To Kneel Where Others Have Knelt

At the tomb of the apostle St. James the Greater—a silver-covered coffin at the heart of the cathedral in Santiago in Spain—one may kneel, but it isn’t comfortable or in any way fancied up. There’s a narrow staircase down, then a slightly wider spot where, to one side, is a short passage to the coffin. But a gate prevents entering the passage. The one who kneels has old stones under his knees, nothing else. I saw cards that people had pushed under the gate towards the tomb. A woman was doing that while I was there, her arm reaching in as far as it could, her fingers trying to fleck her little card a little closer. Tears marked her face. Behind us, an old man stood with his cane, looking straight ahead at the sacred remains. He said nothing. He didn’t move. He was as much a statue as anything, himself a testimony to the significance of the place.

T. S. Eliot wrote a few lines about a similar place in an out-of-the-way corner of England. To get there is not to go to a fancy place: “you leave the rough road / And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull facade / And the tombstone.” Yet it is a place where a pursued king once stopped to pray, a place where a community lived and served the poor, a place where education and hospitality had been offered—and still are. Nicholas Farrar is associated with the place. So it’s worth visiting. I got there, once, by taking a plane, then a train, then a bus, and then I walked with my suitcase often in my arms through a few miles of country roads and muddy fields. One arrives. One enters. One kneels. (See “Little Gidding,” around line 30.)

At Santiago in 2024, and in the approach to Santiago, today it seems one finds more longing and less touristing than one might expect. The cathedral itself has done little in the way of trying to make itself attractive to the visitor. There is no piped-in music, for instance. Still people wander, slowly, from shrine to shrine and altar to altar. They are kneeling. They are visibly longing. Something hurts, something is desired, and there is a sense that behind the old statuary and stone mesas for sacrifice there is something available that can help—no, not “something,” but Someone.

Oh, it could be nothing but my fancy. Yet I think I see it in Dallas too, in New York, even in corners of my own heart: an awakening. Is it possible that people are rediscovering, in the ruins of modernity, the only true answer? that we are coming to understand Augustine who wrote, more than one thousand six hundred years ago, a line of enduring truth? “Our hearts are restless till they rest in thee”—in God.

— 

    Out & About: Trinity Sunday, May 26, I am to preach at the 9 and 11:15 a.m. services at St. Matthew’s Cathedral, Dallas.

    The following Sunday, June 2, at 5 p.m., the next Good Books & Good Talk seminar will be at St. Matthew’s. We will discuss Klara and the Sunby Kazuo Ishiguro, and anyone who has read the book is welcome to participate. (You can come if you haven’t read it, but we will ask you to keep silence.) The seminar runs to 6:30 p.m.


Posted by The Rev. Canon Dr. Victor Lee Austin with

The End of the Journey

 T. S. Eliot suggests that the end of all our life’s journeys is to arrive home and to know the place for the first time. (See “Little Gidding.”) There is a sense in which we are always students, but our subject-matter is not really history or culture or mathematics or engineering or any other such matter that’s “out there.” Rather, we are learning about what’s right around us, our home, the place in which we are who we are. You leave home in order to understand home. You go away so that you can come back. And what you bring with you when you return is not knowledge about some other place, but rather something much more humble, something, really, much smaller.

Samwise Gamgee was part of the great quest to destroy the ring of power. In his journeys he met people of vastly different sorts. He had his own subsidiary role in the great struggle of his time between good and evil. But how wise it is, how true, that his story ends with him greeting his wife and children at his door. “I’m back,” he says, and (as I recall, I don’t have the book with me) those are the final words of the very long book. (See J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings.)

I write these words from Santiago, at the end of the road. I arrived yesterday in rain, and this morning am mostly dry (for which I give thanks). I saw the west facade of the vast cathedral yesterday, with Santiago—Saint James—as pilgrim high above. Today I hope to pray at his tomb, which will be the true end of this journey. By the time you read these words, I am likely to have left this city for another; I might be in Madrid, or even back in Dallas, the place which for nearly eight years has been home to me. I don’t think I’ll know Dallas as if for the first time, but there is something about home that I feel more strongly now than before walking the Camino. 

To walk day after day on the Way to Santiago has something to do with the battle, which is really a cosmic battle, between good and evil. Saint James is depicted here not only as our fellow pilgrim but also (if somewhat disturbingly) as Matamoros, the Moor-slayer. The Camino is rooted in the historic battles to protect Christianity in Spain, battles in which (one must acknowledge) there were mixed motives all around. That history is a chapter, but not the only chapter, in the struggle of right and wrong that will never be resolved until Christ returns. The Camino thus invites the pilgrim to contemplate this deep struggle between right and wrong and to wonder about his participation in it. That is to say, among other things, the Camino is an invitation to a soul-struggle.

Every one of us is engaged, in some subsidiary way, in the struggle of good and evil. Ultimately this is the effort to join with the apostles (like Saint James) to make a place for the gospel to be seen and heard. So we make crosses. We remember the meal and the death. We erect churches. We ponder the mystery that Jesus had enemies, and, with Jesus, we pray for them. We walk. We try to purify our own deeds and the motivations behind them.

All of this, it seems to me, is not far away and long ago. It is at hand now. In a complex and mysterious and wonderful way it makes possible for us to have a home.

— 

    Out & About: I am to preach on May 26, Trinity Sunday, at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Dallas. And the next Good Books & Good Talk seminar will be at St. Matthew’s on June 2, on Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro.

 

Posted by The Rev. Canon Dr. Victor Lee Austin with

12345678910 ... 175176

The Rev. Canon Victor Lee Austin. Ph.D., is the Theologian-in-Residence for the diocese and is the author of several books including, "Friendship: The Heart of Being Human" and "A Post-Covid Catechesis.: 

Categories
Authors
Archive