Walking the Camino

by Tony Kevin

  Ironically, Franco was a Galician from Ferrol; and, from the very start of the Civil War, the conservative and church-influenced Galician political elite supported the Nationalist rising. Yet Franco suppressed Galician culture as ruthlessly as he suppressed other regional Spanish cultures. It was all part of his iron Spanish centralism

  Galicians will never again accept second place for their language and culture. From the other end of Spain, the great Andalusian poet Federico Garcia Lorca loved and admired Galicia for its uniqueness. Just before the Civil War broke out, Lorca wrote his ‘Six Galician Poems’ in 1935, composed in the Gallego language as his tribute to Galicia. One of them is ‘Chove en Santiago’ (‘It’s raining in Santiago’), which Luar na Lubre later set to music. It is one of their most-loved songs now:

  Chove en Santiago

  meu doce amor.

  Camelia branca do ar

  brila entebrecida ao sol.

  Chove en Santiago

  na noite escura.

  Herbas de prata e de sono

  cobren a valeira lúa.

  Olla a choiva pola rúa

  laio de pedra e cristal.

  Olla no vento esvaído

  soma e cinza do teu mar.

  Soma a cinza do teu mar

  Santiago, lonxe do sol.

  Ágoa da mañán anterga

  trema no meu corazón.

  (Lorca, ‘Madrigal â cibdá de Santiago’)

  Lorca never translated these six poems into his native tongue, but I found a Spanish translation by Juanfer Puebla, which is nearly as beautiful as the Galician original, on a Spanish poetry website:

  Llueve en Santiago

  mi dulce amor.

  Camelia blanca de aire

  brilla temblorosa al sol.

  Llueve en Santiago

  en la noche oscura.

  Yerbas de plata y de sueño

  cubren la luna nueva.

  Mira la lluvia por la rúa

  lamento de piedra y cristal

  Mira el viento evanescente

  sombra y ceniza de tu mar.

  Sombra y ceniza de tu mar

  Santiago, lejanía del sol.

  Agua de la mañana antigua

  tiembla en mi corazón.

  I also found an English translation, by Catherine Brown, which inevitably loses the poetic rhythm of the Romance versions but retains something of the poem’s beauty:

  Rain falls on Santiago

  my sweet love.

  White camellia of the air,

  the veiled sun shines.

  Rain falls on Santiago

  in the dark of night.

  Grasses of silver and dream

  cover the vacant moon.

  Look at the rain in the street,

  lament of stone and of glass.

  See on the languishing wind

  shadow and ash of your ocean.

  Shadow and ash of your ocean,

  Santiago, far from the sun;

  water of ancient morning

  trembles in my heart.

  Lorca was thrilled that under the short-lived republic, Galicians, like Andalusians, were starting proudly to rediscover and revitalise their national cultural roots. He would be glad that Galician culture is now flourishing again. And its great cities — Santiago, Vigo, Ourense, Pontevedra, cosmopolitan La Coruña, Ferrol, and Lugo — are both Galician and Spanish in spirit, important elements in the rich multicultural mix that is Spain.

  chapter thirteen

  Walking with God

  It’s time that I tried to say something about the religious ideas I took with me into my pilgrimage, where I stood in relation to my Catholic faith before I started the journey, and what impact the pilgrimage might have had on me — for this book would be incomplete and less than honest if I were to remain silent on such matters. These days, fortunately, we have pretty much left behind the inhibitions of the quite recent past, when it wasn’t considered good manners in English-speaking countries to talk about religion, politics, or sex. Nowadays most people talk easily enough about politics and sex, and we are recently becoming less constrained from talking about religion, the last taboo.

  Religion starts with family. I was baptised as a newborn baby at St Canice’s Catholic Church, Sydney, down the road from St Luke’s Hospital, where I was born in 1943. I was brought up a Catholic with loose but real connections back to my father’s Australian Irish–Catholic tradition. My mother, Minnie Kevin, and grandmother, Josephine Schick, with whom I grew up in Sydney, were well-educated, culturally sophisticated women, of Viennese–Jewish cultural background but not practising Jews. My father, Charles Kevin, had always wanted me to be a Catholic, and my mother honoured her promise that I would have opportunities to grow up as one. It was a marriage whose formative years were disrupted by long wartime separations. My parents married in London in March 1939, on the eve of World War II.

  My father spent the war as an Australian naval officer and in secret intelligence work. I learned years later from the official biography after his death — he had never told me anything of this — that in 1941 he helped set up the Commonwealth Security Service, which worked out of Melbourne. These secret duties kept him away from my mother and me for most of the war years. I always understood that he had spent the war at sea as a lieutenant on a minesweeper in the Indian Ocean, and he was in fact on active naval service at sea for a year in 1942–43.

  To my mother’s enduring sadness, my parents effectively separated in 1947 after eight years of marriage, when I was four. My father was then Australia’s first head of diplomatic mission (his title then was official secretary, effectively charge d’affaires) to the newly independent nation of India. Conditions were still very unsafe in Delhi then, so my father sent my mother and me, first for a few months in Ceylon while waiting to see if security improved, and finally back to live in Australia for the rest of his three-year posting. My mother and I did not see him again for the next three years, and my parents never lived together again after he returned from India to duties in Canberra in 1950.

  After a few unsuccessful attempts by my mother to re-establish a family home in Canberra — my father had gotten too used to his independent single life by then, and could not handle the stresses of a domestic life with his volatile and eccentric Viennese wife — we stayed on in Sydney, living with my grandmother, whose flat was always a home and a safe refuge for me.

  Many years later, my parents were finally divorced — an acceptance of facts — at my father’s volition. He remarried in 1963, to Therese Wilson, a beautiful and charming woman he had met in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), when he was Australian high commissioner there from 1959 to 1961. Therese had two daughters, Tammy and Naomi. Naomi is my cherished little sister, living in Australia now with her husband, Deve Mahesan, and their daughters, Lara and Tatiana. Naomi had some happy years as a child living in our father’s home during his last posting as Australian ambassador to South Africa. She has the warmest memories of him. He died of cancer at age fifty-nine in 1968, the year I began my Australian foreign affairs career. Therese died a few years later. I am sad that I never really got to know my father as well as I should have. We loved one another, and he was as good a father to me as he could be in our damaged family circumstances, but our relationship was never easy.

  My early school years were in non-Catholic schools. As a boy, I was taught most of what I know about my Catholic religion by an outstanding Jesuit, Father Michael Scott, headmaster of Campion Hall, a Catholic primary school in Sydney not far from my home and school. At my father’s request, I would visit Father Scott in his study for an hour’s regular teaching, one on one, every Saturday morning. They were stimulating conversations rather than lessons, and I greatly looked forward to them. Scott was a charming and perceptive man who knew exactly how to make the best use of the limited time he had to teach me. With his help, I went through the Catholic sacrame
nts, starting with First Communion at age eight. I have retained a respect and affection for the Jesuit order ever since.

  I spent my three final high-school years attending a well-known Jesuit boarding school in Sydney, Saint Ignatius College, Riverview. I drifted away from religious observance at university, and married in an Anglican church in Northern Ireland. I have two sons, Patrick and Charles, from that first marriage to Valerie Russell; and three young grandsons, Patrick’s sons, Jonathan, Sam, and Max. I didn’t return to the practice of Catholicism until my early fifties, under pressure of a series of emotional hammer-blows, years of deep loneliness and distress and flawed judgement following the death of my beloved second wife, Jennifer Cushman. Instinctively, I reached back into my past, to my childhood Catholic religion, seeking the help of a divine Friend.

  My reawakened Catholicism grew stronger during a challenging final ambassadorial posting to Cambodia (in 1994–97), as I wrestled with official detachment and cynicism in the face of great human distress, and as I took my first tentative steps towards taking on responsibility for a new, adoptive family. In Phnom Penh I started going regularly to Mass again, at the weekly English-language Masses conducted by the US-based Maryknoll Fathers’ Mission to Cambodia. An impressive Maryknoll priest from Vermont, Father Jim Noonan, baptised my adopted Cambodian baby daughter, Vanny: it was a moment of re-invigorated faith for me. After retiring from the Australian foreign service in 1998 and beginning a new life as a private person back home in Canberra, I became a regular Mass-goer with my young children Vanny, Raingsey, and Julius in my local parish church of St Christopher’s, and we draw joy and comfort as a family from that. My wife, Sina, is a loyal member of Canberra’s Cambodian Buddhist community. On festival days I go happily with her to our local Buddhist temple, and she comes with us to Mass on special days, too.

  I am not a fervent or doctrinaire Catholic, and have never experienced any dramatic ‘born again’ experience of rekindling of my religion. It has been a more gradual thing, a gentle re-orientation with and re-affirmation of the ‘faith of our fathers, living still, we will be true to thee till death’, in the words of that stirring Irish hymn we used to sing at Riverview. In recent years I have felt a growing, quiet conviction: ‘Yes, I really do believe in God, and I do believe in the essential elements of my faith — a faith which is Catholicism’. Going on pilgrimage to Santiago was a natural step in my life’s spiritual path over the past few years

  I’m still probably an unusual sort of Catholic, as indeed my father was. He used always to stand at the back of the church so as to be able to slip out of Mass unobtrusively during the sermon, across the road for a quick milk-shake! He had strong views on the separation of church and state, and resented being told by priests how to think about politics or how to vote, as some Australian bishops and priests were still wont to do in the 1950s. He loved the remote mystery, dignity, and universality of the Latin Mass, and he felt the loss of it when the language of the Mass became vernacular English.

  My nonconformity takes different forms from my father’s. I enjoy the stimulus of good sermons (or, as they are now called, homilies), and I am comfortable hearing Mass in my own language. However, I still remember and love the familiar words of the Latin Mass that I experienced as a child, so going to a choral High Mass is a special joy for me. I have a problem with personal Confession (or, as it is now called, Reconciliation). The notion that one should regularly confess one’s sins to God through the intermediation of a listening priest, another human person, strikes me as burdensome on both confessor and auditor. It seems to me that, just as one prays to God privately, one may properly confess to God privately, and the idea that one should tick off one’s card with a priest before taking Communion is discomfiting for me. I make my private confessions to God before and during Mass, and I receive Communion with a clear conscience.

  I suppose the other odd thing about my Catholicism is that I have absolutely no interest in converting anyone to my faith. I love my church because it works for me, for my family background, culture, and personal values. I love its universalism; its tireless and culturally sensitive good works in helping the poor and sick and homeless (work that I came to know and admire in Cambodia); its total absence of racism or any sense of European superiority over other cultures; its fearless affirmation of the equal dignity and worth of every human person in this world; and its firm precept that we are all brothers and sisters under God. Catholicism’s unshakeable affirmation of our common humanity under one God is, for me, the most precious precept of my religion, the mainstay of my faith.

  I know this: we will need to hold firm to that universal value in coming years, as global warming accelerates, sea levels rise, and as Hurricane Katrina-type cyclones and coastal inundations become more frequent and permanent. Will we rich countries respond to the human suffering from those predictable disasters selfishly, circling the wagons and driving the starving and homeless away from our defended laagers, or will we respond as one human family? I know my church’s answer, and the answer that many Australians of religious or non-religious belief would instinctively give, for we are or we used to be a generous and fair-minded people. I don’t yet know what answer my government would give.

  To me, the idea that one should be going around the world trying to convert people does not sit well with Catholicism. One could argue that God in His divine wisdom wanted to make room for all the world’s great religions and belief systems, even for humanist and atheist philosophies; and that God in His wisdom will decide if and when people should choose to transfer their allegiances from one religion to another. I admire the way that Catholic priests and nuns and lay people work selflessly in Cambodia to help people in need, without asking anything in return. And I have to say that I am uncomfortable with the approach of some Christian missionary enterprises working in poor countries, which quite unashamedly hold out material inducements in the form of assistance with sustenance and children’s education to those who convert to their offered faiths. I think that offering such deals is missing the essence of Christianity, in which one gives without expectation of reward.

  Do I then believe that one religion is as good as another? In a way, I do, but not to the extent of that very funny scene in the Beatles’ movie Help! when the Anglican bishop is having a cup of tea in his garden with his guest, a high priest of the murderous Indian cult of Kali (gleefully played by Leo McKern), amiably comparing the theological merits of Christian worship and ritual human sacrifice to the goddess Kali. Obviously, religions have to be compatible with core human ethical values: to love your neighbour, to forgive those who have sinned against you, to help the poor and homeless and suffering, to honour and cherish your family. But all of the world’s great religions, and secular humanism as well, inspire such values. The ethical systems, the precepts on we may try to live a good life, that grow out of the three great Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and out of the great Eastern religions or philosophies (Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism) seem to me similar in their essence. These great world religions have stayed the course for thousands of years. Religions that call on people to do violent and unnatural things such as engaging in human sacrifice or ritual suicide or self-castration have short lives, and are not serious ethical alternatiives.

  If I respect all the world’s great religions as I do, what is it about being a Catholic that is important to me? Why don’t I wander around the smorgasbord table, visiting churches and synagogues and mosques and Eastern-religion temples at random? Simply, I think, because I feel most at home in Catholic churches, places of worship that embody the belief system and language that I grew up in, and that helped shape my personal morality. My Catholicism is an important part of my childhood memory. It helped to make me the person I am, and its yeast continues to ferment in me as I grow older. By my choice, it is the moral yardstick of how I live.

  My mother’s maternal grandfather (the fami
ly name was Keller) was a German-speaking reform rabbi in Bratislava, the ‘city of brotherly love’ that is now the capital of Slovakia. Her father was a wealthy Viennese spirits distiller, Julius Schick, who came from an upper-middle-class, secular Jewish background She grew up in Vienna in the 1920s as a tolerant humanist, a strong believer in modernity and internationalism and human progress. She rarely, if ever, went to a synagogue. If she had any religious belief, it was in some vaguely understood ‘universal spirit’ or ‘life force’. Talking about a personal God used to embarrass her. I think that, like a lot of Europeans in the early twentieth century, she found organised religious observance archaic and unprogressive.

  Her generation’s optimism was shattered by her forced flight as a refugee from her home city and nation, and by the ensuing Nazi Holocaust in which most of her aunts, uncles, and cousins who did not get away in time perished. I don’t think that my mother ever recovered from that horror, about which she would not speak easily, though she did lovingly show me old photographs and tell me the names of her lost relatives and childhood friends. I think she spent the rest of her life wondering what had gone wrong with her beloved high-German culture. She was a highly educated and artistic woman, brought up to read Goethe and Schiller and Kant (I still have leather-bound sets of the German classics at home — I cannot read them, but cannot bring myself to sell them), to draw well, and to play the piano music of Beethoven and Schubert and Chopin. She died in 1971 in Sydney, a sadly wounded and bewildered woman, a casualty of anti-Semitism and the dislocations of war. I gave her little comfort: in those years, I was mostly selfishly absorbed in myself and my new career as a young, ambitious Australian diplomat.

  My father had a firmly instinctive Catholic faith — I think for much the same reasons as I do now, that it was a strong part of his family history and culture — but he never would have claimed that his faith was either provable or disprovable. He would not have thought either proposition was worth wasting time discussing. Religious faith was just that — a leap of faith, and a precious gift from God. It was enough, for him as it is now for me, to try to live a good life without fretting over trying to ‘prove’ that God exists. I remember vaguely a religion class at school, when a priest took us carefully though one of the most famous attempted proofs of the existence of God — I think it had something to do with Swiss clocks — but in the end he concluded rightly that all these ingenious ‘proofs’ somewhere along the line always required an act of faith.