We're all going on a summer pilgrimage
There is still a lot of camaraderie on the road to Santiago de Compostela, John Laughland discovers, but serious Christianity is being replaced by New Age 'self-discovery'
As we crossed over the escarpment at the Mount of Joy — traditionally the place where pilgrims caught their first glimpse of the spires of the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, but now a grim and dirty picnic spot with a hideous modern monument to a recent visit by the Pope, a kiosk selling soft drinks, and no view because the cathedral has been obscured by suburbs and trees — our eyes winced in the late afternoon sun, which hung directly in front of us. To the left, the heavens were black with the storm clouds that had soaked us throughout the morning; to the right, the brilliant blue sky had been washed bluer by the day's rain. Whether this dramatic bisection of the firmament reminded other pilgrims too of Last Judgments with heaven on one side and hell on the other, I don't know; but there can be few more dramatic or moving experiences than arriving at your destination, in my case after walking for 16 days and 300 miles, as the sun is setting in front of you. Perhaps this explains why, alone among the great mediaeval pilgrimage routes, the Way of St James is now more popular than ever.
Anyone who has walked west for weeks on end instinctively understands that a pilgrimage is a metaphor for life, and that our life's journey has only one certain end, namely death. Not that the camino (as the pilgrim's way is universally known) has anything morbid or even particularly religious about it. Instead, it is rather like a peripatetic dinner party, or a school outing for grown-ups. Far from being a conscious act of mortification, the camino is for many just a cheap holiday offering outdoor activity, a hippy-dippy lifestyle, or at most a whiff of right-on spirituality. Often pilgrims look like the sort of people who go to Stonehenge for the solstice, and their relationship to Christianity is tangential at best. On one of my first nights, an Irishman expounded the truths revealed in Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code (that Mary Magdalene was Christ's wife and that they had many children) while a tubby Native American woman from Quebec, who played a deep-toned Red Indian pipe, explained the superiority of Celtic religions over Christianity because of the pre-eminent role accorded to goddesses by the former. I learnt, too, how tolerant the Moors had been in Spain, unlike those evil Christians with their cult of St James the Moor Slayer — a point of view, I felt, which had probably not been shared by the Christian slaves on whose backs the bells of Santiago cathedral were carried to Cordoba, where they were placed upside-down by the mosque as an insult and a humiliation. So far, indeed, were the minds of most so-called pilgrims from the clouds of incense emitted by the enormous censer, the famous totafumeiro', which is swung on a huge pulley operated by eight men at the end of the daily pilgrim Mass in Santiago cathedral, that the most pungent smoke I detected during the walk came when a blonde German girl and two long-haired Argentinian boys repaired to a bench by a village church to puff their way through a remarkably fat spliff.
But what the pilgrims lacked in traditional spirituality they made up for in traditional charity. They were kind, considerate, friendly and generous to one another. For weeks people from all over the world walk, sleep, eat, wash, snore, fart and pick their blisters together in conditions of extreme privation. The pain is constant and everyone's feet swell up like Hobbits'. You sleep in the pilgrim 'refuges' which have sprung up all along the way — large dormitories, often bug-infested. People who back home in Milan or Paris would shudder to invite a stranger into their home for a drink seem happy to throw themselves into sudden intimacy with people they do not know, often including sleeping in what amounts to the same bed. At Leon, a barrel-bellied, bearded man snored like an open sewer with a partial blockage, keeping the whole dorm awake, and a boy from Bavaria attempted vainly to quell the noise by getting out of bed and rattling the snorer's bunk at three in the morning. When that failed, he simply rummaged in his rucksack until he found an unneeded object to throw at him; but no one bore the man, still less the boy, any serious grudge.
Perhaps the greatest deprivation is of a lie-in, or anything approaching it. Spaniards have a love of noise and a hatred of sun, and they are the usual suspects when, without fail at 5 a.m. or earlier, alarm clocks start to ring and bags start to rustle, as those walkers start the day who wish to finish by lunchtime. Then the slow torture begins, for those still in bed, of listening to the zip and unzip of camping gear and to the infuriatingly gentle swoosh which light waterproof fabrics make when they are being packed into a rucksack. Many early risers have torches which they fix to their foreheads and so, for what seems like for ever, the dormitory resembles Nibelheim, as strange figures move around furtively performing unnatural tasks in the gloom. Yet no one complains, for that would infringe the unspoken but universally understood rules of pilgrim camaraderie.
Given that these simple truths about doing without are immediately grasped by anyone who experiences them, I found it incredible that I never once heard the word 'penance' from the lips of a priest in the villages and towns along the way, even when they specifically preached on pilgrimage. Instead those few pilgrims who attended Mass were treated to sermons composed of what my Canadian walking companion (non-religious) pithily described as 'a lot of New Age bullshit' about self-discovery and the unity of humankind. Even the Archbishop of Santiago, in his sermon, told the throngs in his cathedral that 'We are all pilgrims' — a nice enough thought, perhaps, but rather irritating for those of us who actually were. Never did any cleric explain that a pilgrimage is a physical act of penance by which sins can be redeemed — not only one's own but also other people's. And yet the Christian religion has no greater message than the injunction to imitate Christ by performing self-sacrifice.
A pilgrimage, like life, is a stony, hard, often lonely and sometimes desolate path. But not only does the company of others greatly alleviate the hardship; there is also a special elation which comes from it. By putting yourself in pain and by devoting each day to the simple but urgent tasks of walking and finding food and shelter for the night, you feel released from bondage to the chains of comfort. And that is why, with or without either faith or intimations of mortality, there can surely be no pilgrim on the Way of St James who reaches the end of the road without being overcome by an extraordinary feeling of inner peace.
Previous page
