Connective Memories

This chapter illustrates how families constructed recollections of spiritual intimacy that had the potential to shape new experiences of intimacy upon their return home. Drawing from Randall Collins’s work on the character and function of the emotional energy at work in ritual life, it discusses the emotional weight of ritual memories, symbolic recollections of Camino spiritual intimacy that had the potential to change family relationships and identity. It describes three types of connective memories family members talked about as significant: quiet memories (stories and sensory memories that are generally more private and shared only with intimate others), digital memories (photographs and other media forms of constructed memory), and material memories (printed photographs, symbolic objects such as jewelry, a pilgrim’s stamped credentials, and Camino tattoos). The chapter also discusses distancing memories, negative ritual emotional memories with the potential to sever feelings of family/group identity and solidarity with others and nature.

Conclusion

This concluding chapter argues that the stories in this book are about people working to strengthen family relationships, but that in many cases they also represent shared discovery of commitment to an ethic of care for those outside of their intimate circles. It stresses how most respondents recognized their privilege and expressed a desire for their Camino to translate to daily interactions with distant others and contemplation of larger social problems. At the same time, distancing memories may undermine such effects. This chapter suggests that respondents’ stories, taken as a whole, push us to think more deeply about the social forces that stand in the way of positive relational outcomes from shared transformational travel. The conclusion moves beyond the Camino, identifying efforts to promote inclusivity in opportunities for travel for transformation in North America and highlighting differences in access to spiritual practices in the United States that could foster relational intimacy. It stresses efforts to build opportunities for travel for transformation with the potential to promote understanding of social inequities and injustices.

Intimacy and Disciplining Technology

This chapter focuses on research participants’ stories of managing and limiting technology, and how they used digital devices to stay connected to each other, fellow pilgrims, and friends and family back home. Drawing from formal and informal interviews, it illustrates how family members negotiated and reflected, both before and as they walked, on their use of smartphones and tablets. Research participants’ voices describe creating time and space away from digital devices to self-reflect and come to know each other as spiritual co-practitioners. The chapter suggests how Camino experience represented, in compressed form, relational and individual habits regarding digital technologies in their everyday lives.

Camino Promises

This chapter interprets family members’ expectations of the Camino as a practice that could bring miracles, life lessons, and individual and relational healing through different kinds of spiritual encounters. It details how parents and their young adult children expected the Camino to be a pilgrimage space where they could develop shared bonds as pilgrims, and where leveling social relationships and expectations in a time and place away from their everyday lives could bring them into deep relationship with other pilgrims. This chapter demonstrates how these Camino promises and expectations are related to the multiple ways people talk about spirituality and its effects in our contemporary world.

Spiritual Intimacies

This chapter illustrates how family members’ Camino expectations played out in their descriptions of shared pilgrimage experience. It reveals how their stories matched the self-searching, relational connection, and caring expectations found in larger cultural therapeutic understandings and expectations of family intimacy, and it explores the salience of gender as it relates to the type of spiritual intimacy parents described. The chapter considers how most research participants told stories that demonstrated a larger archetype of travel for transformation; theirs were narratives of journeying through a space that brought change to their everyday relationships upon their return home.

Planning the Mysterious

This chapter illustrates how parents and their young adult children approached making decisions about how they would walk the Camino de Santiago together and the role that Camino guidebooks, published pilgrims’ narratives, and online sites played in their expectations and design. Drawing largely from formal interviews with pilgrims, it highlights the abundance of choices these parents and young adult children faced regarding hospitality, travel, and digital technologies. The chapter emphasizes how, through familiar mechanisms and processes of buying family leisure time, they pursued the Camino’s call to be open to the unknown and its promise of sacred connection to others, nature, and mystical encounters.