Walking a Pilgrim Route

This is Part Two of excerpts from Jennifer Lord’s essay in the Spring 2017 issue of Liturgy, the quarterly journal of The Liturgical Conference, which deals with pilgrimage in a number of ways.

Here, Lord describes the experience of the walking itself––an undertaking that she and her husband completed over an 8-week period in 2014 on the Camino de Santiago de Compostela. This was a 750-mile pilgrim route.

In 2013 I led a seminary travel seminar called The Way of St. James. Ten days into our pilgrimage. . . some group members discovered a booklet for sale showing each stage’s elevation gain and loss. One of our members chastised our guide: “You kept saying the day would be flat walking! And it wasn’t flat!” According to our guide’s definition, if we started and ended at relatively the same elevation then it was a flat day. We laughed: this, after a week and half. . .  (and still more days to go) of climbing in and out of river valleys! . . . 

At some point there are adjustments––to our packs, to our water supply, to bandages. . . there is café con leche and breakfast. . . there is lunch whether from a bodega, a bar, or from our packs. We stop at the chapels and churches that mark the route. At some point, there is an afternoon break or the end of the walking. . . The anxiety for a bed at the day’s end manifests as competition on the route: some pilgrims leave by 4:00 a.m. so they can walk in the cool air and also arrive ahead of the masses. . . We show our pilgrim’s passport for entrance, leave our hiking poles and boots in the appointed area, and claim a bed. We unroll bedding and hope for a shower with hot water (don’t run the water while soaping!). We rinse or wash clothes in the designated area. Perhaps we soak our feet; people trade foot rubs. Nap. Shop for supplies for the next day. . . and perhaps for a communal dinner. Have a beer. Nap or cook or attend Pilgrims’ Mass. Dinner. Camaraderie. Sleep. All of it: again. And: again. . . 

We always studied our maps and read about the coming day’s terrain. We checked the weather and our food bags, and topped up water bottles. We bandaged our feet, took anti-inflammation medicine, chose our clothing layers. But then we stepped into the day, into the unknown. We did all the familiar things and then walked into discovery. Over time, we discovered that we had become more at home in the walking than at any of the stops along the way. 

In the walking, we discovered that our sensibilities of interiors and exteriors had been inverted. Philosopher Frédéric Gros observes: “When you go ‘outside’ it is always to pass from one ‘inside’ to another: from house to office, from your place to the nearest shops. You go out to do something, somewhere else. . .” 

Walking the Camino inverts those sensibilities. . . It comes from walking the permutations of outdoors. . . Cold rain and sloppy fields, we walk it. 

The day after day after day walking is what inverts because we find out that we want to walk no matter what. . . The walking becomes the way we live in the whole world.  

Jennifer L. Lord, is the Dorothy B. Vickery Professor of Homiletics and Liturgical Studies at Austin Theological Seminary in Austin, Texas, and president of the North American Academy of Liturgy.

Jennifer L. Lord, “Walking the Camino,” Liturgy 32, no. 3 (2017): 3-13.

Pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago de Compostela

The Spring 2017 issue of Liturgy, the quarterly journal of The Liturgical Conference, deals with pilgrimage. Jennifer Lord’s essay describes the pilgrim’s experience on the Camino de Santiago de Compostela which she and her husband walked in 2014 for eight weeks, starting 250 miles north of the famous last 500 miles of the Camino Frances to Santiago, Spain. Prior to that they had walked five other Camino “installments” in both France and Switzerland.

Lord explains the history of the pilgrim’s routes, the modes of transport possible, and the physical and spiritual experience of walking.

Legend states that the Apostle James, the elder, one of the sons of Zebedee, after evangelizing in Jerusalem and Iberia, was martyred in Jerusalem. His body was brought to Iberia but the place of interment forgotten. . . [until] a hermit (Pelayo) discovered the tomb through a vision in the ninth century. . . Locals began to make pilgrimage. Concurrently, St. James was invoked as patron and protector in that land, increasing the appeal of the pilgrimage. . .
 While travel to the Holy Land became difficult in the eleventh century, this pilgrimage flourished. . . The sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation took its toll on the practice of pilgrimage, as did the loss of the relics. . . for 300 years, from 1589 to 1879! . . But in the 1950s, renewal efforts in France. . . rehabilitated interest in the pilgrimage and associations for the preservation and publicity of the Camino developed in France and Spain. 

The story of this Camino’s contemporary popularity truly begins with the Roman Catholic priest who repopularized the route in 1967. [He] wrote his doctoral thesis on the importance of the pilgrimage and subsequently published guidebooks for pilgrims walking the Camino Francès. Notably, he personally way-marked the route from the Pyrenees to Santiago, using yellow paint he begged from the Galician highway authority to mark rocks, houses, and trees with the yellow arrows familiar to all pilgrims on this route. It was a revival within the Roman Catholic Church that spoke to the twentieth-century faithful and to those outside of the church.

Today the Camino de Santiago is a worldwide hit. The Cathedral’s Pilgrim’s Reception Office tracks the hundreds of thousands of pilgrims arriving each year and the broad swath of nationalities represented. The pilgrimage path itself has been deemed a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Martin Sheen’s movie The Way, books by Paulo Coelho and Shirley Maclaine, and arrivals by Oprah-status celebrities have popularized, especially, the best-known section of this ancient pilgrimage. It has worldwide importance for Christians and persons of other faiths. And for persons who declare no faith. 

You can do the Camino on a bicycle. Or by car, or by combination of bike and car, by car and walking, with a rolling walker, in a wheelchair or hand bike, or by horse, or llama, or donkey. . . 

In medieval times, if one had the choice, one walked to Santiago and back home again. The walk was supposed to be costly. The physicality of the walk was central to the meaning of the pilgrimage. One only enlisted cart and animal because of need. Otherwise, medieval pilgrims walked amid dangers of brigands, accidents, sickness, bears, and wolves. . . .
How one does the Camino. . . is a live question today. . . .

While I am not interested in arguing that walking is the best or only or authentic way to do this pilgrimage. . . I will suggest several properties of walking that contribute to its distinctive quality for pilgrimage.
 

Jennifer L. Lord, is the Dorothy B. Vickery Professor of Homiletics and Liturgical Studies at Austin Theological Seminary in Austin, Texas, and president of the North American Academy of Liturgy.

Jennifer L. Lord, “Walking the Camino,” Liturgy 32, no. 3 (2017): 3-13.