We had hiked almost 30 miles that day. We had been on the Camino de Santiago for a month. Everything on my body was either tired or non-functioning.
We stopped at a hostel-slash-bar in a fleck-on-the-map town. For supper it was pinchos, which is the Spanish word for tiny, stale, rock-hard sandwiches which have been sitting on the café counter since before your birth.
We sat at the bar with other pilgrims, drinking tepid beer, eating in silence. Too tired to talk.
Seated beside me was an elderly pilgrim who seemingly had energy to converse. His beard was white. His skin was shoe leather. His odor was ripe. He looked like a cross between Moses and a Hobbit.
He had a heavy French accent. The left half of his face was paralyzed. There was a string of rosary beads dangling from his pocket.
He told us this was his seventh Camino. He said he first hiked Camino after he died.
“Died?” said a priest who was sitting at the bar.
“Oui,” said the old man.
At first, we weren’t sure we heard him correctly.
The young priest adjusted his glasses and took a long look at the old man. I could tell what the priest was thinking. I was thinking the same. The old man LOOKED plenty alive. And he definitely smelled alive.
The old man went on to tell a story. When he was in his 40s, he died for several minutes. He said he was on the toilet, of all things. He had a stroke. He collapsed. And thus began an ethereal experience that changed him.
“What happened?” the priest asked.
The old man said he exited his body, floating high above it. He watched paramedics stuff his body into a bodybag.
After that, a glowing woman appeared. She was made of light. She whisked him away into a world of whiteness.
“Whiteness?” the priest asked.
By now, even the bartender was leaning inward to listen.
So there he was, in the whiteness. There, he saw mountains and trees and streams and flowers. And strangely, he felt unified with each tree and flower and rock. He could even communicate with them.
All the flowers, for example, knew him by name. And he knew them by name. And whenever he walked through this flowery field, the flowers all moved aside to make a path for him.
Also, he could see many more colors than there are words to describe them.
“Our human eyes,” the old man explained, “are incapable of seeing even one percent of the full color spectrum, did you know that?”
By now most pilgrims in the bar were listening to him. Hardly anyone was moving.
The old man spoke of the family members he was reunited with. He told of the movie-like review of his earthly life’s events. He spoke about meeting God, who, as it turns out, was nothing like he expected, and did not resemble Charleton Heston.
But mostly, the little man described an overwhelming, awe-inducing, bone-crushingly intense realization of love. Everything is made of love, he explained. Love is the atomic matter of life itself.
Love, the man said, is the glue that binds all things. Love inside, outside, above, below, everywhere.
Love before us. Love behind us. Love on our right. Love on our left. Love is the empty space between objects. Love, love, love. There is no death, only love. Even our mistakes are somehow made of love.
By the end of his story, our small group of dusty pilgrims was listening with slack jaws. The priest was staring into his empty beer glass.
“I was given a choice,” the old man said. “I was told that if I came back, life would be hard for me because of my stroke. I was told there would be pain. But I chose to leave that realm and come back.”
“Why?” said the young woman beside me. “Why would you ever leave?”
The old man smiled. “Oh, ma petite. Because I have a message to share.”
“What message?” the priest asked.
The old man smiled. “You just heard it.”
