Walking for wisdom on the Camino in Spain
When I first told friends that I intended to walk some of the pilgrimage route across northern Spain, the Camino de Santiago, I got lots of tips and suggestions.
In fact, there are a number of Peterburians who have taken on this project: Fred and Karen Kooy (more than once), Kate Jarrett and Sheila Collett, Betsy McGregor, Michael Gibson, Barb Woolner, Julie Fitzpatrick, Bev Robson, Eloise Bucholtz and many more. We must have a get-together later this fall to share stories.
Two bits of advice I have hung on to were these: “Make every step a prayer.” That perhaps won’t be too hard: I am generally a praying person. My longest day will be 18 kilometers, and shortest 11. That makes quite a few steps.
The other was: “Put on a medieval mind.” Now that could be a challenge. I am a post-modern, somewhat technocratic, educated, skeptical, feminist writer. My culture has been through the Reformation and the Enlightenment and the age of science. This is no longer the Age of Faith. I live in an interconnected global world which has managed to produce 7 billion people and to create massive threats to itself by its profligate consumption and warmongering.
Medieval Europe, on the other hand, had only 65 million persons, almost every one a Christian Catholic. Most were peasants, and they believed in God, in the Christian gospel and in the Pope and the King. Most were very poor. One-third of the population undertook the pilgrimage. A few were prisoners serving their sentence this way!
All had a deep sense of their own sinfulness and need for forgiveness. Pilgrimages, whether to Rome or Jerusalem, which were the most popular routes, or to Santiago de Compostela, the third most popular, were acts of devotion and healing, people making acts of contrition so that punishment for sins would be removed.
Some of these concepts of spirituality, from which we have moved away, could now be at least partly re-appropriated, if I am to get out of this walk all it promises. It is amazing to realize that the pilgrimage to this northwestern Spanish city has been going on since the ninth century, over 1,000 years. I’ll be in the footsteps of St. Francis of Assisi (he actually took a donkey), royals Ferdinand and Isabella and the current King of Spain.
Under my feet will be roads built first by the Romans before the Common Era when they invaded Spain (then called Hispania).
When Martin Luther launched his reformation of the Catholic church 500 years ago this fall in Germany, piety of this kind fell out of favour. It wasn’t until the 1980s that interest began to take hold again. In 1986, 20,000 pilgrims came to the camino: in 2016, 200,000 did. (Only 56 were over 80 years of age. Sixty used wheelchairs. And there were 143 nationalities.)
The Spanish government has introduced a series of pilgrim hostels: basic dormitory accommodation: no reservations; just show up. Much of this part of Spain is rural and poor. So peregrinos are welcome as an economic boon.
I expect to meet all kinds of people walking for all kinds of reasons: to quit smoking, to lose weight, to get over a relationship, to enjoy the outdoors. This Spain will include steep mountains and a vast dry desert (la meseta). It will include many villages and a few cities of note. For a good picture of the landscape, see Martin Sheen’s feature film, The Way.
Next article; the destination, the cathedral-city of Santiago, and some preparation.