Pilgrim Again
As in 2022 and 2024, so this year, God willing, I will be walking the Camino Francés across northern Spain to Santiago. My route will be basically the same as before, as will be the time of year, and I have wondered if I am getting in a rut. Would it be better to make a pilgrimage to a different destination? or at least to take a different route to Santiago?
In the Middle Ages, there were three principal pilgrim destinations: Jerusalem, Rome, and Santiago. In the year of our Lord 2026, walking to Jerusalem would present obvious difficulties. To walk to Rome, by contrast, would be quite possible: I know a peregrina who walked from Canterbury to Rome, about 1500 miles in total (she did it in three, 500-mile pieces, one piece every other year). Why not Rome?
Or why not get to Santiago by a different camino? There are ancient paths from Seville and Lisbon, for instance; there is also the Camino Norte that runs close to the Mediterranean. Further options are to start in France, for instance at Le Puy; that camino (about 500 miles in France) is an earlier French part of the Camino Francés that I have walked.
Nonetheless, I keep coming back to the original plan: to walk, alone, the Camino I have walked before. My decision has to do with the nature of pilgrimage. The point is not tourism. As T. S. Eliot says in his poem “Little Gidding,” about a minor pilgrimage destination in England (an old church in an out of the way place which has survived centuries and which, at one point, was the center of a family-based Christian community under Nicholas Ferrar): One does not go to such a place in order to inform curiosity or carry report back home. Instead, Eliot says, you come to such a place “to kneel Where prayer has been valid.”
This is the strange thing about pilgimage. You have a destination; you have a period of time cleared on your calendar; but you must let go of control of the details. People ask me how I will get to my starting place, and that’s something I’m still working out. (Things happen in the world and they affect pilgrims just like everyone else. In my case, it has to do with changes to Spain’s train service subsequent to a derailment and crash earlier this year.) Once you’re at the starting place, you entrust yourself to the Camino, to people you will meet who will offer food and shelter, to your fellow pilgrims. You can make reservations, though I prefer not to.
The biggest letting-go, however, is not with regard to arrangements of travel and lodging. It is letting-go of yourself into God’s hands. You start a Camino not knowing what God wants to give you. It is, precisely, a journey—not only a journey through landscapes and villages, but a journey of the soul. A few years ago I had the sense that I was accompanying Jesus through the multitude of humanity to his cross. By Camino lore, Santiago himself is a pilgrim on this route, going with us to the cathedral which, by tradition, contains the tomb that contains his mortal remains.
The ancient Greek Heraclitus said you can’t step into the same river twice. It’s the same Camino as before, but it is as open to possibility as ever.
And of course, this is true for everyone reading these words. Everyone of us is on a pilgrimage here on Earth. (This is always true, but especially this is what Lent is about, and supremely the holy week.) At the center of our lives is our letting-go of ourselves and taking the hand of Jesus, to walk with him. Where will he take us? No matter where it might be in terms of geography and lodging and bodily health, it will be into his heart, into the life of God.
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Out & About. Wednesday, March 25, at St. John’s Church in Corsicana, Texas, I am to speak at the Lenten program. My talk is titled, “Walking the Camino de Santiago in Spain: A pilgrim's reflections.” The program starts at 6pm and includes a light supper; everything is concluded by 8.