In summer 2003, Kevin Codd walked 500 miles in 34 days along a route in Spain to Santiago de Compostela. Pilgrims have walked there for more than 1,000 years. It is the place where many believe James the apostle was buried. Kevin lost 12 pounds. He grew a beard. He nursed five blisters, suffered through tendinitis and endured an irritated nerve in his shoulder. He slept each night in hostels for pilgrims, called refugios, often sharing quarters with world-class snorers.

Unless his fellow pilgrims asked what Kevin did for a living, he didn’t reveal that he was a priest who had traveled a long way from his north Spokane childhood home. He grew up in the Codd family, one of 11 children. I grew up next door.

Kevin is a Spokane diocesan priest who spent the past eight years running the American College of Louvain, a seminary in Belgium. He is fluent in Spanish, and on June 1 he’ll move to Othello, Wash., to become pastor at Sacred Heart Parish.

Kevin recently dropped off his book “To the Field of Stars: A Pilgrim’s Journey to Santiago de Compostela.” I read it on a trip to California. The book transported me from a crowded airplane to a pilgrim’s path in Spain. My childhood buddy can really write.

Don’t take my word for it. Actor and activist Martin Sheen read the book and wrote Kevin a note of praise. He then penned this book blurb: “In this wonderful book Father Codd brilliantly captures the essence of pilgrimage. He is a candid and engaging guide to the physical realities involved. He reveals the interior journey, equally difficult and equally rewarding. It is a spiritual and emotional trek on which pilgrims are confronted with their own broken humanity.”

Kevin walked for 34 days with no fear. Pilgrims carry all their belongings in backpacks. No one steals. Single women make the pilgrimage alone with no worries. In our non-pilgrimage world “we’re conditioned to be fearful,” Kevin told me. “There’s always a new threat, a new disease. There’s always a new bad person. We lock our doors. We’re afraid of our own neighbors. Until you step out of that, you don’t even know you’re in it.”

Without fear, “people are freed to care about one another. Strangers can gather in a circle in the evening and share bread and wine and grapes and cheese without a second thought, with five languages floating around. You begin to see what human community life could be like.”

Kevin has never shed his childhood kindness. But he is honest in the book about how the heat, dirt, lack of privacy and physical pain got to him. One afternoon, he pouted under a tree. A blister had flared. His fellow pilgrims irritated him. A few moments later, after a friend gently listened to Kevin’s laments, he walked on renewed.

“We human beings can’t escape our darker sides,” he writes. “We are both weak and strong. Just when we think we are strong, we fall, and when we feel most weak we later realize it was right then that we were at our best.”

On the pilgrimage, Kevin pushed himself physically, emotionally and spiritually. The experience lived on in him. He did a 750-mile walk through France in 2007, and on June 4 this introvert will face an audience of friends and family – all those Codds! – and do a reading at Auntie’s Bookstore.

When Kevin reached Santiago de Compostela, he pondered this question: How do you want to end up when you die?

“Ultimately, you want to say thank you,” he decided. “This life has been a great thing, even with its sufferings, its ups and downs, its little deaths. What do I want? I want to die grateful. That to me was the biggest lesson.”