, a brook running off in another direction, a farmhouse set back from the road. Maybe I’ll go down there. And then I understood what they were. Those paths were the choices I didn’t make: the person I didn’t go out with, the city I didn’t move to, the job I didn’t take, the life I didn’t live. The Way teaches as you walk.

Life isn’t a circle. You don’t double back and you don’t walk every path. You walk this one.

Tangerines

Around the third or fourth day, I ate my peregrino breakfast, gathered some tangerines, and started walking. As I walked, I thought about the tangerines at the bottom of my pack. Where did they come from? Somebody planted those trees. Somebody watered them and fertilized them, somebody harvested the fruit, somebody trucked it, and somebody put those tangerines in the bin I took them from that morning.

Each step of the process an act of love.

The farms in that area are ancient. Farmers planted and tended those trees out of love for the land and love for their families, and the love of people I didn’t know and would never meet fed me. Some of them had been dead for generations, and their love still reached me.  The workers who harvested and moved them to the albergue that week were supporting their families with love.

And the Shalom teaching came alive: Love is not time-bound. I’d heard those words and thought I understood them, but walking there with tangerines in my backpack, I felt it. I am the beneficiary of love that stretches back through time. Those tangerines were made of love.

Then I looked down and laughed because I was wearing an orange down vest.

I Am a Tangerine

Just as those tangerines were the product of generations of care, so was I. My parents loved me, their parents loved them, and before them came generations of people whose names I’ll never know, an endless chain of feeding and teaching and protecting and sacrificing and caring for one another. I wasn’t only surrounded by love. I was made of it. The very substance of me, like the tangerines, was the product of all that care: and if that was true for me, it was true for everyone.

Love is more than an emotion or an idea. Love is a verb woven through everything, moving through time and space. Standing on an ancient road in Spain, thinking about tangerines, I understood.

And lunch was delicious.

Cathedral

Other pilgrims meet each other along the Way and make lifelong friends. That’s wonderful, but it wasn’t what I needed. I needed to walk solo, and for most of the journey, I did.

At Santiago de Compostela, I went to the cathedral, and I thought it was an aesthetic disaster. Not because I’m Jewish. The cathedral was begun in the 11th century.  Spanish monarchs, including Ferdinand and Isabella, added to it for centuries, each leaving a mark, and the result is a rococo disaster of curlicues and stone angels. In late 2019, everything in the huge space but the altar was scary and dark, roped off behind renovation scaffolding.

I dutifully viewed the relics of St Francis.  Then I stood in front of the altar and asked myself: why did you do this? You just walked seventy miles. What was this about? I recited the Shehecheyanu, the Jewish prayer of gratitude, and I lit a candle, and then grief hit me: overwhelming and unexpected. I walked out to the square and let it come.

For hours I sat and wept. I grieved my father. I grieved my mother, who had died the year before. I grieved the death of my marriage, the lost job, the failed business. I grieved all of it, and maybe more: the lost sense of purpose to my life. The sun moved across the square, and every beggar who came to me got a euro until I ran out. I felt what was there, and I let it pass through.

A child in grief believes it will never end. An adult has the experience of surviving grief. I learned that grief is painful, but it does not leave a wound. That day it passed through, and what it left behind was clarity, and ultimately, more capacity for joy.

Walking Again

I came back to Shalom for the fiftieth anniversary in June, 2026. I didn’t come carrying grief. I came believing I was finished with it.

In May, 2024, I’d had foot surgery for Charcot foot, a surgery meant to make an infection or wound less likely. Unfortunately, I contracted osteomyelitis, which led to a life-threatening systemic infection. In October 2024, my right leg was amputated below the knee.

I metabolized the experience. There was a great deal to adapt to, and I set about adapting: how to get around, how to manage a prosthesis, how to live my life. I believed I had grieved the leg, quickly and cleanly, and moved on. That was the story I told myself, and I told it in good faith.

People at Shalom know the Mountain as sacred ground. As part of my visit to the Mountain, I walked the Labyrinth.  I walked with no intention beyond staying present to whatever came up. That is the work of Trusting the Process that we do at Shalom, framed by the Principles and Skills of Loving.

Walking is less simple now. I attend to every step, and that attention is itself a kind of meditation. The walk opened it. In the last turns of the Labyrinth, the grief rose, coming up out of a depth where I still held it beyond awareness. I had done the practical work and the mental work. I hadn’t done this.

Grief came, and I sat with it at the stones by the Labyrinth. But so eventually did clarity and even joy.

It was the same lesson the Camino had taught me at the end of an ancient journey with a pack containing tangerines, and it turns out that knowing grief passes through and letting it pass through are not the same thing.

What remains after grief is clarity, and clarity is what lets us live as our fullest and deepest selves. We do that work on the Mountain, and we carry it with us when we leave.

The leg is gone. I am made of love that is not.