There’s a curious thing that happens after walking the Camino: you come home expecting trumpets, banners, and perhaps a small parade of parishioners holding “Welcome Back, O Pilgrim!” signs. Instead, you find your laundry still unfolded, the dog unimpressed, and Sunday’s bulletin stubbornly refusing to proofread itself.
It turns out that life — much like the Camino — doesn’t care overly much about your spiritual epiphanies. It simply hands you a new day and asks, politely but firmly, “Right then. What’s your next step?”
And perhaps that’s exactly the point.
On the Camino Portugués, I learned the deeply humbling truth that the great mysteries of life tend to reveal themselves not in triumphant leaps, but in the slow, steady rhythm of one foot in front of the other. You walk through sun and rain, villages and vineyards, cobblestones and questionable café bathrooms, and somewhere along the way God whispers: “Just this step, beloved. Take just this step.”
It is the same in parish life.
People often imagine the church runs on grand moments: Christmas Eve choirs soaring toward heaven, baptisms with three generations beaming, or vestry meetings that — by miracle alone — end under two hours. But in truth, the life of a parish is shaped by tiny, faithful actions: the coffee maker who shows up ten minutes early; the choir member who remembers both their folder and their reading glasses; the warden who tightens a mysterious bolt on a wobbly pew no one else can locate; the child who shyly lights a candle for “everyone who is sad today.”
Small steps. Quiet holiness.
We don’t need the Pyrenees or the path to Santiago to learn this. The Gospel is quite content to teach us on Highway 50, in the church kitchen, or halfway down the aisle when we suddenly remember we left our sermon in the printer. God works just as gracefully through the ordinary ankle-level moments as through the mountaintop ones. And as I think of hoibness in small steps, it is a huge comfort for me. I’ve spent 3 months in healing, and I’m not there yet. Small steps are about all I can manage these days.
One of the most liberating lessons of pilgrimage is realizing that holiness is not a destination — it’s a practice. And practice, as every pilgrim limping into a Galician albergue knows, is simply a thousand tiny decisions to keep going. To start again. To trust that God will be found not only in the cathedral, but in the dusty road that leads there.
So perhaps the Camino’s greatest gift isn’t a Compostela certificate or a fridge magnet, but the courage to believe that small steps matter. A prayer whispered before getting out of bed. A gentle word to someone who needed more kindness than we realized. A moment’s pause before replying to that email best left marinating in grace.
As we walk the winding path of parish life — its joys, surprises, potholes, potlucks, and all — may we remember that the God who walked with us through Portugal and Spain also walks through the grocery store, the vestry agenda, the pastoral visit, and the parking lot that mysteriously fills at 9:58 every Sunday.
Take the next small step.
God is already in it.
Companion Prayer
Gracious God,
You meet us in the great journeys and the ordinary ones —
in the thunder of pilgrimage and the hush of daily tasks.
Teach us the wisdom of small steps:
to pause, to notice, to trust,
and to walk gently in your love one moment at a time.
Guide our feet along simple paths,
and make our ordinary days holy ground.
Amen.