Walking the Camino

by Tony Kevin

  He who would valiant be, ‘gainst all disaster,

  Let him in constancy, follow the Master.

  There’s no discouragement, shall make him once relent

  His first avowed intent, to be a pilgrim.

  The idea of pilgrimage, the dream of ‘an arduous journey far from home undertaken for sacred reasons’, is embedded deep in our culture and history. It is part of us, part of what inspires our urge to travel, to experience foreign places. We may not know it, but each time we leave our homeland to travel the world, we are looking for something more than just ‘holidays’, fun, and sex in the sun. I think we are seeking, whether we recognise it or not, spiritual enlightenment, wisdom, and the revelation of God in the richness of the great world that lies out there beyond our home town.

  Every traveller, especially every young traveller, is a pilgrim: whether they go consciously to seek spiritual rebirth, to escape from oppression or grief or boredom at home, to seek interesting or spiritually rewarding work experience abroad, or simply to enjoy the thrill of unfamiliar places and customs. The desire to go a-pilgriming, it seems, is part of our human condition.

  chapter three

  Setting Off

  In my garden in Canberra, one crisp and sunny autumn afternoon in May, my family and friends — my sister Naomi had even flown up from Melbourne — came to see me off to Spain. But it wasn’t just an ordinary pre-holiday farewell gathering. Father John Eddy, a Jesuit priest and a good friend for many years, was there to bless the pilgrimage I was about to set out on.

  We were honouring the medieval customary practice. When pilgrims or crusaders left home, everybody knew there was a fair chance they might never come back, or at least not for a very long time. So departing pilgrims would make their personal arrangements with care — paying any debts, collecting any debts due to them, asking reconciliation with their enemies and forgiveness from those they had wronged, and making prudential arrangements for the care of their dependent families while they were away or if they did not return. Finally, they would ask the local priest or bishop to bless their pilgrimage and pray for their safe return home. I thought all those were good rules, and wanted to emulate them.

  So there I was, proudly dressed in crisp new khaki pilgrim gear, walking boots, and floppy hat, a scallop shell around my neck, a packed rucksack and wooden staff at my side — no doubt looking rather ridiculous, but I wanted to do this thing properly — as Father John sprinkled me and these meagre belongings with blessed holy water, and offered his priestly pilgrim’s blessing. I realised then with a shock that all this was truly happening, that I really was about to embark the next morning on the strangest adventure of my life. I would need all the help and prayers I could get, and was suddenly very glad that my family and friends were there to wish me well and pray for a safe journey and return home to the family. It was a memorable and heart-swelling send-off from my priest and friend John. Looking around at the shining faces of family and friends, I felt more at peace with myself than I had been for a long time.

  But the next morning’s departure was considerably less happy. Suddenly I was lonely, and scared of what might be in store. I was going to the other end of the world, alone. I looked down at my pack and staff — they seemed both very heavy to carry, and very small. Everything I owned, my whole life-support system for the next two months, was in this little backpack. I was leaving behind — I realised now, for a long time — the warm comforts of home, the joy and love of family, but for what real purpose? Waves of doubt and fear and a sense of my own foolish selfishness swept over me as I made my final packing checks.

  The taxi tooted in the driveway, and I gave my wife and children hasty farewell hugs, fighting back brimming tears and incipient panic. It was crazy to be leaving for so long those whom I loved. Why on earth was I attempting this pilgrimage venture on the other side of the world. Had it all been a huge error of judgement?

  I caught the bus for Sydney, and tried to drive away such bleak thoughts by closing my eyes and burying myself in Spanish-language tapes for the next few hours. The tapes were a good excuse for not thinking, a mental exercise in keeping fears and emotions at bay. I didn’t know it, but the iron discipline of the pilgrimage was beginning.

  ***

  While I patiently waited out the long bus and air and train journey stages from Canberra to Granada — it took over forty-four hours in all, and I did not sleep in a bed once in that time — I thought more about how the Santiago pilgrimage, which by the early twentieth century had become defunct medieval history, had revived spectacularly after World War II and the return of democracy to Spain following Franco’s death in 1975. It’s an interesting story in itself that says much about the changing mood and values of our times.

  There was a combination of powerful cultural trends. In continental Europe there was widespread disillusionment after the century of terrible wars and atrocities that had followed the two centuries of the optimistic Enlightenment. Now, many serious thinkers felt that secular rationalism had taken Europe down a civilisational blind alley that had, in the end, contributed to the perverted nationalist ideologies of the twentieth century, and to the huge crimes against humanity of the Nazi and Stalinist eras. Many thought that something more than secular rationalism was needed to rebuild the foundations for a decent European civic morality. There was a new open-mindedness and interest in religion, and a new readiness to try to re-connect with the noble old ideal of a united Christian Europe. Europeans had had enough of competing nationalisms, except on the football field and in the Eurovision song contest. As the Cold War wound down to its close, and as postwar generations of Europeans grew up, there was a growing conviction that it was essential now to look for new models — new ways to come together in love and friendship, both symbolic and practical, affirming the cultural unity of European peoples.

  Spain itself was searching for new approaches to civil society and to church-state relations. Franco’s coercive and now discredited clerical-fascist ascendancy had run its course, and with his death in 1975 a new democratic politics was in rapid gestation. Progressive Spanish Catholics were looking for new ways to re-legitimise their church, to restore its standing and connections with younger, democratically minded Spaniards. In this context, the pilgrimage to Santiago was something fresh, holy, and untarnished by past church mistakes and misdeeds. Local voluntary ‘Friends of the Camino’ societies sprang up across Spain and Portugal to survey, waymark, and restore the old pilgrimage rights-of-way — routes that had in many areas become no more than vague local memories. Soon there were several alternative waymarked routes to Santiago being re-established: not only through the Pyrenees, but also from Valencia, Alicante, Toledo, Granada, Seville, Cádiz, Lisbon. All the ancient caminos of Spain were being re-located and re-signed with the famous yellow arrows.

  In Rome in the 1960s, the Catholic Church under the benign influence of Pope John XXIII was itself searching for symbols of a new global ecumenicism and inclusiveness. The Second Vatican Council, 1965–68, launched this new spirit, and pilgrimage fitted into the new ethos perfectly. In 1978, Karol Wojtyla, who had been Archbishop of Cracow in Poland since 1963, became Pope John Paul II. A strong and vigorous athlete, he was throughout his life a priest who instinctively understood the great value of pilgrimage in the re-building of Christian life. As Archbishop of Cracow he had helped restore the historic Polish pilgrimage to the shrine of the Black Madonna in Czestochowa in southern Poland. Defying mockery and harassment from the communist state authorities, young Catholic Poles from the 1960s onwards walked this pilgrimage in great numbers as an act of religious affirmation and symbolic rejection of the Communist Party’s pretensions to dominate Polish society. The freedom and joy of the Czestochowa pilgrimage relieved the fear and suspicion that people lived with under the harsh control of the communist national security state. Even the worker-intellectual alliance that became Solidarity, the social renew
al movement that eventually toppled communism, was forged on the pilgrim paths to Czestochowa.

  Thus, in eastern as well as western Europe, religious pilgrimages became a symbolic rejection by young people of the sterility of both communism and capitalist greed. As pope in 1989, John Paul II presided over a seminal World Youth Day in Santiago that was attended by huge numbers of young people.

  Even outside the Church, in Western society at large, there was a new readiness in people who were not necessarily religious in a conventional sense to explore their own spirituality in new ways. Secular rationalism had truly had its day in Europe. For the same sorts of reasons that a lot of people were ready to try yoga, transcendental meditation, Zen, travelling to India to explore oriental mysticism, varieties of tantric sex or mind-enhancing drugs, and experimenting with new communal ways of living together, more and more people were ready to have another look at the Santiago pilgrimage. Going to Santiago became a fashionable ‘New Age’ thing to do.

  Obviously, modern pilgrims no longer expected miracle cures in Santiago, nor were they seeking guaranteed passages into heaven, but they were looking for answers to important questions about the good life and a good civil society that European secular rationalism had failed to deliver. And it turned out that the pilgrimage delivered something of value that many were looking for. Its popularity grew rapidly. This is easy to measure, because Santiago Cathedral keeps statistics of the number of compostelas that it issues each year to pilgrims completing their journey.

  Here are some published data: in 1986, 2491 compostelas were issued; in 1992, 9764; in the holy year of 1993, 99,439; in 1998, 30,126; in the holy year of 1999, 154,613; in the jubilee year of 2000, 55,004; and in the holy year of 2004, 179,944 — the highest figure yet. In 2005, a ‘normal’ year, 93,924 were issued.

  The greatest numbers of pilgrims still choose the most popular set of routes from France, the Vía Frances from Roncesvalles. But conscious of the dangers of this classic route becoming overloaded and overstressed with too many pilgrims for their own safety and comfort, the Spanish and European Union authorities (Spain joined the Union in 1986) have been working to improve the infrastructure on alternative routes — in particular, the Vía de la Plata from Seville in the far south. A lot of money is going into better waymarking and information signage, establishing new pilgrim albergues and refugios big enough to handle large groups of walkers — school groups, for example — and protecting and maintaining public pedestrian rights of way on the caminos as new motorway-construction projects carve great swathes out of the Spanish countryside. The European heritage values of the pilgrimage trails have been formally recognised and gazetted, and the economic value of the pilgrimage in encouraging remote-area tourism and bringing more economic activity into isolated villages accepted. Of course, the pilgrimage has wider long-term benefits for Spanish tourism: walkers on the camino may not be big spenders, but they may return in later years with their families for more conventional holidays in Spain.

  The European Christian churches, both Catholic and Protestant, see the value of the pilgrimage as a stimulus for religious revival and consciousness-raising in the youth. And doctors and mental-health professionals see its therapeutic value for mind and body. So the modern pilgrimage to Santiago speaks to many constituencies, all sharing the central classic motivation of pilgrims, ancient or modern — a hunger for spiritual rebirth, for better answers to deeply felt spiritual needs. That the pilgrimage seems to appeal alike to practising Christians and to non-Christians, even to determined humanists, only confirms that something interesting is happening here in terms of spirituality and personal growth.

  ***

  On the face of it, the people you meet on the camino today might seem far removed from medieval concepts of pilgrimage. But they are not so different, I think, as might first appear.

  In the Middle Ages, pilgrims certainly carried a lot less. They might have looked a lot like the statues of Santiago Peregrino you see in Spanish churches — in a homespun robe and sandals, a scallop-shell hanging around their neck, and carrying a staff, water bottle, and waist-purse at their belt. No hi-tech backpacks or hiking boots for them!

  The Elizabethan courtier and adventurer Sir Walter Raleigh wrote a lovely little poem — which forms the frontispiece to this book — that perfectly captures the uncomplicated and artless spirit of medieval pilgrimage:

  Give me my scallop-shell of quiet,

  My staff of faith to walk upon,

  My scrip of joy, immortal diet,

  My bottle of salvation,

  My gown of glory, hope’s true gage,

  And thus I’ll take my pilgrimage.

  — ‘The Passionate Man’s Pilgrimage’ (1604)

  Raleigh is a link between medieval and modern pilgrims. A versatile Renaissance man — courtly and elegant, a buccaneering sea-captain and knight much favoured by Queen Elizabeth of England, imbued with the cynicism of his worldly age — he was still in spiritual contact with the medieval idea of pilgrimage. And his short poem here is far more than just a pilgrim’s packing list. Raleigh lived while England was being torn asunder politically between the old Catholic religion and the newly established national Church of England. His poem shows a rich empathy with the fast-fading medieval ideals, with the old urge to ‘go a-pilgriming’. I want to reflect a little on Raleigh’s lines.

  My scallop-shell of quiet: this is a lovely image, reminding us of how pilgrimage is fundamentally a search for peace and quiet from the hurly-burly, tensions, and complications of daily life and work. Put the shell to your ear, Raleigh suggests to us, and the noise of the world falls away — all you will hear is the soft sigh of the sea. And wearing the scallop-shell of St James around his neck identifies a pilgrim to Santiago, being his safe-conduct pass through dangerous lands where an unidentified foreigner might otherwise be suspect.

  My staff of faith to walk upon: the sturdy wooden pilgrim’s staff, shoulder-high or longer with its forked or hooked top, was symbolic both of a shepherd’s crook and of Christ’s wooden Cross. Raleigh’s key phrase here is ‘to walk upon’ — not just to walk with, but relying upon the staff as companion and helper on the way, assisting the pilgrim over mountains and rough ground, crossing rivers and marshes, and as a weapon of self-defence. Raleigh understood that the staff symbolises the pilgrim’s strong faith that, with God’s help and protection, he would complete his arduous and dangerous journey to Santiago.

  My scrip of joy, immortal diet: literally, the ‘scrip’ is the pilgrim’s credencial or passport, his document from his local priest or feudal lord testifying that he has been permitted to go on this pilgrimage. But ‘scrip of joy, immortal diet’ has a richer meaning that I experienced one wonderful day in high Castile. I was walking alone, my blisters had healed, my excess body weight was gone, and my pack seemed light. It was early morning. Dark-grey storm-clouds were massing in the sky to the west, rolling across the ripe, golden wheatlands towards me. Morning dew still hung heavy on the wire fence alongside my track, and pendant spiderwebs glistened like silver against the gold and grey horizon. Everyday wayside flowers — dog roses, thistles, lupins, bluebells, wild shallots, everlasting daisies, lavender, and much more — were in bloom. This commonplace countryside view suddenly was so overwhelmingly beautiful to me that I wept as the glory of God’s creation washed over me. That, I think is the ‘immortal diet’ Raleigh has in mind: those wonderful moments on a pilgrimage when all pain and earthly care is transcended, when you see with piercing clarity and joy the wonder of the world that God has given us to love and care for.

  My bottle of salvation: there are several sly Elizabethan puns here, I think. Without water, we die: it is the essential element in our physical organism, and our bodies are mostly composed of water. When we dehydrate, we die, and our bodies finally become no more than dry dust and bones. So the water bottle a pilgrim carries is his water of life, his essential guarantee of physic
al survival. Raleigh would have seen other meanings wrapped up here as well. A pilgrim’s leather water bottle would have frequently held not only water but alcohol — wine or beer or cider or spirits, all part of the pilgrim’s normal diet. Christ turned water into wine; and in the Christian sacrament of Holy Communion, consecrated bread and water and wine — the pilgrim’s basic foods — become the body and blood of Christ. To eat and drink from the consecrated bread, water, and wine, in memory of Christ’s supreme sacrifice on the Cross, saves us from sin and thereby offers the possibility of eternal life. Finally, the ‘bottle of salvation’ also good-humouredly reminds us of the benign secular pleasures of human society on pilgrimage. To be a pilgrim is not to be a cheerless lonely traveller, but to journey in groups, to meet people and enjoy convivial relaxation with them after the day’s hard walking, to celebrate life and friendship in evenings of eating and drinking with fellow pilgrims and people met on the way.

  My gown of glory: Raleigh, who wore the rich and colourful garb of an Elizabethan courtier, speaks here with affectionate irony about the typical pilgrim’s rough and dirty brown homespun gown. Medieval pilgrims did not carry backpacks or changes of clothing. The one rough robe was worn through all weathers. They walked, slept, and bathed in it (whenever they found rivers or lakes in which to bathe). The austerity of such spartan clothing was part of their pilgrimage experience. Part of their sense that their act of pilgrimage had value, their ‘glory’, came from their sacrifice of physical comfort and vanity.