One foot in front of the other

LOUISVILLE — Walking a portion of the Camino de Santiago — together with all the time she spent walking in West Africa while serving in the Peace Corps — led the Rev. Kimberly Knowle-Zeller to write “Small Steps: Blessings to Lift Your Soul on the Pilgrimage of Life.”

Knowle-Zeller, a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, joined hosts the Rev. Lee Catoe and Simon Doong this week on “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast.” Listen to their 44-minute conversation here.

Any journey taken on foot can be a pilgrimage, Knowle-Zeller told the hosts, adding, “we just have to slow down and pay attention.” Her time spent walking every day in West Africa put her “in tune to my community and my neighbors and living connected to the land,” she said.

After the Peace Corps, Knowle-Zeller attended seminary, where she met two people who’d walked the Camino. “I couldn’t just chalk it up to random occurrences. It felt very Spirit-led,” she said. In seminary she did an independent study on Christian pilgrimage, where she learned even more about the Camino. “If you were a Medieval pilgrim, it was very dangerous,” she said of the 500-mile pilgrimage, which has routes through Portugal, France and Spain. “There was sickness and thieves, but there was also the hospitality along the way. You would stay in convents and people would let you in. I was enthralled.”

Knowle-Zeller walked the Camino for 33 days, putting “one foot in front of the other, over and over again.” After she returned to seminary, the connection between walking to get anywhere in West Africa and walking the Camino helped her to realize that “you don’t have to travel the world to go on pilgrimage.”

That realization “became the lens through which I viewed the world that taught me and continues to teach me to keep going no matter what circumstances come at us,” she said, as we move “through the world, paying attention and trusting that each step that we take is an act of hope. That’s where small Steps has come in and been a model for my life.” She now encourages others and herself to “see the ground before us as holy ground, which is hard to do in our fast-paced, busy world.”

“This lens of pilgrimage has helped me to slow down and see what’s around me,” she told Doong and Catoe. “That’s how I want to live my day-to-day life. I want to feel it all and marvel at the miracle of life before me — the challenges and the joys.”

Any pilgrimage “is about the encounters along the way,” she said. Originally, Knowle-Zeller thought she had to walk the entire Camino straight through without skipping any parts or taking a taxi to speed a portion of her journey. “Finally it dawned on me that no, I am going to get there however I get there, and that doesn’t take away from the experience and what I’m learning,” she said. “It was freeing to know I could take some days off and hop in the taxi if I needed to and realize that the learning happens in the detours and in the challenges that are ahead.”

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“I adore the book cover,” she said when asked about the cover of "Small Steps." “When [the publisher] sent me this cover, I said ‘yes.’” The cover comes from something her father would tell her during infrequent phone calls and more frequent letters while she was with the Peace Corps in West Africa. “Now Kim,” he’d always tell her, “remember to wear your boots.”

“It was such a dad thing to say. He was worried about snakes and hippos, but the thing about where I was in West Africa, it was hot,” she told the hosts. “I was not wearing boots, and he knew that, and he continued to tell me to remember to ‘wear your boots.’”

She calls those words from her late father “a blessing to me and a benediction. My dad was sending his 22-year-old daughter to Africa knowing it would be hard and challenging and you don’t know what you’re going to encounter.”

“But he believed in me and he believed in the work of the Peace Corps. Most importantly, he believed in the God who was going with me and who was already there,” she said. “We bless people and we send them into the world knowing we can’t protect ourselves and our kids, and yet we go with God’s blessing.”

It’s similar to the blessing worshipers receive at the end of a church service, Knowle-Zeller said.

“That is life. That is pilgrimage. There’s no safety guaranteed,” she said. “That’s my hope in the book — that in the small steps, in the movement in our lives, in our day-to-day simple tasks — we are aware that God is with us.”

By becoming a pastor and a mother, Knowle-Zeller has moved from one who receives blessings to one who gives them. “There’s not a time or a place where we shouldn’t ask for a blessing when we need one, or not offer one to somebody else for something they’re going through or the joy of the life they’re leading,” she said.

“As a pastor, you’re beside people at the hospital bed. You’re in their home when they’re having hard conversations,” she said. “These are the times we can offer a word of hope that God is with you.”

People walking the Camino say to those they encounter “Buen Camino,” for “Good Way” or “Good Journey,” she noted. “It’s that encouragement from people you don’t even know. I had read that when you walk the Camino, the people who have gone before you are as present as the people who are there, walking. You feel the presence of all the saints who have walked.”

“Isn’t it the same at church? When we say the Lord’s Prayer or gather at the table for Communion, we are not alone,” she said. “It is flooded with all the people who have gone before us and those to come. It’s the holiness all around us — if we take a moment to be aware.”

New episodes of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” drop every Thursday. Listen to previous editions here.