"I . . . acknowledge that I am weak and a sinner and because of the horrible sins which I have committed, I fear the pains of eternal judgement; however, not despairing of the mercy of Christ, I desire to attain the joys of Paradise. I want therefore to go to the shrine of the blessed apostle James . . . "
--Remundo, a priest.1
Remundo, fellow pilgrim, brother in the Faith, priest of the Most High God, your words written in 1045 Anno Domini are mine! For I too have been on pilgrimage to the shrine of the apostle James! And I intend herein to tell about it.
The ancient pilgrim path to Compostela that the pilgrim-priest Remundo walked is alive; it teems with modern pilgrims. The modern trekkers have their reason or reasons; not all are pilgrims in the strict sense, for among the pilgrims (like all men and the wheatfields of the Spanish meseta) the tares grow with the wheat. Some walkers go principally for diversion, others for the physical challenge, yet others to study the architecture, art, and culture on the way. Some go with a blind inconsistency to experience the occult. Many go feeling called; some go simply searching, and not fully knowing the why of it. Some, like the young French boys I met at Santiago de Compostela whose plea for a Compostellana was rejected by the authorities, implausibly went for the purpose of "gastronomy." (It is an oxymoron for the French to go to Spain for gastronomy.)
I, however, went on pilgrimage to the shrine of St. James at Compostela for the perennial reason. Like Remundo, I went on pilgrimage orandi causa. I had three prayers. The first pertained to me. I have sinned. I am unapologetic for it. I am also unapologetically contrite for it. Like the medieval pilgrim, I yearn for a conscience better distilled. I yearn also for a greater integrity between the dictates of that conscience and the acts or omissions of my daily life than I have yet been able to achieve. And I hoped, like the medieval pilgrim, that as a result of my pilgrimage to Compostela, my past want in integrity would be plenished and my future want decreased. Simply put, I hoped for a greater release from sin, or, put positively, salvation. My second prayer involved the repose of my parents’ souls, for they had both recently died. My third prayer involved a request for God’s blessings on my wife and my three children, the subject and products of marital sacrament.
When I told the bishop emeritus of my diocese of my desire to go to Compostela, he urged, “You must go!” Indeed, I felt the “must” for some time. I have been able to trace the first conscious spark of that desire to the glance of a picture of a modern pilgrim to Compostela dressed in the medieval habit in a Spanish magazine some years ago. This happy picture of a happy pilgrim engendered in me a desire for that spiritual dance which is a pilgrimage to Compostela. That desire eventually grew into a “must,” and that “must” into a serious resolution, nay, even a private vow. Somewhere along this development, like Hilaire Belloc vowed before his pilgrimage to Rome, I vowed I would walk to Compostela all the way and take advantage of no wheeled thing. I vowed to start at St. Jean-Pied-de-Port in France on the Feast of St. John, and to get to Compostela by the Feast of St. James. In the words of an old French pilgrim hymn:
To obtain from my God His mercy
I vowed to go to Galicia
To seek St. James the Great.2
I planned twice to go; both times my resolutions were frustrated by pressing responsibilities arising out of my state in life. I could not let the dead bury the dead. Instead I had to bury both my parents.
Looking back on it, the delay was to the good. Simon Coleman and John Elsner, in their book Pilgrimage, Past and Present in the World Religions, have observed:
If we think of pilgrimage as an institution made up of a constellation of features, the ‘landscape’ of any pilgrimage site consists not only of the physical terrain and architecture, but also of all the myths, traditions and narratives associated with natural and man-made features.3The extra time in between my first resolution and my actual pilgrimage allowed me the luxury of reading about this “constellation of features” as it pertained to the ancient Camino de Santiago and the shrine of St. James at Compostela. I read about, and grew familiar with, the physical terrain, the architecture, and also the many myths, traditions, and narratives associated with the pilgrimage. The pilgrimage to Compostela is rich with these things, very rich. One can spend many an hour in wonder without setting one foot on the Way. Somewhere along this time, I formed the resolution of putting my thoughts down on paper, which eventually led to this book.
The contemporary interest in the Camino has given spawn to numerous books about it. Unfortunately, many of these miss the essential meaning of a pilgrimage generally and the pilgrimage to St. James’s shrine in Compostela in particular. Some, indeed, seem entirely ignorant or antithetical to it. So what is needed, I thought, is not simply interest in the Camino. What is needed is interest in the evangelical and ecclesiastical message of the Camino and an evangelical and ecclesial response to it. A pilgrim is the poorer and perhaps not really a pilgrim on the Way if he wrests the Camino from Christ and the Church.The Church and Camino were tied in the medieval ages. This is not an accidental union. If you remove Christ or the Church from the Way of St. James you are no longer on the Way of St. James. About pilgrimage, as in all life, we must learn to think and to walk with the Church if we are to get the most out of it. To go about a Christian pilgrimage without Christ and without the guidance of His Church is a great folly.
The modern secular world and its structures move mightily forward. They are traveling, and traveling fast, and have little time for reflection, and no time for penance. There is weak profit in things spiritual and things contemplative—these are what Jacques Maritain termed (without any negative suggestion) useless Truths—and so modern life seems to pass over such things, with but a glance of disinterest or a stare of disdain. Yet the unexamined life, a life without prayer, a life without the time to turn, pause, reflect, be sorry, and love again, is not worth living. I am assured of it: what the modern world needs is less travel and more pilgrimage, less pragmatism and more idealism, less “I” and more “Thou.”It is, to be sure, difficult to overcome the obstinate sense of duty to the mundane that intrusive “Authority” (as Belloc calls it in his Path to Rome) inculcates in us and which ties us slavishly to the workaday world. The anonymous makers of modern manners, who spend all their time on vain things, think reflection and retreat a waste of good time. We are trained to feel anxious if we do not work. It affects us all; it is Plato's Great Beast. This is quite contrary to the men of the medieval world, who saw pilgrimage as an otherworldly virtue which they called xeniteia. The modern jack’s disdain for things spiritual—especially the virtues—reminds one of the conversation in C. S. Lewis’s Pilgrim’s Regress between Virtue and John:
“You had better come with us, Virtue,” said John . . .
“Certainly not,” said Virtue. “We must keep to the road. We must keep on.”
“I don’t see why,” said John.
“I dare say you don’t,” said Virtue.4Despite the doctrine of the modern age, I saw why. This was a gift. I was the recipient of what a wise Spanish priest in confessional at the Gothic Cathedral in León called a special grace, una gracia especial, the grace of pilgrimage. I received the call to shut my ears to that worldly noise. I received the grace to hear the call, and I received the grace to answer it. I left many things undone and left many obligations hanging. But I knew that God’s call to go to Santiago de Compostela might not be there much longer if I tarried. And so I went on pilgrimage, kept to the Royal road, and kept the Faith.
I did not find anything new on the Camino, yet I did not expect to. For two millenia, millions have trod it. It has all been seen before, enjoyed before, borne before, described before. Nihil sub sole novum. But I did find the Camino anew. For me it was a new discovery, a confirmation of the Truth, of the Way, of the Life. And despite the passage of seasons, years, and ages, the Camino and its message appeared to me fresh, virile, and timeless. It spoke to my tired soul, like it should to this tired world whose values and ways of thinking have become old and unable to inspire the better angels of our nature. My hope—like that of the Italian pilgrim Francesco of whom you will read in the pages of this book—is that the Camino may speak to us all, for if it does, we all will be the better for it.
1 Cartulario del ‘Sant Cugat’ del Vallés, ed. J. Risu Serra (3 vols, Barcelona 1945-47), 2, n. 582), as quoted in Diana Webb, Pilgrims and Pilgrimage in the Medieval West, I. B. Tauris. N.Y. 1999. P. 44
2 Kaufman/Lozano, p. 52 (translation mine) from Rossignols spirituels (Valenciennes 1616).
3 Coleman & Elsner, Pilgrimage, at 212.
4 C. S. Lewis, Pilgrim’s Regress.
No comments:
Post a Comment