Dear Saints in Santa Fe, and other far-off places—
Greetings in the name of Jesus Christ!
The Camino de Santiago. The Way of St. James.
Like Iona, I am not sure when I first heard about this pilgrimage. Perhaps it has been roaming around within me for years without any acknowledgment and suddenly it appeared and said it was time to go wander a bit, stretch your legs and your stamina. And your heart.
So here we are. When you read this, Jenny and I, and daughters Gwen and Claire, will be arriving in Madrid (yes, the other one for all you who live in Santa Fe) then take a long train ride north to Sarria, close to the top of Spain in Galicia, arriving Saturday at 9:15 pm. We will spend the night and Sunday we will be resting up, to begin our seven-day walk on Monday morning to Santiago de Compostela, the destination of pilgrims since the 10th century.
A brief history from Wikipedia: The Camino was created in the 9th century after the discovery of the relics of St. James. At the end of the Grenada War in 1492 Pope Alexander VI officially declared the Camino de Santiago to be one of the “three great pilgrimages of Christendom.” The main pilgrimage route follows an earlier Roman trade route. Only since the 1990s has this pilgrimage regained the popularity it had in the Middle Ages.
So why go? And why have hundreds of thousands of people since then set out, like we are about to do, on foot, bicycle, even on horseback or donkey, to travel five hundred miles (we are going about 112) only to reach the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela? Admittedly, a cathedral is not the first choice for many in this fast-paced and technology-laden world of ours and walking is well, so slow.
But that is precisely the point. We walk because it is counterculture. We walk because it slows us down. We walk so we have time to talk with others. We walk because wisdom might catch up with us. We walk because those before us did, like Abraham in Genesis 12 who heard God say, “Go to the land I will show you, and you will be blessed.” We walk because a blessing might find us.
We walk “seeking the place of one’s resurrection.” John Philip Newell writes, “leaving the familiar in order to experience new birth, dying to the boundaries and securities of home to be alive to what one had never imagined before.” Yes, maybe that’s why.
So, we shall walk, talk, get tired, rest, enjoy a latte, start again, groan at a steeper-than-wanted hill, marvel at the scenery, meet some people from around the world with holy stories, take deep breaths, share our own holy stories which masquerade as daily life, eagerly look for the town we will stay in that night, and wish perhaps the journey that day could have been longer.
I will let you know what it is really like, hopefully next Saturday, but I can’t guarantee it. It’s the Camino, you know, where resurrections and new births and imaginations set free often have agendas and deadlines other than our own.
Grace and peace,
Harry