Thursday, October 20, 2011

"A tendency to overpack"


From Kerry Weber's articlein America Magazine, "The Father's Way" about the new film by Emilio Estevez, starring his father, Martin Sheen. The film tells the storry of a man who loses his son and decides to walk the several-hundred-kilometre El Camino de Santiago between France and Spain.

Along the camino, the refugios, or hostels, often contain shelves of books in many languages, which people have left behind in order to lighten their packs on the road. Everyone has a tendency to overpack, Sheen said, but this unpacking can be not only a physical comfort but a spiritual one, as well.

“As you begin to let go of the material baggage then you begin to reflect on the interior baggage, and you begin the transcendence, the descent into yourself,” Sheen said. “As St. Teresa of Ávila tells us, in order to become free and to become ourselves we have to open the dungeons of our hearts and let go of all those people and those things that we’ve been hanging on to…. We’re hanging on to resentment, judgment, anger, jealously…. As we begin to descend in there and have an honest look at the baggage we’ve accumulated, we begin to let it all go and we become ourselves.”

In the end, Sheen said, it is important to remember that we are all on the same journey. “You can’t have anyone walk this walk for you,” he said. “But you don’t have to walk it alone.”
 Image


Creative Commons: Some rights reserved

No comments:

Post a Comment