LITMIR.BIZ

PILGRIMS AT LAST

      Despite the wine and the jet lag, or perhaps because of them, I slept fitfully in Le Puy, waking every hour to stare into the darkness and listen to people breathing in the cubicles around me. We were so close to beginning this thing. When my digital watch finally said it was close to 6:00, I turned off the alarm and quietly packed my bag in the dark. I put on my “walking clothes”—the hiking pants, the merino wool shirt, the vest, the scarf—that I’d so carefully chosen. I could hear the sound of a dozen other people doing the same thing, but no one spoke.

      Downstairs, the tables were set for breakfast. I saw a pitcher of orange juice and a basket of crusty bread. But this early in the morning, the April sky still dark outside, all I could think about was coffee. My wishes were granted when the female volunteer came over with a coffee pot.

      “Café?”

      “Yes, merci.” My Frenglish made her smile as she waited to pour.

      I looked at my place setting more carefully. There was a cereal bowl and a juice glass. No mug. Hesitantly, I reached for the glass. Maybe the French didn’t drink their coffee venti-sized. Demitasse was a French word, wasn’t it?

      Her smile turned into a laugh. “Non, non.” She reached past me and poured me a full bowl of coffee. I looked around and realized that yes, everyone had a bowl of coffee.

      Well, okay. When in France. I chalked up another lesson about the change in culture. The centerpiece of our French country breakfasts was a bowl of coffee, alongside which we ate sliced bread, not toasted, with butter and/or fruit confiture (jam).

      At 6:45, Isidore told the assembled group (while pantomiming for us) that he would take us to the cathedral, but first we should please clean our dishes. A dozen people moved to gather bowls and cups, and a line formed at the sink. Eric, whose desire to be helpful is almost pathological sometimes, settled in at the tap and washed everyone’s dishes while they donned their jackets and packs.

      They were, of course, charmed by him. Well, everyone but me. I was impatient with my husband’s good deeds. What if they left without us? What if we were late?

      But of course, we weren’t late. As the first light of dawn started to break, Isidore led our group up an alley I hadn’t noticed and into a side entrance of the cathedral. He took us through the main sanctuary, pausing to make the sign of the cross before the Black Virgin, and to a smaller side chapel, where a line of backpacks rested against the wall.

      There were twenty or so people in the pews already, and our group filled in around them. Remi wasn’t there, but I recognized the maybe-brothers from dinner. They stood, arms crossed, stiff and frowning. I mentally christened them the Brothers Grim.

      The mass, of course, was in French. The words washed over me as I looked around the stone chapel. How many people had gone through these same motions in this same place before they set out in the name of Saint Jacques?

      To understand the modern experience of what we now call the Camino de Santiago, it helps to look back to where it came from and why it matters. This journey is much more than a hike through the countryside.

      Throughout the first millennium, as the Roman Empire spread across Europe, Christianity spread with it. As the Romans conquered and assimilated disparate peoples, the church gave them a common language and purpose—which is the nice way of saying it gave them something to focus on other than killing each other.

      One of the most important unifying practices of the early church, and of most religions of the time, was pilgrimage. The physical commitment of traveling to a holy site, in a world where few people ever left the village where they were born, marked a person’s piety. Pilgrimage was an act of penance, devotion, and also adventure.

      There were plenty of regional pilgrimage destinations all over Europe, each claiming some holy object that could convey blessing or absolution. The cathedral of Le Puy, I’ve been told, once boasted the foreskin of Christ himself—but then again, so did a dozen other towns across Europe. If a pilgrim really wanted to show devotion, there were two Big Pilgrimage destinations: Jerusalem, where Jesus was killed, and Rome, where many of the early apostles were martyred, all by the same Roman Empire that now sponsored them. (As with most things in medieval history, it’s best not to think too carefully about the details.)

      As centuries passed and Christianity spread into Germany and the Low Countries, however, the distance of those big journeys became almost impossible for new converts. Enter a Spanish hermit named Pelayo, who in AD 813 reported experiencing a series of strange visions in a field in northern Spain. As the story goes, he followed a mysterious star and discovered, in an unmarked field, the body of Saint James the Greater, one of Jesus’s original disciples.

      How a Jewish guy from Galilee happened to wind up buried in one of the farthest corners of the known world takes some creative explaining, but first-century storytellers were well equipped for that. It seems that after Jesus’s crucifixion, his followers scattered over the known world to convert others. James traveled to what is now Spain but had little success with the people there. He unwisely returned to Jerusalem, where he was arrested by Herod Agrippa, beheaded, and thrown over the city walls for the dogs to eat.

      Not willing to let the brother of the apostle John become puppy chow, his disciples snuck out under the cover of night and retrieved the body (and, presumably, the head), put it on a rudderless, unmanned stone boat guarded by an angel, and launched it into the Mediterranean. The boat miraculously traveled back to the Iberian Peninsula, where, in some versions of the story, it sank just offshore, and James’s body washed onto the beach, covered in scallop shells.