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🇪🇸 Camino de MADRID (Madrid - Sahagún)
Black Friday on CdM
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[QUOTE="timr, post: 569273, member: 5237"] I'm separating this off from my Live on The Camino thread which is here. [URL]https://www.caminodesantiago.me/community/threads/a-short-walk-continued.51788/[/URL] Black Friday Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving Day in the US. A 'holiday weekend'. It has spread like wildfire in UK and Ireland in the past few years. It is 'black' because it is a day of such unconstrained consumer spending that hard-pressed traders can move their accounts from the red into the black. It is as widely promoted now as Christmas or Easter or Halloween. Unlike those days it hasn't the slightest connection with the Christian message. You cannot wish somebody a 'Happy Black Friday'. It has a single message - 'Spend, spend, spend.' No robins or bunnies or chicks, let alone a crib or a cross on the posters. Just very stark letters. Literally, in black and white. Black Friday has arrived in Spain. They don't have a word for it. They call it Black Friday. Newspapers, TV and shops are screaming at you. Get out there and spend. On Black Friday I was walking on the Camino de Madrid, from Peñaflor de Hornija to Medina de Rioseco. Across the broad featureless meseta, where wheat and sunflowers are grown. 36 solitary kilometres. No other pilgrim met. On the way I stopped off at the ancient monastery of La Santa Espina, which to this day preserves a thorn from the Crown of Thorns given by King Louis IX of France who bought it long ago and built the Sainte Chapelle in Paris in which to keep it. The monks are gone, scattered by Napoleon. I met a couple of ancient de la Salle brothers who showed me the stunning church. The monastery building is now an agricultural college. After a long day I arrived at Medina de Rioseco. The first building you come to in the town, adjacent to the bridge, which leads you in, is the Poor Clares Convent. It dates from. 1492. Poor Clares follow the rule of the ever cheerful St Clare, the companion of Francis of Assisi. They embrace a life of austere poverty, prayer and charity, and they live all their life enclosed in a particular convent. At Medina they have an albergue for pilgrims. It is a great monastic tradition along the Camino to care for pilgrims in this way. A Sister left the enclosure to lead me across the courtyard to the albergue. I asked her if there was a supermarket in the town. (I didn't need to 'spend, spend,spend' but I wanted some fruit and energy bars, which are pilgrim staples.) [I]'Lo siento, no lo sé'[/I], she replied with a beautiful smile and a wistful look. 'I'm sorry, I don't know.' Black Friday. Spend your life, not your money. Follow your dream. I'm crying. Next morning, after Mass, I chatted with the Sisters through the grille. It is a bit like prison visiting but much more cheerful! They are just three in number. In their eighties. One has been bedbound for 16 years. A fourth died last month. Sr Maria Concepcion told me she has lived within those walls for 64 years, since before I was born. They have a young Franciscan Sister from the Philippines helping to look after them at the moment. On December 8 they will all leave the convent finally. After 525 years it will be empty. They will go to stay with Franciscan Sisters in Valladolid. I'm crying again. (Just for the record, there is a Carrefours-Express 500m further up the road.) [/QUOTE]
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