Embodying Faith: Tattoos and Pilgrimage – Mookie Manalili

Episode 45.
In this second conversation with Mookie, we expanded the discussion of diversity and the ways he embodies his Catholic faith. The two main areas are his tattoos that manage to marry his Filipino and Catholic identities, and his pilgrimage in August
2022 on the Camino de Santiago.

Highlights:
00:04:39 Diversity and race in the US.

00:13:34 The guest’s tattoo and its symbolism, including references to his Christian faith and Filipino heritage. The tattoo represents creation, crucifixion, and the concept of redemption and healing.

00:21:53 Camino de Santiago: A meaningful, diverse pilgrimage.

00:36:48 The Camino reminded him of lost hopes and dreams and brought back a sense of purpose. 

References:
Isabel Wilkerson, Caste – https://www.isabelwilkerson.com/
US Census through the Decades – https://www.census.gov/data-tools/demo/race/MREAD_1790_2010.html
Camino de Santiago – https://followthecamino.com/en/camino-de-santiago-routes/

Social Media links for Mookie: 
LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/mookie-manalili/
Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/mr.man.of.lily/

Social Media links for Méli:
Talking with God Project – https://www.talkingwithgodproject.org
LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/melisolomon/
Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100066435622271


Transcript:    https://www.buzzsprout.com/1851013/episodes/13298063-embodying-faith-tattoos-and-pilgrimage-mookie-manalili

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The Living Our Beliefs podcast offers a place to learn about other religions and faith practices. When you hear about how observant Christians, Jews and Muslims live their faith, new ideas and questions arise:  Is your way similar or different?  Is there an idea or practice that you want to explore?  Understanding how other people live opens your mind and heart to new people you meet. 

Comments?  Email  Méli – info@talkingwithgodproject.org

The Living Our Beliefs podcast is part of the Talking with God Project – https://www.talkingwithgodproject.org/

Transcript

Mookie Manalili transcript

Embodying Faith: Tattoos & Pilgrimage

Meli  [00:00:05]:

Hello and welcome to Living Our Beliefs, a home for open conversations with fellow Christians, Jews and Muslims. Through personal stories and reflection, we will explore how our religious traditions show up in daily life at work, at home, in the community, in good times and in bad. There is no one size fits all, right answer, just a way to move forward. For you, for here, for now, I am your host, May Lee Solomon. So glad you could join us. This is episode 44, and my guest today is Mookie Manalili. Mookie is a psychotherapist professor and researcher interested in suffering, meaning making, narratives, trauma, and memory. In addition to his psychotherapy private practice, he is a part time faculty member for the Graduate School of Social Work at Boston College, teaching clinical courses like narrative therapy. He also serves as a research consultant at Boston College for Social Psychology Research at the Morality Lab, and for philosophical psychology projects through the center for Psychological Humanities and Ethics. In all his various roles, Mookie hopes to participate in our duty to better our society, particularly for people on the margins and those who suffer injustices, such as the widow, orphan and stranger. Through helping those in need, he strives to build a more compassionate world. Mookie lives in Boston, Massachusetts. Links to his social media handles are listed in the show notes.

Meli  [00:01:57]:

Hello Mookie. Welcome back to my living our beliefs podcast. What a treat to have yet another conversation with you.

Mookie [00:02:06]:

Hello Meli. It's wonderful to be here on this podcast, and I'm excited to journey again with you and our listeners.

Meli  [00:02:14]:

In our first conversation, we spoke about your background, your therapeutic and academic work, the healing process, accepting of the whole person, and how faith is brought into your work. In this conversation, I'd like us to pick up on a couple of related threads from that call. One, the expression and exploration of identity, and two, the balance of uniqueness and group identity. I say all this very mindful of the current social context regarding the recent Supreme Court ruling striking down the use of race based affirmative action in college admissions. It's been justified on the grounds of value of educational diversity based on the past years in Michigan and California. Since they made similar decisions years ago, the black and Hispanic populations on campus have decreased and the white and Asian populations have increased. And I say all this because you teach at a university. This is not a legal podcast. We're not going to delve into the Supreme Court ruling, but I wanted to just give us and the audience a note that that is part of the context in which we are having this conversation in July of 2023. And it's just really on my mind. And since you are from the Philippines, you very much fall within that population. So that's part of why I wanted to make that note and part of why I'm actually really glad I'm always glad to talk with you, Mookie, but I just think the timing is quite good. So with that context laid, I'd like to start with just talking a little more about diversity. What does diversity mean for you when you work with your students and your clients at Boston College and wherever else? What sorts of diversity are important to you, and what is the diversity that you bring to the table?

Mookie [00:04:39]:

Yeah, one, thank you so much, Meli, for locating us in time and space. Definitely understanding this conversation within the US. Context here in July 2023 is different in terms of how I would have answered these questions two years ago, in the midst of the pandemic and in the midst of racial injustices happening in the nation, or even ten years ago, when maybe folks were not as keenly aware of this as something that think about. I would say, for me, diversity is something that I continue to grapple with in terms of how the university understands it. Is this just kind of a checkbox for us to address? Is this just lip service that we're doing, or is this something that we truly, truly value? This is a very live question for me. Before we were recording, we were just chatting, and it brought to my mind the book cast by Isabel Wilkerson. For our listeners. If you haven't read it, it's a great book. It's a very chilling and haunting book, but I think it's very important for our citizens to read. And I think she was sharing how, at a conference, somebody approached her and said, hey, Isabelle, there's no black folks in Africa. And of course, she was maybe taken aback. But it's the idea that folks did not identify by their tonality and skin tone in other spaces, right? So even the construction of race as something that is spoken in the US. Context, I think, is very important for us to think. When I teach my narrative therapy course, one of the things that we do is deconstruct where stories and narratives come from. Deconstruction, rather than just taking things apart and breaking it apart, it's more like archaeology, right? We take a concept and we brush away the dust, and we see where it is located. As you're invoking today in time and space, when we deconstruct, we see the story of Maybe where these meta narratives come from. Race is an interesting one for listeners. Feel free to Google the US. Census Bureau's race across the decades. They track it from 1790 to 2010. But it does track the way that different folks were counted, quote unquote counted in this nation. The first three categories that this nation counted actually was free, whites, free, others, and slaves. And over time, across the decades, as people counted, or maybe counted for three fifths or maybe counted for full persons, the census gives us a hint of what mattered, what counted in this nation over time, you'd get categories like Chinese, Mexican, et cetera, et cetera, and then collapsed, expanded, and you can see patterns of migration. But all that to say that it also tracks the way people came in into our nation and our nation had to grapple whether it could fit in the stories that we have. Maybe these two folks come from similar geographies, so I guess we can collapse them together. And that's why over time, we now have these five categories. And whether you're Hispanic or not, which is a question of ethnicity, right? So I think currently we have American Indian or Alaskan, Native Asian across the different Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, et cetera, black, of African American descent or other folks. In terms of the Hispanic, again, that's Afro Latino is also a thing that just gets collapsed into the same black category and then Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, which is really interesting because Filipinos used to be associated with that, but were then brought into the Asian category and then, of course, white. So you can begin to see why it's two categories about skin tone and then maybe some about language and then some about geography. It is a social construction. An important thing to note is that just because it's socially constructed doesn't mean it doesn't have real effects, whether we were Filipinos categorized as Asian or Pacific Islander, actually invokes different implicit narratives that would be attached to our group of folks. And I think that's what I challenge my students to do, be very aware of the effects and the other things associated. Because when you deconstruct a concept, that means you can also see how other things link into it. Socioeconomic status, education, access to things, right? And then being able to understand where is my unique story and heritage? Does it get cut off because of the ways that we are categorized and what might be beyond just the categorizations that we keep? So I would say that diversity plays into that insofar as I think we need to value the unique particularity of each individual person and understand the way that this nation has payments that it needs to reckon with for some of the historical effects of how our folks have been categorized, shifted, and which folks has historically been marginalized because of this. It is tough being in the higher education system right now. And I do hope that we think about this question of diversity in terms of that idea of particularity and heritage and responsibility to our students.

Meli  [00:10:37]:

Thank you. What a rich answer, Mookie. I really appreciate that. It's so valuable and so important to hear the different voices. So I want to pick up on the last bit that you just talked about in terms of the groups. So it was really interesting to hear you take through the census categories. But of course, this podcast is really about you now. You're in the US. And you're on a Jesuit campus, a very white Jesuit campus. Do you feel since settling into Boston College? Do you feel like your Filipino heritage and all of that is more sharply present for you in your identity.

Mookie [00:11:35]:

A very that's a very astute question. I think so. I think so. I have kind of journeyed across the US. I would say that that kind of journey has brought into sharp contrast my Filipino ness here in Boston. Not a lot of Filipino restaurants. Filipinos do love talking about food. But I guess that is kind of an aside that highlights the sparseness of some of the community. I have since found a Filipino mass community. It's one of my favorite spaces. All that to say, though, that yeah, those are small spaces and pockets. I had a student come up to me and share that I was one of the first Filipino, in fact, one of the few Asian professors that she had as a graduate student. So throughout the course of her time, both in undergrad and graduate school, that I was one of the few. And it does make me pause to think. I'm kind of reminded of my place under the sun. Viewers can't see, but as I show a little bit of my arm tattoo my sleeves, it hopes to integrate a little bit of my cultural heritage from the Philippines, but also my theological tradition as a Catholic. I think the representation is very important. I think it's important for our students to be able to see themselves in the work. And I think to our prior conversation, that's something that universities need to be very mindful of.

Meli  [00:13:16]:

Mookie since you mentioned your tattoos and showed the arm, can you kind of walk through a little more carefully what those images are and what does it mean to you to have them? And let's get into that whole issue.

Mookie [00:13:34]:

One of the things that I try to do, the university system, is to be able to embody the very narratives that I'm hoping to speak and promote. And, you know, the Jesuits in the best of times is able to push towards those spaces of justice. This idea of being integration of the whole person with and for others, I think is how they formulate it now. But I think also part of that is being able to own this idea of being made imago day, uniquely made in the image and likeness of God in the Christian tradition and the ways that each of us is particular in our story, in our journey and narrative and our embodiment. So for me, being able to, yes, pull up to the classroom with an arm sleeve is an important note of embodiment that the university system could look quite different than the preconceived notions that we keep. So for me, it is also a way that I externalize what I value internally in terms of my heritage. It is a tap tap method in which you take thorns and ashes and tap the dye into the skin of folks I have not been able to make the pilgrimage up the mountain. So this is an American made way of doing that. But I would one day love to be able to partake in that tradition and pilgrimage and journey up the mountain. However, this tattoo, right, one of the things that prompted this was actually my time in theological school, which is very interesting because usually you don't think of tattoos and churches as coming together quite well. Right. But if our body is indeed the temple of God, then why not have stained glass and art to symbolize it, right? So I call this tattoo Parachres, and it's still left unfinished. As you see, the part panel of that tattoo is not quite done. It's perichoresis, and it comes from the Greek, which basically means a circular dance. In the Catholic Christian tradition, I guess, God is understood as community, the idea of three persons as one. And there's kind of three panels to this tattoo with one unfinished. So far. This is the story and the mythology of the six days of creation, the stories of the Crucifixion, and then it will be stories of redemption, resurrection, or in the trinitarian formulation of a father or potter, son and Holy Spirit. I use traditional Filipino and Polynesian symbols and have kind of rearranged them like mosaic glass to tell these stories. So right. You have the creation story with the clouds and the sun and the moon and stars, and then the creation of the first persons as well. Coming from the mountain over there. I also have a scar on my elbow that was really tough for my tattoo artist to try to figure out, but I just put the scar right smack there in the middle of the mountain. And that even is a symbol of some of the wounds and the scars that we keep as inherently part of us being Humis, us being Ha-Adam or made from the earth. Right. And then, of course, the Crucifixion narrative, which has the crown of thorns woven kind of like a DNA structure over here, and bamboo wood and spearheads, which kind of symbolize part of that stories. But you can see how some of the polynesian symbols have been transfused as part of this. Also throughout this, there are ancient Babayan script. It kind of looks a little like Sanskrit, because a lot of the spice trade would move from the Middle East all the way to the Indo-Malaysian, and some of those touched and moved into the Philippines. So you can see that some of our ancient language actually looks very Sanskriti. But, yeah, these are transliterated Latin verses, actually, into ancient Tagalog, into the Babayan script. So there's a little bit of Filipino heritage and a little bit of theology and even just the embodiment, hopefully, of being able to symbolize for my patients, my students, that I might not be embodied, as you might expect, but a therapist or professor to be. But just know that your story are also welcome. I love to wear my heart on my sleeve, and I am very much an open book, and I would say that I wear my culture and faith on my arm sleeve as well. Sorry. There is one part I missed, ironically enough. It is the blank spot up top of the redemption narrative. There is a phoenix like bird in Filipino mythology. It's called the Ardana, and its tears are thought to bring healing to people. And I think that might be a very good symbol for the idea of the Holy Spirit spyre or breath ruach, this idea of the thing that all living creatures share in and this journey of healing that all of us undergo. So to recap, it creation crucifixion, but also redemption and healing. And that is a little bit about pericaris the arm sleep that I design.

Meli  [00:19:16]:

Well that is quite literally embodying your faith and culture. Isn't it fantastic? I do want to ask just one question. This might be obvious to the Catholics in the audience, but it's not to me. You talked about the mountain, and I don't know what you're talking about there. What does that mean?

Mookie [00:19:36]:

Yeah, no, that's fair. That's fair. I would say, I guess in terms of the symbol for it, the six days of creation with the three days of giving kind of form to a place and shape and then the objects that got filled into it, I guess it's hard to symbolize the idea of dirt on an arm sleeve. Right. I have fish scales and water over here to symbolize the oceans and the chaos from which things were formed. And then fish scales constructed as clouds up top and in between. Right. Trees and mountains. And then, of course, here, over here, we have the cross fashioned out of one of the trees as well. But the folks on the back coming from the mountain, the idea that we do come from the humus come from the earth, but it was hard to symbolize that. So I had folks coming from the mountain also. It's kind of a nod at the different landscapes of the Philippines in which there are oceans and sands and mountainous regions and forests, and it kind of hints and evokes that. But, yes, the idea that we are made from the stuff of the earth as well, maybe not particularly mountain, but hard to find another symbol.

Meli  [00:21:04]:

Right. Okay, thanks for that clarification. I didn't know if maybe there was a sense in Catholicism or in Filipino culture of God being on the top of a mountain or that that is a process of development. All right, well, that is a whole journey of expression, and I'd like to now turn to another kind of journey. You have said that you did a pilgrimage last summer, August 2022, you did the Camino de Santiago. So that is a very famous pilgrimage route across northern Spain. And I just love to hear about why you did that and how it was.

Mookie [00:21:53]:

Yeah. The Camino de Santiago is a pilgrimage across the north of Spain. Some people take it through the Portuguese way as well. Some people take it through the Villa Franc or the French way, and some people take it through the beaches in northern Spain. All pilgrimages and roots are welcome. Yeah. This, I think, is a tradition that started a while back, I believe, in the Middle Ages. But pilgrimages, at least in the Christian Catholic tradition, became more and more of a way in which one visited a holy site or a place in which a holy person was buried. I know, again, our Muslim siblings make pilgrimage one of the tenets of the faith. But for Catholics, for Christians, the sense of maybe journey has kind of been lost, I think, across the ages. And again, maybe this is my read of it being in the academy, so I can see that I might be biased. I think our faith has become very intellectualized, very of the mind of thought. If you believe orthodoxy, if you believe the DOXA, then you are doing your faith. There's always been something so strange about faith that is just thought. Right. Catholic catholicos meaning universal, I don't think, has to mean sameness. And that this is my stance on things like excellence or virtue or some of the literature in the field. I think just because something is universal or something captures generality, it doesn't mean we should lose diversity and sameness and things like that. So all that to say that this idea of pilgrimage, this way of proceeding, of being back in our body and touching time and space with our body on a road somewhere, and not just thought, really appealed to me. Yeah, it called to me, I think, in the midst of the pandemic, there was a lot of grappling, I think a lot of unrest, both in my heart and in my work. Being isolated, of course, being cooped up in a studio room, bearing a lot of the suffering of folks through therapy, seeing a lot of the injustices in our nation and wondering if there's different ways of being and proceeding in the world, got me kind of itchy to go on pilgrimage. And then one of my buddies noted, hey, I just came back from this Camino. I think you'd really like it. And there was something, I guess, in my soul that kind of stirred, and it reminded me of the time that other people went on this ancient path, and it just kind of kept popping up until I became very interested and asked, all right, where do we begin?

Meli  [00:24:43]:

A couple of practical questions before we get to the more philosophical spiritual. How long is it and how long did it take you to walk it.

Mookie [00:24:53]:

The Camino de Santiago? If you start from San Jean Pitapot, which is in France, I believe would take about 30 to 33 days. And I think pilgrims like that route because it mimics something of the 33 days, 33 years of Christ. However, you can make the Camino in however many days that you have to journey or wherever you might come from. I met a pilgrim who straight up walked from her home in Germany and has been journeying for three months with our US. American sentiments for productivity. I could only take two and a half weeks away from my laptop, so it was a practically bounded Camino in that sense. I flew into Madrid and started in Leon, and my pilgrimage took about twelve ish days. And I made an additional journey from the coast Finistera to a northern village that was kind of a way to decompress. So all in all, the pilgrimage took about 1314 days. Folks can begin the journey wherever. My pilgrim friend just said, the most important thing is that you just go. It's really easy to get lost in how many days or how many things, and he's like, whatever time you have, carve it out and allow yourself to go on the journey, because the journey itself is the most important part. So that's a little bit of the logistics of the Camino.

Meli  [00:26:30]:

Yeah, thanks. And what you just said is so important to remember. So I'll say it again, the journey itself is the important part. I recognize that the Camino de Santiago is the classic, the preeminent pilgrimage, but are there other pilgrimages that Catholics look.

Meli  [00:26:51]:

To, that they try to do?

Mookie [00:26:54]:

Yeah, I think depending on your context, there's a couple different pilgrimages. Holy spaces are the end goal. So any way that somebody can walk towards a holy space, justifies a pilgrimage. I know that the way for Ignatius is a pilgrimage that's well walked as well, especially those in the Jesuit circles. And I know that there's spaces in the Holy Land that Christian Catholics tend to enjoy going to. If you have Marian kind of devotions, whether it's Our Lady of Guadalupe or Fatima, there's certain shrines that pilgrims will go to as well. Yeah, I would say that the way of St. James towards his burial site is the most well known. And it is interesting. It has become so well known that folks from other faith traditions, atheists, agnostics, all make the way now, which has been quite interesting, and the stories of the fellow pilgrims that I journeyed with would break bread with it was really powerful. But yeah, I would say that Christians have a couple Caminos or pilgrimages that are common, but this one, I think, is one of the bigger ones for sure.

Meli  [00:28:16]:

In hearing you talk about that, a couple of things came to mind that I want to check about. We're talking about a spiritual process, and walking is such a natural way, it slows you down, and you're really in the environment, hopefully in nature, but maybe also in a city and then ending at a place of worship or something similar. And I wonder about two things. One is, is there a connection to the rosary and is there a connection to the Stations of the Cross?

Mookie [00:28:59]:

Those are great questions. So I have fond memories of praying the rosary with my village in the Philippines and then with folks in Los Angeles that I grew up with. So for myself, yes, I brought my rosary that I had from Rome onto the community. However, people kind of take the spirituality in different ways as they go on the path. I'll give maybe a little itinerary of what a typical day might have looked like and that might help folks see how beautiful the mundane was. So you typically begin your journey waking up from a hostel, an albergue, as they say in Spanish. So these are like bunk beds and whether you get the top or bottom bed, you hope that your bunk partner was not moving throughout the night, and you hope that your bunk mates were not storing around you. But over time you get tired enough that that is just fine. And depending on the town, there might be smaller albergues or hostels with maybe like twelve beds and you're sharing with a couple of pilgrims, breaking bread together, et cetera, et cetera, or upwards of like a couple hundred bunk beds together. People begin the rhythm of the day in different paces. I went with a crew that began at around 06:00 a.m., so I'd wake up, drink a little cafe sito, be very introverted, not talk to people until I had time to read some scriptures and journal for the day, to set those intentions and remind myself where I was. And then I climbed a little Camino family that I kind of journeyed with day to day. So we journeyed together into the dawn. It'd still be pretty dark at that point. Folks are typically a little slower to talk, which is nice, or sometimes it might be a day where people are quite talkative and maybe you'll stop at a little cafe and we'd begin to chat. We'd go for a couple more hours, we'd go two by two, maybe we'd go in a group, maybe one of us will say, hey, I just need to take some time off to think and maybe go alone. And we kind of found a rhythm in which there was kind of a gentle movement. And we'd walk for anywhere from five to 6 hours straight up, just walking and pilgrimaging with your backpack, with friends. By 11:00 a.m., you've been walking for a while, so I guess it's time for a rattler or a Calada de lemon. And then you'll share stories, maybe play some cards, then journey into the next town. You'd reach the next town usually around twelve or one because the sun would be a little too high in August for you to walk anytime further. You check in into the next hostel or albergue, you'll typically see the other pilgrims filing in as well. You take a little siesta, you'd break bread with some of your pilgrims or maybe alone if the city had a festival, you'd go and celebrate with folks. Or maybe the city has beautiful landscape that you want to explore or maybe there's a pilgrim who story you wanted to share with more. And you do that. But it was so beautiful not being on our laptops or scrolling through our phones, but quite literally where our feet are. And I think that was the innate spirituality there as the landscape broke from dusty dirt paths to sunrises over forest regions to the dew that stuck to the BlackBerry thorn tissles that was free breakfast on the side of the road to the vineyards, to the warm hospitality of folks in Spain saying Buen Camino, which basically means, like, good walk know, a good pilgrimage. But there was something really powerful about that innately being part of the spirituality found in the mundaneness. All that to say that I guess some of the gospel stories I never really understood until I went on this pilgrimage. I never really understood what was meant by I was sick and you cared for me until I got severe blisters from walking for hours and the kindness of fellow pilgrims and other folks showed me how to treat them. Or I was without home and you housed me until I was a know, walking on the way or I was hungry and you gave me bread to eat when we'd have the really wonderfully, not expensive meals in Spain. So all those things that I think what you did for the least of did, you did for me. Being a recipient of that and understanding the common humanity that we share on pilgrimage, I think that was a powerful spirituality in and of itself. And the diversity. I would say I did half of the Frenchway from Lyon to Santiago. And even then the changes in the landscape and the changes in the context of the people, but still the same spirit of hospitality was very present. And then you get to Santiago and the grandeur of the church, some of my fellow pilgrims who've been journeying for much longer than two weeks, just the emotion as people walk up and realize that the journey is over. And I think that was a really powerful metaphor for life too, this idea that it is not infinite, there's something finite and there's something beautiful about finding that meaning in the day to day. And the mundane, I would say that's a little bit of the spirituality. Of course, more traditional forms of the Stations of the Cross, the rosary was present. We'd stop by different church sites to get a stamp and take as much time in prayer as possible. And even the journey itself, the way it makes you really understand what it means to care for one another. On the road. Last note on this as we crossed over into the Galician region, the town is called Osebrero. There is a prayer in a Franciscan monastery. This was about halfway of my time and some of the questions I brought were finally settling into my soul. It was this beautiful old monastic feel and there were actually chance. We walked in during a time of chance, which was really powerful. And then I saw a prayer I can't quite recall exactly, translated in Spanish and English that basically said if you have gone to every pilgrim site but you did not meet others on the road, you have not done the Camino. If you have tithed at every place but not given spare change to the pilgrim who needed extra for the hostel, you have not done the Camino. If you're willing to do X, Y and Z but not willing to break bread with others, then you have not really done the way. If you have traveled for thousands and thousands of miles but never traveled into the interior depths of your heart and with others and met God, then you have not traveled the way. And that prayer also reminded me like, ah, this is the way.

Meli  [00:36:37]:

My closing question tags on to that, which is, that was a process.

Meli  [00:36:44]:

What did you bring back with you?

Mookie [00:36:48]:

Yeah, what a great question. After Santiago, I took the quote unquote, extra credit trail from Finistera to Mushia. My Camino ended up being very social, quite full of stories from other people. And of course, my friends from back here are like, yeah, that's, of course, not surprising. I take back a lot of those memories and stories, but one of the conversations I was having with them was quite interesting. A lot of people think that the Camino is a break from reality, but it was not a break from, I guess, reality. You still bring the carry on and checked in baggages of your heart when you go on that trail and you still have the personality of whom you are. So I guess all that to say that, yeah, the Camino doesn't maybe make you anything different, but might brush away the dust of the things in our hectic rhythm, of the things that we innately value and feel. You know, the fellow pilgrims who love socializing and drinking after we got to the city, when they have unallotted free time, you'd find them at the bars. And the pilgrims who love being able to explore and do that would do that in their free time. The pilgrims who had a lot of questions about certain things would be brought up in conversation. So if anything, it was maybe more of a refining of where things are in my heart. And that's a lot of the conclusions that I kind of put together after the very social Camino that I had. Of course, with the quiet times in prayer and in journaling and things like that as I journeyed from Phoenistera or the end of the world to a small fishing town in Messiah, it was a time of thinking of what the Camino actually meant. And I guess for me, it brought back some of the hopes and dreams that I think I've lost during the pandemic and in the busyness of work and life and some of the cruelties and injustices and sometimes it snuffs out parts of your hope. I would say it brought that back for me here in the States. And I hope that's what people find when they do the way a reminder that our time on Earth is finite and the stories that we write is with our breath. And our breath is not endless per se. It is the gift we're given when we first come out of the womb. It's the last thing that we give up before we dip. And hopefully there's good stories that we use our bodies to write and even per tatoos, maybe even inscribe on our bodies, but our hand extended to break bread with another, to make the world a more just and equitable space for our students, our patients, persons. That's what I realize I'm bringing back from this pilgrimage. Pilgrimage is interesting too, because just like space and history, as we were talking about, we don't start from zero. We're thrown in to the middle of a story, we're thrown into a middle of a culture. And for me, as a migrant, as a pilgrim here in the US, I'm thrown into this nation's story in this way, my own story, the story of Christianity and Christ, the story of Filipinos and what that means in the US. And I know my time's going to be up sometime, right? But I hope to make the way. I hope to pave the way for other people walking it. And I think that's what I hope to bring back. And I hope to bring back an invitation for other people to make the way, hopefully in Camino de Santiago. But whatever the way looks like for them to carve out time, to journey into their own unique stories.

Meli  [00:40:50]:

Well, Mookie, thank you so much again for coming on my Living Our Beliefs podcast. Each conversation is so rich with you, and I look forward to more and you have a good afternoon.

Mookie [00:41:06]:

You as well, May Lee. Thank you so much.

Meli  [00:41:13]:

Thank you for listening. If you'd like to get notified when new episodes are released, hit the subscribe button. Questions and comments are welcome and can be sent directly to info@talkingwithgodproject.org. A link is in the Show notes. Transcripts are available a few weeks after airing. This podcast is an outgrowth of my Talking with God project. For more information about that research, including workshop and presentation options, go to my website, www.talkingwithgodproject.org. Thank you so much. Till next time. Bye.