COLUMNS
Living the Mission ON A 500-MILE JOURNEY IN SPAIN, JEFF FRANCO ’88 DISCOVERED THE POWER OF PRESENCE, FAITH AND THE UNEXPECTED MIRACLES.
“The more I let the walls come down, the more I saw miracles taking place all around me,” Franco says. “I saw God in everything, and when I looked at the world through those eyes, it changed everything.” Long before he arrived on the trail, he’d been learning how to see. On Gilmour’s soccer and baseball fields, he learned discipline and humility. In the classroom, he says, his teachers showed him “the power and privilege of an excellent education.”
When Jeff Franco ’ 88 began walking the Camino de Santiago, every morning looked much the same. He woke around 5 a.m. in a hostel filled with other pilgrims, shouldered his backpack, laced his boots and stepped onto the dirt path. Then he walked. For 35 days and 500 miles, Franco made his way from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port in France to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. There were blisters and extreme heat, laughter with other pilgrims, and long stretches when he walked with nothing but his thoughts. This spring, Franco returned to Gilmour to share with the Class of 2026 what those 500 miles had taught him. As the featured Commencement speaker, he reflected on a life filled with milestones. But the moments that shaped him most weren’t the milestones themselves. They were the unexpected miracles he encountered along the way. When Franco began the Camino, he thought finishing was the point. Soon, the journey became less about the destination and more about a way of being. Pilgrims often ask one another: What’s your Camino? In other words: Why are you here? Along the way, Franco met people from around the world, each walking for a different reason. One stranger walked beside him for three days before the two embraced and went their separate ways. More than a decade later, Franco can still vividly remember the steps they shared. Why could he remember that brief encounter so clearly, yet struggle to remember who had served him coffee the day before? Perhaps, he says, because he was fully present.
felt a deep sadness that the journey was over. He noticed a group of nuns nearby and felt drawn to sit beside them. Without knowing what he was feeling, one of the sisters took his hand. “Do not be afraid or sad that you are finishing and leaving the Camino,” she told him. “The Camino will never leave you and will always be with you.”
Franco broke down in tears.
Standing before Gilmour’s graduates this spring, he passed that message on. “None of us needs to know exactly where the road will lead. You just need to take the next courageous, faithful step and be present to God walking alongside you to guide you on your life journey.”
On the Camino, those lessons came to life.
Gilmour’s Holy Cross mission calls students to develop the competence to see and the courage to act in creating a more humane and just society. Franco’s journey offers a deeply personal expression of that mission. Seeing requires more than looking. It means slowing down enough to notice others and recognize the sacred in the ordinary. Mile after mile, he shed unnecessary belongings from his backpack and lost more than 10 pounds. As the physical weight disappeared, emotional weight fell away, too. When he finally reached Santiago de Compostela, Franco expected to feel joy. Instead, standing inside the cathedral, he
The Franco family
Jeff Franco on the .Camino de Santiago
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