Walking the Way Part 3 - The Final Stretch

Paul Adams (commentary) and Katryn Adams (pictures)

Wisteria

This did not make any more sense in English

There were several fancier memorials along the way, but we found this humble effort the most touching

Nearly there.  Katryn's disposable poncho did not last much longer

More monuments and markers as we get closer to Santiago

Stream at Lavacolla where pilgrims traditionally purified themselves before entering Santiago

Our first glimpse of the cathedral in Santiago

The old seminary where we spent the first night

and its courtyard

The seminary holds some 170 pilgrims and is well supplied with kitchen, laundry facilities, lockers, and shop. When we arrived the city and cathedral was celebrating the feast of the Ascension and we were warned that the doors would be locked at 2:00 a.m.  We looked at each other, laughed, and the man at the desk recommended we take individual rooms at the back of the building.  We heard nothing and were asleep by 10:00 p.m. 

Inside the pilgrim office where we received our  compostelas

Catedral de Santiago de Compostela

Carved pillar from the original Romanesque doorway of the cathedral. If you look closely towards the bottom you can see the imprint of 1000 years of pilgrims putting their hands on it.

Old confessionals labeled with the languages spoken by the attending priest (in this case German and Hungarian). A wonderful young priest heard my confession in English and granted absolution in Spanish.  Katryn asked him to bless some medals she had brought for the purpose on behalf of a friend's mother in Oregon. I did a similar thing on behalf of a friend here at Ave Maria, FL.

Tombstone of Bishop Theodomirus, who founded the first church here (AD 829) 

Romanesque transept with presumably later dome

Detail of the baroque altarpiece

Pilgrims Mass: Where hundreds of thousands had been before us

The famous botafumeiro in front of the baroque altar.  Unfortunately we didn't get to see it in action. That happens on Sundays and feast days.  We thought it was a feast day but it seems they celebrated the Ascension a day earlier than the rest of the Church.  There's a clip of the botafumeiro, an enormous censer in action with Benedict XVI calmly waiting for the giant swinging flaming ball to come to a rest while everyone else gawked - in the first of this series of posts about the Camino, along with Webster Bull's excellent comment.  You can also see it near the end of The Way, Emilio Estevez's film starring his father Martin Sheen. Here's a clip, with a lot of interesting info at the beginning and end.  El Botafumeiro, use of which began in the 11th century, swings alarmingly back and forth in the transept above the heads of the pilgrims for whom this area is reserved.  As this clip points out at the beginning, "The primary reason for El Botofumeiro is to facilitate the offering of incense to God on a grand scale.  The incense smoke also provides the ancillary benefit of masking the odor of unwashed pilgrims who have journeyed across Europe to the cathedral to venerate the corpus of Saint James the Greater since medieval times."  I believe it was also meant to prevent the spread of contagious disease among the pilgrims and those who served them
.

Tympanum depicting the visitation of the Magi

Looking up towards the Convento de Bevis, next to the seminary where we stayed

11th-century manuscript depicting the missions of the apostles. That's St James going to Galicia at the bottom.

San Roque and his little dog

St. John with a tiny dragon emerging from his cup.  This, I learned from Wikipedia, depicts the legend according to which St. John was handed a cup of poisoned wine, from which, at his blessing, the poison rose in the shape of a serpent or dragon.

The little fruit market outside our hotel in Santiago

Le mejor cerveza

And so back home via Barcelona and some more amazing Gaudi and other Barcelona Art Nouveau architecture there

&&&&&

Remembering with deep gratitude all the many blessings of this wonderful journey and recalling the ancient Pilgrims' Prayer to St. James that is said at the end of the Pilgrim Mass along the way.  Its immediate sense is about the journey of the Camino itself, but it can be understood as about the journey of life that takes us to the "end of the Road." It also reminds us that before the days of modern transportation, this pilgrimage was a round-trip journey.

O God, who brought your servant Abraham out of the land of the Chaldeans, protecting him in his wanderings, who guided the Hebrew people across the desert, we ask that you watch over us, your servants, as we walk in the love of your name to Santiago de Compostela. 

Be for us our companion on the walk,
Our guide at the crossroads,
Our breath in our weariness,
Our protection in danger,
Our albergue on the Camino,
Our shade in the heat,
Our light in the darkness,
Our consolation in our discouragements,
And our strength in our intentions. 

So that with your guidance we may arrive safe and sound at the end of the Road and enriched with grace and virtue we return safely to our homes filled with joy. 

In the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen. 

Apostle Santiago, pray for us.
Santa Maria, pray for us.

Reflections on the Camino

Paul Adams

These are some general reflections on walking the Camino de Santiago, the ancient pilgrimage that was enormously popular and well traveled in the Middle Ages and which has undergone a tremendous revival in recent decades.

Here's how my daughter Katryn described our pilgrimage as she introduced her terrific gallery of photographs on Facebook (I'll include a few here later if and when I figure out how to transfer them):

We walked from Sarria to Santiago de Compostela in Galicia (the northwestern part of Spain) along the medieval pilgrimage route from France. We only did the last 112 km -- you need 100+ for it to be recognized by the Church. It was a religious thing for my dad, but more of a cultural and bonding experience for me. We could have had better weather, but overall a great trip!

It was also a cultural and bonding experience for me, as well as a religious pilgrimage to honor God and St. James and in reparation for my sins.  The Cathedral office that dispenses the Compostela (certificate of completion) only has two categories of certificate based on your reasons for making the pilgrimage - religious/personal/spiritual/cultural and as an athletic activity - and the latter definitely did not fit either of us.

There were plenty of athletic types - Italian and German cyclists as well as young people who whizzed past us on foot and whom we never saw again.  At the same time, a few families with children and American elders in groups, and English mums had their luggage shipped ahead for each night.  But this was late April and early May, when most younger and fitter peregrinos were still in school.  We had heard and read tales of boisterous partying at the pilgrim hostels along the way that were said to lead to serious sleep deprivation for more mature pilgrims.  But we saw none of that.  Most of the people we met and chatted with, those going at our pace, were moms of children who were now in high school or beyond.  There were the two South African sisters who were walking the Way as a bonding experience, along with the best friend of one of the women.  There was a pair of English 'county' women, mothers of six boys between them who had been or were currently at the same public (private) school in the South of England.  

We saw other pilgrims at Mass along the way and not only at the famous Pilgrims' Mass held every day at noon at the Cathedral in Santiago.  But none of those we chatted with seemed to identify as Catholic or indicated they were doing the walk as Christian pilgrims. Others from here at Ave found the same on their pilgrimages and in that respect the film, The Way, seemed accurate. I had Chaucer's Canterbury Tales on my Kindle.  I did not turn to it as I had meant, though I read one tale on the plane to Barcelona.  But thinking of that great medieval work reminded me that those going on pilgrimages always had a range of motives, secular as well as religious. It was all that most pilgrims had in the way of a vacation - as opposed to a feast or festival.  It was a respite from routine and responsibility and for some from unhappy marriages or grinding work.  Some pilgrims were holy people filled with the love of God and neighbor.  But others were, in the English expression, no better than they should be.

Still, I was filled with the sense that I was walking in the footsteps of hundreds of thousands of Christian pilgrims who had the made the journey in faith and in much harder conditions for more than a thousand years.  I felt their presence and their prayers as clearly as I saw the many Romanesque and Gothic churches of the Middle Ages, the monuments and statues. Or saw the deep identations made in the column at the Cathedral by countless peregrinos as they paid their homage over the many centuries down to the time it was cordoned off from our touch for its own protection and ours, like the leaning tower of Pisa.  

Doing the full 800 km of the French route on foot takes more time than most people can manage, unless they are young people using a long vacation or time between jobs or else retirees.  So we met only a few spiritual-but-not-religious seekers of enlightenment about their own lives - hoping to find answers to questions they had about what to do next after finding themselves without a partner or a job. One particularly intense American woman fell into that category, saying she had walked over 400 miles and still had not found the answer she was looking for.

Yet most people seem to find the Camino a spiritual experience in some sense.  It is a time apart from the daily routines and responsibilities of life, a bit like a long retreat at a monastery, even without going to Mass, but a retreat with blisters, aching feet, and the sense of accomplishment that came from a physical feat requiring more exercise than most of us had done in many years.  It is a unique and unforgettable life experience, a time of bonding with old friends or family and of meeting many wonderful, kind, happy people along the way - pilgrims, locals, and young Catholic volunteers from other parts of Spain who offered free services like tea, coffee, and toilets - wonderful, kind, happy people whom we'd never see again in this world.

Like the intense American lady, most peregrinos, I suspect, do not have a singular moment of enlightenment, an aha moment, when an answer to their question, whether about God or their next career choice, is revealed.  I had no such unique moment, no falling-down road to Damascus experience.  Instead I felt the continuous presence of God as never before, something more - I imagine and for a time - like a "life of prayer" than the usual life with prayer episodically in it.

Over lunch at an inn on the way, one of the English women asked me upon learning that I was Catholic, what my reward would be on completing the Camino.  She asked in a very mildly teasing way and I realized she was thinking of those rules for indulgences, like a week off Purgatory if you confess and attend a mass celebrated by a regular priest, a month if it's a bishop, and a plenary indulgence if you drop dead on the way - there were enough little memorials along the route to remind us that it happens.  I did not want to get into the history and theology of indulgences or what it might mean to talk of time periods in that way for a situation where there is no time, and so forth.  I forgot what I did say, it was not much.  I also felt the conversation and the question were too light for me appropriately to get into the way I actually did think about my "reward," which had much more to do with the parable of the Prodigal Son, the way we voluntarily separate ourselves from the Father, how we nevertheless can return and be welcomed home.

More on the actual Camino - what we saw and experienced, the country, the churches and other notable buildings, the way we ate and slept on the way - to follow.  First to figure out and select those pictures.

Walking the Way

Paul Adams

In a couple of hours (DV), I will be on my way to Barcelona and thence to join the Camino de Santiago, the pilgrimage to the shrine of St. James in northern Spain, with my adult daughter Katryn.  That means there will be a three-week hiatus in my blog.

I have been asked about blogging the experience day by day.  I expect to write about it when I return but there are several reasons not to do it day by day.  One of them is that there is a very fine blog of that kind already by a father, Webster Bull, who walked the whole 500 miles of the camino with his adult daughter last year.  It is beautifully done and fascinating.  Father and daughter respectively are ten years younger than me and my daughter, so their experiences were inevitably different but his troubles sleeping in the albergues certainly reinforced my determination to bring a large supply of ear-plugs.

Each day's post is linked to the next so you can read it like an e-book.  I was reassured by his observation that, despite expecting to feel a certain superiority to those who joined the pilgrimage, as we will, at Sarria, the last place on the French route you can do so and still put in the 100 km you need to get a certificate--but he found that many of these pilgrims were Spaniards with jobs and families using their vacation to do a religious pilgrimage.  That gave him a fresh respect for them, since both he and his daughter are serious Catholics, whereas many who do the whole camino--as we know from The Way (the movie with Martin Sheen) are non-religious, spiritual-but-not-religious, or even anti-Catholic.

A favorite part of the blog is the account of their time in Santiago de Compostela, including this anecdote from June 18, 2012, about Pope Benedict XVI.  It starts like this:

In Seattle you have the Space Needle, in Paris the Eiffel Tower. In Santiago de Compostela, the number-one tourist attraction seems to be the Botafumeiro, the giant censer propelled on a pendulum swing by six rope-pulling stewards and spewing scented smoke in front of the altar before the final blessing, especially at SRO pilgrim masses. It's a sensation, hurtling on its trapeze like a death-defying circus artist or a space capsule out of control. 

It's most of what you hear about. A couple from Holland here on holiday asked me during the Spain-Croatia soccer match tonight if I had seen the Botafumeiro yet. A fellow pilgrim and a Protestant complained to me that the Botafumeiro was "too commercial," and proved his point by standing with hundreds of other gawkers to snap still and video images when it swung into action at the end of noon mass on Sunday. When the giant, flaming ball was wrestled to earth by a courageous caped attendant, the cathedral broke into applause. Before giving us his final blessing, the celebrant made the best of an awkward moment by saying that he hoped we were applauding the Lord and not the Botafumeiro. 

A pilgrim who had been following Webster's blog as it unfolded and who was on pilgrimage at the same time, told him that

when the Pope was in Santiago a couple of years ago, everyone was eager to see his reaction to the Botafumeiro. Some thought he would look up in wonder. Some thought he might even gesture approvingly. 

Instead, our Pope kept his head lowered in prayer throughout the swinging, which lasts at least 45 seconds. He never looked, never flinched. He just waited for the censing to be done with, then delivered his blessing. 

I have concluded, and this anecdote reinforces my conclusion, that it is impossible to make a proper judgment of the Catholic Church without having lived inside it seriously. Few have lived longer or more deeply inside the faith than Pope Benedict.

To all my fellow peregrinos, I wish buen camino.  See you soon.