Pilgrims on the Way: Walking the Way Part 2

Paul Adams (commentary) and Katryn Adams (pictures)

A friendly cat at La Bodeguina in Mercadoiro. And the dormitory building where we slept. Many pilgrims stopped off here for a drink or meal.  We stayed overnight.  All the hostels we stayed at were clean and pleasant.  We carried our sleeping bags on our backs, sleeping in bunks in rooms with ten or more peregrinos, male and female, always for ten euros or less.  Usually there were private rooms available at double the price ($25 or $26), still a great deal.  Fellow pilgrims we encountered were quiet and considerate.  I had little use for the ear plugs with which I came well supplied.  

We passed through many small old farm towns like this one

 And on to Portomarin, where the yellow arrows that were helpful almost everywhere on the Camino in this case pointed us into and out of town at the same time.  Good for business but confusing for pilgrims!

Santa Maria de las Nieves in Portomarin

El rio Mino

Misty morning at the Mino river across from Portomarin

Finally, a sunny day.  Not too much of the Camino goes along beside with the highway like this, a bit more as we approached the outskirts of Santiago, but not too much.  The markers directed to side paths and lanes that crisscrossed the highway whenever possible.

Caterpillar train! How to make yourself look five times bigger.

My favorite hostel/inn was this one, run very efficiently by two young couples, with food from the family farm.  

Young Catholic volunteers from southern Spain provided free tea, coffee and use of toilets to pilgrims

One of several 17th century wayside crosses along the Camino

Symbols of St James on the street in Palas de Rei

Most people walk the Camino, some do it on bicycle, and a few make the journey on horseback.  If you go by bicycle or on horseback, you have to cover twice the minimum distance to qualify for a Compostela. Horses parked outside a bar in Palas de Rei

No idea what this is

Another medieval bridge

Very fancy tap for the local beer - Estrella Galicia

Walking the Way - A Religious and Cultural Experience in Words and, Especially, Pictures - Part 1

Paul Adams (commentary) and Katryn Adams (pictures)

We flew into Barcelona, where we visited some wonderful art nouveau architecture, before making our way by train to Leon and after a short stay in that beautiful medieval city, by bus to Sarria, where we joined the Camino for the 112 km walk to Santiago de Compostela.  Even in Barcelona, it was cold (close to freezing at the end of April) and rainy.  There was such a long line to see Gaudi's famous church Sagrada Familia, his "catechism in stone" begun in 1882 and still under construction, that we decided not to stand in line in the cold and rain, though we went to Mass in a small pre-Gaudi section of the church which required no line and gave no access to the rest of the building.

And here is the Gothic cathedral in Barcelona, outside and in:

The church of Santa Maria del Mar in Barcelona was funded by the dockworkers guild and there are images of them on the doors:

and on to the beautiful town and cathedral of Leon:

and on to Sarria, where we began our pilgrimage in a moment of respite from the rain:

on our way, on Ponte Aspera, outside Sarria:

Igrexa de Santiago in tiny Barbadelo, where the priest performed a mass just for us.  Most peregrinos did not attend the Masses meant specially for them along the way, though probably all attended the Pilgrims Mass in Santiago de Compostela.  But in this 12th century church, we were the only ones there apart from an elderly priest, who called us up to the altar at the end and had me read a special blessing in English.  The altarpiece was different from anything else we saw, in a primitive, folk art kind of way.

Somewhere between Barbadelo and Morgade:

A memorable moment.  As we walked past him, this man called us over to the side of the road where he was stripping the bark off a stick to make a walking pole. He gave me the pole but would take no money for it.  He asked us to pray for him at the Cathedral in Santiago.  Katryn thought he picked me out from the hundreds of pilgrims who must have passed him because I "looked sincere."  Or perhaps just old and unsteady on my feet!  In any case, along with some other commissions from friends back home, it gave the sense that we were representing others in our pilgrimage and our blessings and graces were to be shared.  The stick saved me from several bad falls on slippery rocks and mud over the next few hours and days.

Other pilgrims along the way:

These fancy corn cribs are a big thing in Galicia:

Just 100 km to go!

Going with the Flow of History: The Lemming Argument for Redefining Marriage

Compare the Nazi and Communist cases for inevitability here.

Intolerant Tolerance - Is Rational Public Discussion Still Possible?

Paul Adams

It was not some goofball but obscure pastor somewhere, but the presiding bishop of the Episcopalian Church USA (ECUSA), Jefferts Schori, who recently gave a sermon in Venezuela that has provoked questions such as, Is this the worst sermon ever preached? and (on my part, I admit) Have the Episcopalians in the US gone completely mad? Here are Fr. Barron's comments, delivered not with a rending of garments but with his characteristic chuckle.



Additional commentary by Fr. Barron, who addresses among other questions that of whether such a patently ridiculous and silly sermon is even worth paying attention to:



Other writers have commented on the increasingly bizarre nature of this abandonment in our times of critical thinking or any resort to reason or evidence - and the substitution of intolerant bullying - in the name of tolerance and diversity.  See for example the article by Australian sociologist Michael Casey on "The Puzzle of Intolerant Tolerance" and the interview with him here.

Now D.A. Carson, "a well-known Reformed theologian and exegete," has, in the words of James Kalb's review, "written a clear and well-reasoned analysis of today’s imperialistic tolerance from an Evangelical and classically liberal standpoint.

Kalb explainss,

He tells us that the new understanding of tolerance has meant a shift from accepting the right of others to hold dissenting views to demanding acceptance of such views as equally valid. It thus implies a shift from free discussion of conflicting truth claims to suppressing conflicts by silencing truth claims. This shift, he says, makes the new tolerance intellectually debilitating as well as blind, intolerant, and socially dangerous.

The shift is from a concern with truth and the common good to a radical individualism and subjectivism that conflates diversity as situation with diversity as a principle, that celebrates lifestyle diversity as such.  In this view diversity of family structures is to be welcomed.  We are supposed to talk of "families" rather than "the family," as if the natural family in which the children who result from the bodily union of their married parents are raised by those parents were just one kind of family among many alternatives and preferring it or wishing to promote and protect it were a form of intolerance or bigotry.   Not without reason Carolyn Moynihan calls this celebration of 'family diversity' "the world's most dangerous idea." Gone is the right of the child declared by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as spelled out in the Convention on the Rights of the Child adopted by the U.N. as recently as 1987 according to which every child has "as far as possible, the right to know and be cared for by his or her parents" (Article 7).

As Kalb notes in summarizing Carson's argument,

The result was a tolerance that looks only to itself, or perhaps individual freedom, as the highest standard. As the author puts it, the current form of tolerance is “largely cut free from both a well-articulated vision of truth and from binding culture-wide moral standards.”

The result has not been a state of ultimate freedom but a tolerance that makes rejection of absolutes an absolute. That, of course, is self-contradiction. As the author notes, the “truth question catches up with all of us,” and secularism has turned out as absolutist and dogmatic in its commitments as any other system. It is more so than most since it denies that it has dogmatic certainties and so feels no obligation to articulate and defend itself against objection. Instead, it relies on the “manipulative bludgeoning” of accusations of intolerance.

The new tolerance thus puts irrationality and bullying at the heart of public discussion. The results are as bad as might be expected. The new tolerance can’t deal with evil, for example, so serious discussion of human life and the public good becomes impossible. That leads to practical problems. The author notes, for example, that the idea of truth is necessary to resist tyranny, giving twentieth-century tyrannies and unpleasant features of Japanese life as examples. Nor can democratic procedures solve the problem. If rational discussion is impossible democracy becomes unworkable, and power inevitably flows upward to manipulative and irresponsible elites.

The author notes that the Christian emphasis on truth makes Christianity intolerant and therefore illegitimate by the new definition of tolerance.

Carson is right about the irrationality of this new notion of tolerance, one which rejects the notion of truth (except in asserting the truth of its own view about truth) and so makes itself impervious to reason and evidence and excludes them from public discussion.  But as Kalb says, there is a need to go further, to a sociological, theological, and philosophical understanding of how it can be that such an irrational, indeed bizarre form of tolerance

 has become so immensely powerful among intelligent, thoughtful, responsible, and well-educated people. More needs to be said of the logic of a modern outlook that views human relations technologically, and identifies what is good with what is desired. For those who hold such an outlook it is  natural to divinize individual subjectivity, which leads to an extreme concern for feelings, and to reject as irrational traditional forms of social organization, which involve sexual and cultural distinctions as well as conceptions of ultimate truth. Put those two tendencies together and the result is today’s politically correct version of tolerance. The author rightly points out many ironies of the present situation. Its ultimate irony, however, is that the current craziness springs from the utilitarian and technological outlook that is now considered so purely rational.

This combination of voluntarism and determinism, of subjectivism and mechanics, was a key theme of John Paul II (e.g., Fides et Ratio; Theology of the Body) and of Benedict XVI (Regensburg Address in 2006; Address intended for La Sapienza University in Rome in 2008).  See also Michael Waldstein's not-to-be-missed lecture on "Faith, Science and Pope Benedict XVI's Regensburg Address" and his marvelous introduction to his English translation of JP II's Theology of the Body.  No-one has better pursued these themes, utterly central to understanding modernity and our current cultural catastrophe, in an accessible or popular (but not dumbed down) way, than Fr. Robert Barron.

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.

Fr. Robert Barron on Modernity & Morality

Fr. Barron on Pope Francis and the Religious Sense