“What was your moment?” Sister Lucy asked. 

“My moment?” I replied with a question, even though I knew exactly what my spiritual director was asking. And I already knew the moment.

“Yes, your moment. I’ve never been on El Camino myself, but I’ve had many directees who have been. And they always come back with a moment.”

In some ways, my experience of walking the Camino from Porto, Portugal, to Santiago de Compostela, Spain, was filled with too many moments to name. But there was “a moment.” 

My sister and I, along with our husbands, had left our hotel in Barcelinos, Portugal, at 8:00am on Saturday, September 20. We wanted to get an early start, as this was to be our longest day of walking: 22 miles. A slight mist hovered about us as we left the city. The precipitation was enough that I used my backpack rain cover for the first and last time on our trip, but not enough that I felt the need to cover my head. And so, I walked hatless through the streets. My pink visor had offered much welcome shade in our first few days of walking in the sun, but now I rejoiced to be under the cloudy sky without it – seeing so much more of the world above me.

Phone at the ready, I snapped pictures…

…of my family walking along the cobblestones, a neon sign in the window of a gym that said, “Welcome to the World” (I felt so welcome!), the white flowers of a potato vine (which is also known as the jasmine nightshade: much preferred), the largest flamingo lawn ornaments I had ever seen. 

And then a minute later, I saw it. For the first time in real life. 

A passion flower. 

The first time I saw a picture of a passion flower (passiflora) was in 2017, and I plopped it immediately into my Easter Sunday sermon power point. The passion flower gets its current name from 16th Century Spanish missionaries in South America. They counted up the bits of the flower and connected the numbers to the story of Jesus’ passion. The five petals and sepals add up to the ten faithful apostles (sorry, Peter, your reinstatement happened after the passion, so, just like Judas, you don’t get a petal). The three anthers represent the nails in Jesus’ hands and feet; the five stamen, the five wounds. The corona filaments are, of course, the crown of thorns. 

Before the passion flower became a Sunday School lesson, indigenous peoples cherished it for its healing properties, using it to treat wounds, inflammation, and anxiety. I have more recently created my own lesson along healing lines, using the image of an open passion flower to illustrate a life passionately turned outward to God and others (which then closes quietly and introspectively for a time in order to nurture the growth of its ultimate gift: the delicious passion fruit).

I had loved the flower virtually for years, connecting it to my faith and my vocation. And here it was in real life – at 9:16am on September 20, an hour into the longest walk I’d ever taken. It was my moment.

In her reflections on her own Camino, Joyce Rupp spoke of the necessity of embracing beauty: “The pilgrimage was far from being a ‘bleak’ time, but the arduous and challenging nature of it required my heart to sip daily of beauty’s strength” (Walk in a Relaxed Manner, p. 117).

This was my moment. My sip of beauty’s strength. A mist-bejeweled passiflora. 

I had read Rupp’s reflections in the month leading up to my Camino, but on the Camino, I took with me a slender book of Mary Oliver’s poetry. The first words of her poem, Thirst, spoke to my moment as well:

Another Morning and I wake with thirst 

for the goodness I do not have. I walk 

out to the pond and all the way God has 

given us such beautiful lessons…

A lesson. A moment. A sip. A… glimmer.

My introduction to the concept of “glimmers” came just after my Camino, when a friend sent me this video by Deb Dana. Dana is a clinician who works with complex trauma survivors, and she coined the term glimmer in the way that I mean it here. A glimmer is what it sounds like, Dana says: “a tiny spark of a moment of feeling safe enough, okay enough in the world.” It is the opposite of a trigger. Where a trigger dysregulates, a glimmer regulates. Dana says that “we need to map both the triggers and the glimmers in order to find well-being.” 

To map glimmers, Dana invites us to see, stop, appreciate, share, and remember them.

I mapped my glimmer with my spiritual director and I map it here with you. 

I had another glimmer two days later – the day we crossed the border from Portugal to Spain. It was a sunny day (welcome back, pink visor!) and we had just stopped at a food truck where a Belarussian woman named Veranika sold us potato pies, told us the story of her life, and gave me a passion fruit from her garden to go along with the juice I’d also purchased from her. 

As we walked along a garden wall that afternoon, I was struck by the contrast of a green plant against the bright yellow paint. I took a quick picture, and as I walked by, I turned to look again. “Oh!” I thought, “the light catches the contrasting colors better from this angle!” Knowing a second photo would mean I would have to run to catch up to my family, I stopped anyway and took another picture.

And there it was. Do you see it, tucked in the green? A flash of red? I got closer and moved the leaves and vines aside with my walking pole. 

A red passiflora. Its sepals, petals, and corona just beginning to close in around the work of fruit-growing. Another glimmer. Another moment. Another sip. A strong and vibrant beauty that I would not have seen had I not looked back.

Joy flooded my body. I pocketed my phone, tucked my walking poles under my arm, and ran to catch up with my family, my pack bouncing against my hips and back with each step – feeling…

…for the moment…

as light as air.