Customer Reviews

Fumbling: A Journey of Love, Adventure, and Renewal on the Camino de Santiago

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Wow. What a book. This woman is a poet - the references she makes to spirit, and the stumbling and fumbling we all go through trying to find our way, our own personal path to God - it's in here.

The premise of the story, a spiritual memoir, is Kerry's sudden decision to walk the Camino de Santiago in Spain about a year after the extended illness and death of her father.

The book held significant value to me as about 4 years ago I set off to do the Camino (are you familiar with it? The famed pilgrimage across Northern Spain from France to the Compestela de Santiago?). I've been on a number of pilgrimages, whether in Spain (where I walked solo from Pamplona to Burgos) to solo hiking the northern NM portions of the Continental Divide Trail, to silent sabbaticals at such monasteries as Gethsemani (of Thomas Merton acclaim) in Kentucky. So this book seemed to really resonate with me.

Her lack of clarity, or the clarity that only comes AFTER the event is humbling. While she walks, she moves through, w/o even recognizing it as such (as is often the case) the different stages of the rather complicated grief she's moving through. At all the unlikliest corners, she bumps into God, a God far richer and grander and ... permeating ... than her religious upbringing would've suggested existed.

Again. It's brilliant writing.
It's rich. It's honest. It's clueless. It's profound.
In a word ... it's real.

I read this book several years ago and I constantly think of it and recommend it. Kerry Egan literally details her spiritual journey as she and her fiance take a pilgrimage in Spain. After reading it, I immediately wanted to walk 500 miles and I began to think about her ideas on faith and devotion. It was so enlightening to read about a divinity student, a person one may imagine to have strong faith, to be just as questioning and doubting as the rest of us.