The Way of the Stars

Journeys on the Camino de Santiago

Robert C. Sibley

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780813933153
• eBook ISBN:
  9780813933160
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

Since medieval times, pilgrimages have been a popular religious or spiritual undertaking. Even today, between seventy and one hundred million people a year make pilgrimages, if not for expressly religious reasons, then for an alternative to secular goals and the preoccupation with consumption and entertainment characteristic of contemporary life. In The Way of the Stars, the journalist Robert Sibley, motivated at least in part by his own sense of discontent, recounts his walks on one of the most well-known pilgrimages in the Western world—the Camino de Santiago.

A medieval route that crosses northern Spain and leads to the town of Santiago de Compostela, the Camino has for hundreds of years provided for pilgrims the practice, the place, and the circumstances that allow for spiritual rejuvenation, reflection, and introspection. Sibley, who made the five-hundred-mile trek twice—initially on his own, and then eight years later with his son—offers a personal narrative not only of the outward journey of a pilgrim's experience on the road to Santiago but also of the inward journey afforded by an interlude of solitude and a respite from the daily demands of ordinary life. The month-long trip put the author on a path through his own memories, dreams, and self-perceptions as well as through the sights and sounds, the tastes and sensations, of the Camino itself.

1

PRAYER

When a man’s passions bewilder him, he should put on black clothes and travel to a place where he is not known.

—TALMUD

In Roncesvalles I prayed for the first time since childhood. I wasn’t very good at it. I felt self-conscious and embarrassed. The words and ritual gestures had grown rusty with disuse and, it must be said, disbelief. I made the effort nevertheless, imitating others as they crossed themselves and genuflected in front of the altar. In part, it was a matter of wanting to be polite and not look out of place. But I also recalled the Catholic apologist C. S. Lewis once saying that faith is an act of will as well as belief. You sometimes have to act as if you believe because faith, like morality, takes discipline and habituation.¹ Besides, I was in a Spanish church as a pilgrim, and it seemed to me that if I was to be a genuine pilgrim, then I needed to take part in the traditional practices of pilgrimage regardless of my skepticism. So, despite feeling awkward, I chose a pew, knelt on the stone floor, and spoke the long unsaid words: “Lord, hear my prayer.”

I prayed for everyone I could think of: my son and my wife, my mother and my dead father, my brother and sisters, and my friends past and present. But then I started to imagine all the things that might go wrong on my walk, how I could get lost or sick or not find a place to sleep. And that reminded me of stories I’d read about pilgrims suffering broken legs, being knocked into ditches by passing cars, and even being attacked by dogs. I imagined a pack of dogs surrounding me in some remote village and wondered about other ways I might die until I realized I wasn’t praying anymore.

I started over, praying it wouldn’t rain too much and my legs would be strong and I wouldn’t get too many blisters or suffer a heart attack. But then I started to think about whether someone or something actually heard my prayers, or whether I was just mumbling to myself, and if that was the case, then what was the point of praying? And that got me pondering my lack of faith and trying to remember when I had had any and why it had disappeared. But I’d had that debate with myself for years. I turned away from this train of thought as some lines from T. S. Eliot came to mind: “You are here to kneel / Where prayer has been valid.”² That encouraged me to pray again, only I couldn’t think of anything more to pray for. I remained kneeling, with my arms on the back of the pew in front of me, until my knees hurt too much and my leg muscles started to cramp. Finally, I sat back in the pew, trying to ignore my wet, muddy clothes and my fatigue and anxiety, and let my thoughts drift as I waited for the Mass to begin.

It was my first day as a pilgrim on the Camino de Santiago. During the next four to five weeks, I planned to walk nearly eight hundred kilometers—five hundred miles—across northern Spain to the Galician city of Santiago de Compostela. The route crosses the Pyrenees, the green valleys of Navarre and Rioja, the plains of Castile and León, and the lush alpine mountains of Galicia until eventually it reaches Santiago, where according to tradition the bones of St. James the Apostle are encased in a silver reliquary.

My walk would take me from the last week of March to the end of April. It would prove to be one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, physically at least. But it was also one of the most satisfying travel experiences of my life. I saw beautiful country, ate splendid meals, and became part of a living history. Best of all, I enjoyed periods of solitude that allowed me to recall places, people, and events I hadn’t thought of for decades. And along the way there were a few psychic experiences that I’ve never forgotten.

Of course all of this was unknown to me as I tried to pray in Roncesvalles. This two-street hamlet, with its twelfth-century Augustinian monastery and a collegiate church, is the pilgrims’ gateway into Spain. My effort at prayer, inadequate though it might have been, was also a gesture of gratitude for my having made it through the first day.

An hour earlier I’d been stumbling along a snow-covered mountain path uncertain about where I was and fearful that I was suffering the early stages of hypothermia. I’d walked for nearly ten hours, enduring rain, snow, and wind as I trekked the twenty-six kilometers over the mountains between Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port and Roncesvalles. By the time I reached the Spanish village in the early evening, I was wet, cold, exhausted, aching, and not a little shell-shocked. The sight of the monastery’s slate-blue roof was a huge relief. It seemed a good idea to offer thanks to whatever powers might be.

The dull gong of a bell announcing Mass pulled me from my reverie. Four priests in white gowns and purple vestments entered the church to perform the Stations of the Cross. This first Mass in Roncesvalles was special. It certainly had much to do with my sense of relief at having made it through the day. But also I hadn’t been in a church in a long time. I was entranced by the priests as they stood in a semicircle behind the altar chanting the liturgy, by the glow of the gold-plated goblets, and by the play of light on the Virgin of Roncesvalles, a thirteenth-century silver-clad wooden statue of Mary holding the infant Christ. Maybe I was lightheaded, but the Child’s face seemed almost gleeful while the Virgin had a faraway look.

An old woman next to me in the pew tugged at my sleeve. The Mass had ended, and worshipers were approaching the altar. The woman gestured for me to do the same. At first I didn’t understand. Then I realized the priests were offering a blessing to the pilgrims who’d arrived that day.

“¿Por los peregrinos?” I asked.

“Sí, sí, una bendición por los peregrinos,” she replied.

“Gracias, señora.”

I joined five others, three men and two women, at the altar. I hadn’t seen them on the road. They looked neat and dry and cheerful. I thought they’d probably come by car or, to be charitable, were simply more efficient pilgrims than I was. The priest paused in front of each one to make the sign of the cross and offer a blessing. The ceremony goes back to the twelfth century when the monastery and its hospital took care of thousands of pilgrims. Even as late as the seventeenth century, the monks greeted twenty-five thousand pilgrims a year. They received food and shelter and, if sick, comfort. If the pilgrims were dying, they received the sacraments. According to my guidebook, an ossuary on the lower floor of the monastery chapel holds pilgrims’ remains.

When my turn came I tried to put on a solemnly humble face worthy of a blessing. The priest ignored my bedraggled appearance, smiled, and blessed me the same way he did the neater pilgrims. Then he stepped back and led us in the Pilgrims’ Blessing.

“May the Lord direct your steps with His approval and be your inseparable companion on the entire Camino.”

“Amen.”

“May the Virgin Mary grant you her maternal protection, defend you in all dangers of soul and body, and may you arrive safely at the end of your pilgrimage under her mantle.”

“Amen.”

With my soul supposedly in good hands I hobbled outside into the rain and returned to the Hostal Casa Sabina where I’d earlier taken a room. The needs of the body were paramount now. I wanted a hot shower, a wholesome meal, and a warm bed. In the room I exchanged my wet clothes for dryer ones, draping everything that was wet—socks, underwear, pants, shirt—on the radiator or on chairs that I dragged as close to the radiator as possible. As I soon learned, this was the standard routine for pilgrims. At the end of a day’s walking you hang your clothes—inevitably wet from either rain or sweat—to dry overnight. It didn’t always work. Many times my clothes were still damp in the morning. Not all pilgrim hostels, or refugios, have heat, or washers and dryers, but fortunately most of them have decent showers. My biggest concern, though, was my boots. Trying to keep them dry proved almost impossible.

I was famished after that first day’s hike. I took my first meal in Spain in the white-walled dining room of the Casa Sabina, with its sword-and-shield ornaments and paintings of knights on horseback decorating the walls. I sat at a table by one of the windows that looked out on the road through town. I was the only customer and had the young waitress all to myself. I ordered the menu del día: a thick potato soup, baked trout in lemon with vegetables, and a bottle of vino de la casa. The soup arrived in a big silver tureen, which I emptied. The trout was so fresh that the flesh peeled away from the bones with a turn of the fork. The wine gradually took care of my lingering shivers.

As I ate and drank—the winsome waitress kept filling my glass; how could I say no?—I thought about the misery of the day’s walk and wondered, with a kind of what-have-I-got-myself-into sense of foreboding, how I was going to walk the next 750 or so kilometers, and why. I didn’t belong to any particular faith. Like many of my generation, I’d been brought up largely without religious devotion, and my schooling had been decidedly secular. If forced to answer the question of religious identity, I usually described myself as a reluctant agnostic. It was, no doubt, a glib response, but it tended to fend off more uncomfortable questions. So why was an agnostic, reluctant or otherwise, undertaking a pilgrimage?

I allowed the lovely waitress to fill my wine glass again as I pondered that question. The word “pilgrim” comes from the Latin per agrum, meaning “through the fields,” and the adverb peregre, meaning “from abroad.” The Romans used the word peregrinus in the same way we use alien or stranger, referring to a foreigner, one from abroad. To be a peregrinus was to leave the community and wander off across the cultivated fields into wild and foreign lands.³ Did this ancient understanding of pilgrimage make any sense nowadays? There is precious little wilderness left in the world, and it’s well-nigh impossible to escape the technology of global communication. We might feel estranged from our next-door neighbors, but the ubiquity of the Internet and social media means that none of us can be complete strangers even if we wanted to be. Besides, in an age such as ours—when belief in soul-saving relics, penitential suffering, and saintly intercession is regarded as superstitious ignorance, if not madness—it doesn’t make a lot of sense to spend a month walking in rain and snow to reach a church containing a collection of bones that probably didn’t belong to St. James anyway. And even if they did, so what? They were just a bunch of bones, long past their return-to-dust date.

As I drank my way through the bottle of wine, I knew I was being deliberately contrarian, waxing cynical as a salve to my waning enthusiasm. But I was bone-weary tired. My feet and legs ached, and truth be told, I was nervous about my own capacities. If each day’s walking for the next month was going to be a repetition of this first day, well, I wasn’t sure I’d be walking very far. To have such defeatist thoughts at the beginning of my journey was depressing. It seemed that not only was I physically unprepared for the rigors of pilgrimage, I wasn’t psychologically prepared, either. But that notion merely made the question of why I was on a pilgrimage more imperative.

I gazed around the dining room at the stalwart knights and thought back to six months earlier when a philosopher friend had mentioned the Camino de Santiago in conversation. I had been moaning and groaning about the need to get away and wanting a respite from the breakneck pace of my journalistic life.

“Have you ever thought of a pilgrimage?” he asked.

I shook my head. “I’m not particularly religious.”

“We’re all religious,” he said. “Anybody who asks themselves what it’s all about, whether there’s some meaning to their lives, is thinking religiously.”

I didn’t argue the point. “Why a pilgrimage?”

My friend then told me about the Camino. While its glory days had been in the Middle Ages, it had never completely disappeared. “Apparently it’s undergoing a revival,” he said. “A lot of people are walking it again. Why not you? Some time alone might do you good.”

“Have you walked it?” I asked.

“Not my kind of thing, but it might suit you.”

I didn’t ask why he thought it might suit me, and we went on to other things. Still, he’d planted the seed of an idea. The seed began to sprout while I was doing research for a series of end-of-the-millennium essays I was to write for the newspaper where I work. I had read an article on Gothic cathedrals that mentioned the popularity of pilgrimages during the Middle Ages and how Santiago de Compostela had been one of the most popular pilgrimage destinations, after Rome and Jerusalem, for medieval Christians.

I then started dipping into books about pilgrimages.⁴ One in particular—Edward Stanton’s Road of Stars to Santiago—captured my imagination. Stanton, a professor of Spanish literature at the University of Kentucky, walked the Camino in 1989. At one point in his book he relates a mealtime conversation with a priest. The priest describes Stanton as “a person who bears the hardest of all crosses, the cross of dis belief.” Such a cross, the priest says, reveals “what our Spanish philosopher Unamuno called the tragic sense of life. It recaptures the instant of the crucifixion when Christ asked God why He’d forsaken Him. The difference is that it was only an instant in Christ’s earthly existence; from what you say it’s almost your whole life.” For whatever reason, the words struck home. I suddenly knew I needed to confront my own disbelief, my own tragic sensibility—that life is without ultimate or transcendent meaning—and perhaps the Camino was the place to do it. As Stanton puts it, quoting the priest, “The Road to Santiago is also a search.”⁵

I was lucky, or at least I thought it was luck at the time. My editor at the Ottawa Citizen, Neil Reynolds, wanted proposals from staff writers for projects that would get us out of our comfortable office cocoons in pursuit of stories with reader appeal. I proposed walking the Camino de Santiago and writing a series of articles about the experience. To my surprise, the project was approved.

One thing I learned right away, as I began researching the Camino, was that I would be following in a long tradition. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries an estimated half-million people a year traveled the route, despite bandits, wolves, greedy innkeepers, dishonest guides and toll collectors, and the foulest of conditions. And that was when Europe’s population was no more than seventy-five million. Just as Muslims today make the journey to Mecca at least once in their lives if they can, so medieval Christians undertook spiritual journeys, if not to Rome or Jerusalem, then to Canterbury, Walsingham, or Chartres, or—most arduous of all—to the shrine of St. James in Santiago. Even criminals made pilgrimages as penance for their crimes, with village authorities telling them not to come back without proof they’d actually done it.⁶

But then medieval Christians tended to regard earthly life itself as a kind of pilgrimage toward God. Possessed of that sensibility, they saw certain places and objects as bearers of spiritual power that would make you a better person and cleanse you of your sinfulness. Out of this belief was born an obsession with relics—the bones of Christian martyrs, a sliver of the True Cross, a piece of the shroud in which Christ’s body had been buried—and with the places where those relics could be seen.⁷

We might mock this sensibility, but are we much different? We, too, betray a kind of spiritual longing in our passion for relics—crumbling pyramids, cities preserved beneath the deserts of the Middle East, propped-up artifacts such as the Parthenon in Athens or the monoliths at Stonehenge—although today we label our longing a search for history, not for God. For medieval pilgrims it was worth great hardship to reach the cathedral in Santiago and see the bones of St. James with their own eyes. Such sights put them in touch with the divine and reassured them of ultimate meaning and everlasting life. “In an age of religious sensitivity, pilgrimage fulfilled a real spiritual need,” writes the religious scholar Jonathan Sumption. “By inflicting severe physical hardship on the pilgrim, it satisfied a desire ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• 1. Prayer
• 2. Pain
• 3. Paths
• 4. Time
• 5. Gratitude
• 6. Gifts
• 7. Visions
• 8. Underglimmer
• 9. Disappearance
• 10. Home
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index