#291:  ON THE CAMINO AGAIN.  It is of course entirely possible that the revered objects which make some places the site of religious pilgrimage—from the mantle of the Virgin in Chartres Cathedral to the Buddha’s tooth in that temple in Sri Lanka—are simply bogus or mistaken, and not at all the sacred things they are said to be.  Among the ritual actions suggested for visitors to the cathedral of Santiago in the northwest of Spain is a visit to the crypt holding the supposed bones of James the Elder, the apostle and saint who is believed to have attempted the evangelization of the Iberian peninsula. His body, after his martyrdom in Jerusalem, was carried magically, the legend says, in a stone boat to Spain, where a shower of stars, the legend says, revealed the bones to an eighth century hermit named Paio: hence Santiago de Compostela, or Saint James of the Field of Stars.  Or because the bones had been discovered in a Roman graveyard, a compositum.  Or because the site already harbored the cultic memory of Priscillian, a fourth-century gnostic bishop condemned as a heretic, with its veneration then back-deeded to James.  These bones became the end point of one of the most famous pilgrimage routes in Europe: the camino francés across the north of Spain, traveled annually now by thousands of pilgrims from all over the world.  But are those Saint James’s bones down there, really?  Are the myths to be believed, or is the whole thing—to put it vulgarly—a crock?  

        Perhaps the advantage of Nancy L. Frey’s book Pilgrim Stories; On and Off the Road to Santiago: Journeys Along an Ancient Way in Modern Spain (University of California Press, 1998) is that she approaches the subject as an anthropologist, detailing not only its history and the myths, but interviewing the people who have walked the walk, carrying with them a massive variety of approaches, backgrounds, motivations, and reactions.  Whether you have approached the Camino as a believer or a skeptic, you’re going to have your opinions complicated and likely humanized by the wealth of human experience these stories bring to bear on them.  I would suggest that the most sensible response to the book would be that whatever beauties and challenges the Camino bestows on its followers, those followers’ stories restore and bestow those beauties back on our sense and memory of the experience.  And the challenges as well—many of the most moving stories are from the last chapters of the book, of peoples’ efforts to incorporate the experience into their lives afterward.  By the end of the book, the yes-or-no questions of belief or disbelief have had to step aside—no one gets to claim the Camino entirely for their own. Someone always has another story to tell.

       One of the most important of Frey’s observations is in the difference between the Camino and other pilgrimage sites.  Most are places you go, and the arrival is all.  There are the four main destinations of the Buddhist pilgrimage route in India (the site of the Buddha’s birth, enlightenment, first teaching and entry into Nirvana) but how you get there is irrelevant.  Some other Christian sites—Chartres, Mont St. Michel—have walking routes associated with them; it’s still possible to see young French Catholics walking from Paris to Chartres, chanting Peguy’s great poem.  But with no other is the road itself, the weeks-long trek across the north of Spain, so equal in importance with the arrival’s endpoint as with the Camino de Santiago.  Here the connection of Christianity to physical experience—the blisters on the feet quite as much as the prayer at the altar—gets beautiful, even unforgettable expression.  This may be why the Camino has attracted so many who are not in any narrow way Christian or even religious: to rephrase Pascal, le corps a ses raisons.  I’ve read around in the literature of the Camino, and Frey’s book—so mundanely careful in its anthropological approach—bests so many of them, that scour their interior responses and end up only celebrating themselves. Frey’s stories open up the Camino to all and sundry, the failures as well as the flights of spirit, blisters and inspirations, and catches the way the memory it has of sneaking up on you years after while you’re peeling the potatoes and making you, just for a moment, unreasonably happy.  Ultreia!

       Noting the book’s date,  1998, and matching it against my own experience of the Camino in 2002, one question occurred to me:  what is the difference in the experience of the Camino now that we are, God help us, in the thick of the digital age?  I managed to find Frey’s email address, and she was, of course, way ahead of me on the topic.  She has written with great feeling on how much more insistently the world and our lives pursue us now:  “To me the most significant difference is the loss of a bracketed period of mental separation from one's life and the Camino--before, during and after the journey.”  In an essay she writes:  “People talk now about the Camino being stressful because they don’t have enough time to write it all down and share it. You don’t have to share it, you can simply live it. The Camino becomes work rather than something you live and breathe, suffer and enjoy.”  Heed this wise caution as you will, as widely as you will.

--Nancy L Frey, Pilgrim Stories; On and Off the Road to Santiago: Journeys Along an Ancient Way in Modern Spain (University of California Press, 1998).

--For the essay noted above, go to  https://www.walkingtopresence.com/articles/leaving-home-and-coming-back