Pilgrimage (June 2023)
In the foothills of the French Pyrenees, the Camino de Santiago starts its 480-mile stretch to the ocean in a small medieval village called St. Jean Pied de Port. Each year, Christian pilgrims flock to this French town 10 miles from the border with Spain to begin their trek westward across the Spanish countryside to the cathedral where the bones of the apostle St. James were purportedly laid to rest.
The story of how the remains of an apostle, a fisherman from Galilee who was martyred in Jerusalem 10 years after the death of Jesus, could come to be laid to rest in the northwestern tip of Spain has many fantastical elements. Local tradition holds that James spent much of the decade prior to his death preaching the words of Jesus throughout the Iberian Peninsula. When he returned to Jerusalem, the local authorities beheaded him for this mission, making him the first Christian martyr. Angels then put his body on a boat, sailed it back to Spain, and buried him in what is now Galicia. St. James, or Santiago in Spanish, became the country’s patron saint; many miracles there are attributed to him.
Beginning in the 9th century, Christian pilgrims began walking an ancient Roman trading route that originates in France and ends at the Spanish cathedral built to enshrine his relics. The Camino is trailblazed at regular intervals with a scallop shell, the symbol of St. James and of the pilgrimage itself. The path winds through a mountain pass in the Pyrenees, past vineyards and quaint villages, near tapas bars in the shadows of medieval citadels. At night, far from the light pollution of western Europe’s cities, the Milky Way appears to illuminate the route to Santiago.
Starting in the Basque region of France and covering 12 to 15 miles per day, it will take an able-bodied pilgrim 35 days to walk the Way of St. James. Last year, almost half a million people completed the pilgrimage; many more than that attempted a portion of it.
When I visited St. Jean Pied de Port this spring, it was a pilgrimage of a different sort for me. I didn’t go to walk the Camino but to see the village where my great-grandmother was born in 1888. As a teenager, she worked as a seamstress and used her talent for language to learn Spanish, Italian, and English speaking to the pilgrims who passed through her hometown. These temporary visitors gave her a taste for a larger life. She eventually made her way to Paris, where she met a wealthy socialite from the Upper East Side and emigrated to New York to work as her social secretary.
Traveling with my mother and uncle, during our time in St. Jean, we wanted to learn more information about our family. We visited the town hall to parse birth records, written in a swirly script that sketched the wisp of our history. We spent an afternoon combing the village cemetery to search out the tombs of distant relations, to try to piece together the slightest bit more.
Much of this was fruitless. We left with more questions than answers. But I found myself content to walk the same cobblestoned roads where generations of my ancestors must have tread, and where so many people over the centuries have started their sacred journeys west.
I spoke to some of the pilgrims who had come to begin their Camino, and in my broken high-school French, with the people who worked in the guest houses and restaurants to serve them. Most were Christian, and felt a holy calling to this arduous journey as an extended period of meditation and reflection.
At the beginning of the Camino, I saw frame packs that were pristine, clean white scallop shells tied onto belt loops and walking sticks, and maps still crisply folded. I overheard animated chatter in the streetside bars and cafes in a multitude of languages and accents. Spirits were uniformly high. Whenever I saw new and unbroken-in hiking boots, I winced a little, but I suppose these pilgrims all came so that the Camino would teach them many important lessons.
Before I visited, the skeptic in me asked why, given the cosmic unlikelihood that the bones of St. James were in fact borne to Spain by angels: Why do people do this? Why have millions of pilgrims walked nearly 500 miles in the heat and mud and snow to seek a place of dubious significance?
But now, I believe the skeptic in me missed the point entirely.
What these pilgrims discover immediately and develop along the way is a veritable community. They marvel together at this opportunity to see western Europe on foot. They share hostel recommendations and sunscreen and iPhone chargers. They teach each other a few words in a new language. They tell tales of home, of previous pilgrimages, of life stories and the heartfelt reasons for their faith. They all contribute and receive something special within this community of travelers.
Along the way, they use the weight of their packs to lighten the load in their minds and shed what they do not require. And when they summit the final mountain, the Monte do Gozo (or Hill of Joy), and see the three spires of the cathedral for the first time, they feel the bittersweet satisfaction of a meaningful journey that is coming to its end.
I now know exactly why they do it, because these are in terms I understand. It is in moments of community and service that I feel that same wonder. We do it to connect with other people walking the same path, and to continue this tradition so that it still exists in the future. A pilgrimage is hoping to witness something extraordinary: a moment taken out of our busy lives to pause and remind ourselves that we are each a critical connection in the network of the universe. It’s finding ourselves — out of context, but still firmly grounded to the earth. We are all pilgrims, every one of us, when our hearts are open.
Yeah, God.
During our time apart this summer, I expect we are all going to venture forth, radiating out from our spiritual center like the grooves in a scallop shell. Maybe we’re looking forward to once-in-a-lifetime travel; perhaps it is quieter, inner growth.
But there is one more thing I hope we all learn from this season. The joy is not just in the journey, and not just in the destination. I believe the deepest joy is in coming home. Coming back together, and celebrating our reunion at the end.
However this summer changes us, I hope we all remember our fellow travelers here, and rest our eyes occasionally on our own steeple on the hill over the green, and know we always have a spiritual home to return to.
