by Tony Kevin
chapter fifteen
To Finisterre and Home
There wasn’t much more that I wanted to do in Santiago. It isn’t just a pilgrimage centre: it is a major modern Spanish city, the capital of the Galician autonomous region, home to 80,000 people and a major football team, and a centre of commerce, government, and education. But none of that interested me any more. I was already mentally preparing myself for the return home, and I was starting to disengage from Spain. So I did what many pilgrims do after Santiago — wind down by going to Cabo de Finisterre, the End of the World, the farthest-west promontory of the European mainland: the place from where it was once believed, if you sailed westwards, you would soon fall off the edge of the world. Finisterre is a Romance name that also evokes the Celtic twilight of Europe, the ancient mysteries and legends, and Tolkien’s Land of the West where Frodo and the Elves sailed into the afterlife. I would have liked to walk to Finisterre as Richard was doing, a 100-kilometre walk from Santiago; but there was only one free day, so I did the next best thing and went by bus.
I caught the first bus at 6.00 am. Seeing the country rapidly sliding by me through bus windows felt strange. Somehow it wasn’t real anymore; it was more like watching a travel documentary on television. Looking out vacantly, I barely recognised the Galician countryside that had been wringing my heart just two days before. Already I was disengaged, in that bland tourist mood of ‘if this is Friday, it must be Belgium’. Sitting in that bus was like being on Prozac — all feeling was deadened.
After a couple of hours, the sea at last came into view. Soon we were in Cee, a sheltered fishing village at the head of a great wide bay, protected from the Atlantic’s huge winter storms by the southwards-jutting mountainous promontory of Cape Finisterre. From Cee, the road wound around the shore of the bay for fifteen more kilometres. On my left were quiet bay beaches, with gently lapping little waves. Soon we were in Finisterre, historically a dirt-poor fishing village, but now a bustlingly prosperous little tourist resort.
I shouldered my small daypack, and set off on my last walk in Spain, from the village up to the lighthouse on the high barren cape. The road climbed and climbed; soon I was hundreds of feet above the sea, with a magnificent view opening up of a richly indented coastline running southwards beyond the bay, and receding ranges of mountains eastwards toward Santiago and beyond towards León. I rounded a last point, and saw the lighthouse ahead. And here was a powerful image of Santiago, a modern bronze sculpture of the beloved apostle dressed as a Galician fisherman, wearing a mariner’s sou’wester and rain-hat, bent over double against an oncoming storm, straining to keep his footing and make progress. It is a moving statue, and a reminder to me that today’s weather was really all wrong for this place.
I should have seen Finisterre on a cold, wet, windy day, with wild Atlantic waves breaking fiercely on the rocks below, and clouds scudding across a leaden sky. Instead it was a calm, cloudless, sunny day, the sea was bright blue, and the waves were lazily curling onto the rocks below as seagulls circled below me in gentle thermals. Only when I rounded the lighthouse and looked out west to the Atlantic side of the cape did I see a few whitecaps, and get a sense of the strength of the sea. Never mind; it was still Finisterre.
I listened for a while to a Galician piper, and then left the tourists to climb up a minor road to the top of the hill behind the lighthouse. I’m glad I did, because from the top I now saw in front of me, far below, an inviting ocean beach, not far from the village. I carefully picked my way down a rough, eroded track — the last thing I wanted to do was to break a leg on my last day in Spain — and found myself finally on a sea-bleached pine boardwalk leading down to the almost empty beach.
There were a very few people sunbathing, and no one in the sea at all — deterred by a stern warning notice that the ocean currents here were strong and dangerous, and that this beach was not safety-patrolled at all. I reached the beach, stripped off my pack and shirt and shoes — I had worn light summer shorts that day, in case I had a chance to swim — and plunged into the waves for my immersion in the Atlantic Ocean, the pilgrim’s last ritual. I didn’t stay in long, because the water was freezing, and the beach fell away steeply into deep water. I went in no further than waist-deep: the waves were strong, and I felt a dangerous backcurrent tugging at my legs. After a couple of breathless whole-body plunges, I was soon back on the safety of the beach.
I walked along, collecting bleached, white scallop shells. At the south end, in a sheltered area I had not seen from the hill, was an encampment of young backpackers. They had set up tents and a fireplace, some were playing beach volleyball, and some were just lazing. They were a happy international bunch, relaxing after their pilgrimages — French–Canadians, Germans, Dutch … the pilgrimage makes nationality unimportant. I met a young French–Canadian woman in the rocks, and we talked about how the pilgrimage had affected each of us. Though strangers, there was an immediate intimacy of a shared profound experience. Then I walked slowly back along the boardwalk to the village. I had fish soup for lunch, and then, at the bus-stop, a welcome surprise: Tim and Liz, my good camino companions from Wales whom I had last seen many weeks ago in Montemayor, were waiting for the same bus, the last bus of the day. On the way back to Santiago, we talked about what we had all been doing and how we were feeling now, and then I walked back with them from the bus station into Santiago, over a hill and through a park from where we had a beautiful last view across to the cathedral spires. I left them at the pilgrimage office: we didn’t swap addresses, but I hope someday they may read this book.
***
There is really little more to tell: a few hours the next day in the sophisticated metropolis of La Coruña, Galicia’s largest city, awaiting my flight to London; a relaxing weekend with Jean and her husband John in Oxfordshire; the long flight to Sydney; and the last bus trip home from there to a final, blissful reunion with my beaming wife and children at the Canberra bus station. It felt indescribably good to be home safe in the bosom of my family, back on parental duties. I thanked God for His protection of us all in the nine weeks that we had been parted. I never wanted to leave my family for so long again.
***
So what was it really all about? What did I bring back from Spain, from my pilgrimage adventure, that is of lasting value? Can I sum it up? Can I share it? Should I even try, or should I just leave off here, letting my readers draw whatever they want to from what I have set down in this book so far? Being an ex-public servant, in the business of crafting words all my working life, I itch to attempt a conclusion.
Spain taught me that a country and its culture can go through hell on earth and still come out at the end as a decent and caring human society. Human societies have enormous recovery powers, and I believe this is a gift from God. It gives me hope that my country and other Anglophone countries that are going through a time of political and moral decline at present, of fear and moral indifference and selfishness, will recover. From the Inquisition to the Civil War and then a whole generation of fascist rule, Spain had everything thrown at it. And yet it has come through now as a gentle, human, and decent society, a country as far as I could tell that is at peace with itself and with the world. Of course, I did not see the major urban agglomerations of Spain, and I do not doubt that big cities such as Madrid and Barcelona have major problems of organised crime, drug abuse, child abuse, etc. But, as a whole, Spain seemed to me to be a country whose political morality these days is to be admired.
I believe something that Thomas Jefferson said in 1772: ‘A nation, as a society, forms a moral person, and every member of it is personally responsible for his society’. The greatest recent test of the morality of Spanish society was the Madrid train bombing by Islamist terrorists — a shock every bit as great to Spaniards as 11 September 2001 in the USA or the London Underground bombings in 2006. Spain’s reaction was quite different: not vengeful, not mindlessly and implacably wa
r-like, but immediately ready to confront the policies that had led to this tragic political crime of mass murder. Spaniards instinctively understood from their history that revenge was not the answer. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth could only prolong the evil. They knew that the Spanish government had invited this crime by former prime minister Aznar having imprudently involved his country, against the weight of public opinion, in the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. The Spanish people well understood what the people of Iraq were suffering daily, and how the Palestinians in the occupied territories and Lebanese were suffering. Spain withdrew from the Iraq occupation in an act not of cowardice or selfishness, but of great nobility and wisdom. Spain has learned from hard experience that good ends do not justify evil means. In Anglophone countries with less tortured recent histories, our leaders have forgotten this lesson.
I saw a civic contentment in Spain, a sense of balance and pride in one’s own local place, of viable small communities: a rural confidence that is harder and harder to find elsewhere, as the driving force of unchecked city growth and economic rationalism sucks country towns and villages dry of real economic life and social hope. I saw a mature, non-doctrinaire understanding that if everything in life is left to market forces, people who need and have a right to public protection will not be protected as they should be: that there has to be a ‘Third Way’, a social morality that draws on the best features of both capitalism and socialism.
I saw a proper pride and self-sufficiency in national languages and cultures, and a sturdy sense of independence. Spain does not see itself as a country on the periphery of an Anglophone-dominated world, but as the centre of its own vibrant — for once, this over-used word is exactly right — Hispanophone world. For an Anglophone like me, to experience this world for a few weeks was both humbling and reassuring. I am glad there are still alternatives to Anglophone culture; our shrinking planet would be so boring if there were not. Spanish culture, even though it has many correspondences and overlaps with international Anglophone culture, is not derivative. It stands proudly on its own achievements.
Spain is a religiously based society, a society whose Catholicism is still rich and strong, but that at the same time offers the full freedom of political and multicultural pluralism. I saw no oppression of gays or lesbians in Spain; no heavy-handed censorship; no religious prejudice; no impediments for Protestants or Jews or Muslims to practise their religion; and the choice of a secular system of education for those who want it. The free-thinking, freewheeling Spain of Pedro Almodavar’s films does exist: Spain is now a genuinely liberal-minded country, and a country that is able to laugh at itself.
I don’t propose ever to emigrate to Spain; my future belongs to my own country and culture. But my few weeks in Spain as a pilgrim gave me a glimpse of what is possible in society — of better approaches to dauntingly huge problems, if we can only liberate our thinking from familiar assumptions and stereotypes about how things have to be. We don’t have to accept stress and unhappily alienated affluent societies, or the daily disappointments of our joyless consumerism. There are other answers, if we dare to ask the right questions.
Soon after I returned home from Spain, a new Catholic bishop was installed in my diocese of Canberra–Goulburn, Mark Coleridge, an impressive man who has spent many years of his religious career working out of the Vatican. He gave a thoughtful and broad-ranging homily at his installation ceremony at my church, St Christopher’s Pro-Cathedral. At one point, he said something that resonated remarkably with my own feelings after two months’ walking through Spain:
I ask the question: Where and how does Australia stand at this time? In some ways, we are like Abraham, ‘our father in faith’ (Roman Canon). He was a rich and successful businessman. Yet something gnawed away at him deep down; something was missing. In the midst of plenty, there was a lingering unhappiness, a sense of failure, of life slipping through his fingers. He had everything except a child and a land of his own; and without these in his culture, he was a man in whose life death had the last word and a man therefore who was wounded deep within, slowly bleeding to death.
So too Australia is in many ways rich and successful, and there is much of which we can be rightly proud, as Abraham was no doubt. Yet there is also something missing deeper down: we sense it in public life and we feel it in the privacy of our heart. We have a bit of fun but not much joy; we get on well enough with others but struggle to find love; we know little conflict but do not find peace; we have endless options but do not feel free; we move but we do not advance. Like Abraham, there is the wound deep within, and so we just get on with business, proving how rich and successful we can be in a world where fear and greed loom large. There is no hope of the fullness of life we long for deep down — the joy, the love, the peace, the freedom; there is no hope of healing. Or so at least it seems. But precisely at this point of seeming hopelessness, God speaks a healing word — a word of promise to Abraham, ‘I will give you a child and a land’, and a word of hope to Australia, ‘I will fill the muted void’. This word comes from nowhere and opens magnificent and unexpected horizons of hope. It overturns the conventional logic which says that nothing else is possible, so just get on with business. This word is the wisdom of the Cross (cf. 1 Cor 1:18-25), and it’s the only wisdom to which the Church can lay claim.
I believe that God spoke a healing word to me in Spain. God restored my hope in possibilities for the fullness of life. I don’t yet know if the pilgrimage will make me a better person. It has already made me a happier, more relaxed person. I appreciate more intensely the blessings of every extra day spent with my family, the rich joys of ordinary family life and domesticity, of every precious day in which my young children grow up in my care. I am happier in my Australian society, despite my keen knowledge of its present serious problems.
I think my pilgrimage was, indeed, in Frank Brennan’s memorable words, a precious opportunity to ‘take my life for a walk’, to unflinchingly hold up to the light memories of past relationships and responsibilities, to examine how well or badly I met those challenges — and how I would try to do better in future, try to heal old wounds and prevent new ones from forming. The pilgrimage to Santiago can teach humility, charity, wisdom, patience, and endurance; in fact, if I look at the list of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, I see them all now as central to my pilgrimage experience. It was, truly, a humble search for Wisdom, Intelligence, Good Counsel, Fortitude, Science, Compassion, and the Fear of God.
‘Science’ is an intriguing word in that list — not a word one usually associates with spirituality. I think of the ‘science’ of the Muslim, Jewish, and Christian communities in al-Andalus, working together harmoniously in the disinterested pursuit of knowledge and the maintenance of a civilised, tolerant society. Or I think of the ‘science’, the mental and physical challenge of navigating one’s way and husbanding one’s bodily strength through a 1200-kilometre pilgrimage walk. And, finally, I think of the science that the human race will need if we are to navigate our way as civilised and caring societies built around the principle of the common humanity of every person on this planet, through the terrifying challenges that are coming, of global warming and fossil-fuel depletion.
Hard times lie ahead, times that will require every ounce of wisdom and goodness we have. And we will need God’s help. It cannot be by science alone that our species will survive these great perils. The great error of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment was to think that science could do it all alone. It is science allied to the other six precious gifts of the Holy Spirit that we will need to exercise now.
My pilgrimage was a miraculous gift from God, an opportunity to better understand the importance of the gifts of the Holy Spirit. I had to allow myself time and space, alone in a foreign place, to be open to that miracle. I had to be ready to take the risk of trying to talk to God alone.
The pilgrimage has given back to me, at the age of sixty-three,
what we all seek: the gift of a mens sana in corpore sano, a healthy mind in a healthy body. God willing, I may hold on to that gift for some years to come, more time in which I can cherish and protect all my family.
We are not so far, after all, from the medieval religious vision of the purposes of pilgrimage: repentance, expiation of sins through sacrifice, self-knowledge, and the hope of salvation through prayer and good works. That is what the pilgrimage to Santiago meant to pilgrims in medieval times. In the end, for all the pleasures of travel that I had on the way, that is what it meant to me.
And to you, dear readers, a final word of thanks for sharing this experience with me. It wasn’t in the end so exciting a story — no life-threatening moments on the way, no encounters with robber gypsies, no holiday romances with dark-eyed, shapely Spanish ladies, not even many interesting conversations to recall. But I hope it was still an absorbing armchair journey for you, as it was for me to experience its reality. Pilgrimage is about sharing as well as about ‘company in solitude’, and I hope by this work of reportage and reflection that I can share my experience with as many people of goodwill as possible. Buen viaje, peregrinos!
Notes
The Confraternity of Saint James (London) is a good starting-point for information about the caminos, travel guides, and credencials. Its website address is www.csj.orh.uk/
This not being in any way an academic book, I have not used footnotes. I owe much to Wikipedia as a short-cut to factual knowledge, and to other Internet sources as noted, and to the following copyrighted books and maps:
Alison Raju, Vía de la Plata — The Way of Saint James: Seville/Granada to Santiago, a Cicerone Guide, 2nd edition, London, 2005