A Happy Ending in Santiago: just like Hollywood.
Santiago de Compostella
Not the Camino I had imagined.
Earlier this year I walked the Ruta de La Lana hoping for solitude and silence. I wanted a period for uninterrupted prayer which I often find in quiet places alone. The Camino through the least populated provinces of central Spain did indeed offer everything I had expected in terms of solitude and quiet with many bonuses such as the canyons and the castles, mountains and forests and rivers, eagles, hares, deer and wild boar; paths lined with rosemary in flower, starlit skies and the great horizons opening out in succession at every mountain pass as I left behind me wave after wave of sierra.
Wave after wave of sierra. Early morning near Cuenca.
What I hadn’t imagined was that with all the beauty and solitude in the world, away from the noises of the city and with a camino well-marked with yellow arrows, I would find prayer difficult and my inner silence weighing heavily upon me. I did have an inner silence and I had little on my mind, especially when I stopped planning which was my main distraction in prayer. Yet, the joy of prayer in solitude which I had experienced on the Camino de Levante two years before was absent and all that remained was a heavy dullness. I didn’t lack peace. Peace accompanied me in every step even though my physical condition was often painful. What I missed were the stirrings of joy within me and the sense of oneness with God and his creation: a state of wonder at the goodness of life and of humanity and an alertness to being alive.
I walked without much spring in my step.
Uplifted by music.
Fairly early on in my Camino I began to pray, “Lord teach me how to give you glory and how to live in joy”. The first part was answered quickly but I really was not full of joy as I had imagined I would be in such perfect conditions for silence. I do not walk listening to music but have five songs or hymns on my voice recorder. I have an inertia when it comes to listening to music even when I feel I need it to help change my mood. It took me two weeks of inner dullness to switch the recorder to “play”. I did so on the way to Alatoz when I was physically weary but inspired by the new life bursting out on the fruit trees in the little valley I was walking through which opened out onto the huge plain of the Rio Jucár.
approaching Alatoz, looking over the Jucár plain.
I selected the “Salve Regina” and played it over and over.
The plea to Mary from this “vale of tears” to pay attention to our prayers was very appropriate and after a kilometre or so I was walking more lightly. The reprieve was temporary but got me to Alatoz where Miguel from the Amigos del Camino was waiting to welcome me.
Another tune which I played is “Llama de Amor Viva” the poem of John of the Cross. The words in Spanish harmonised with my melancholy although I could only pick out phrases here and there and from time to time, enough to strike deeply. English translations don’t help me at all.
The Lord is the Spirit: the Spirit gives Life. Dominus Deus es. This prayer, in Latin, sung by the Taizé community also suited my mood with its repetitive chant. My voice recorder doesn’t have a loop to keep repeating the music. Had it had one I might, some days, have put this on in the morning and stayed with it all day.
Then the day I reached O Cebreiro the tune which came into my head as I was propelled up the mountain was the traditional Lourdes hymn, “Ave, Ave, Ave Maria.” I sang this myself since I didn’t have it recorded.
Cowslips near Silos: muted percussion, silently praising the springtime.
Santo Domingo de Silos.
For the May holiday, Pilar came to meet me in Santo Domingo de Silos. I had spent a night in the very comfortable albergue offered by the monks in this renown Benedictine monastery. When she arrived we stayed in the Hotel Arco San Juan. When I had reached Santo Domingo by camino in mud and rain, after a precarious descent down a rocky slope, the owner of this hotel had invited me in to warm up and take off my jacket and trousers which left a dirty puddle on his floor. The surprise of this good hotel was its restaurant. The menu looks very simple but the price is high, about 20 euros. When we eventually did eat there it was outstanding and I have since seen comments from locals saying it is the best place in the Province of Burgos to eat roast lamb.
Benedictine monk, Silos.
These were a few memorable days when Pilar and I walked together, returning to the hotel each night and attending vespers in the Abbey. The singing of the monks of Silos is famous but did little to lift my inner deflation: nor did the roast lamb. I appreciated both the chanting and the dinner but I still repeated my prayer, “Show me how to live in joy” with a longing for just a spark of what I had known on my first Caminos.
Pilar in Mecerreyes, Burgos
The last day of the May holiday we listened as usual to Rezandovoy (Pray-as-you-go in the uk). This daily prayer webcast included that morning the simple hymn, “Here am I, Lord, I’ve come to do your will”. More then the monks’ Gregorian chant this little tune stayed with me to Santiago and I sang it often on the quiet stretches of the Camino which still lay ahead. At Silos I was well aware that my days of total solitude were over, for the day Pilar left I walked on to Burgos and met the flow of the Camino Francés. After that there were no nights alone and only in the afternoons was the camino deserted. I wondered why I had felt called to walk this route when, [apart from a few miracles, like my finding the Gospel of John,; my gratitude to the friends of the camino for all their help and the pleasure of walking such a magnificent route through the heart of Spain], nothing had happened, I felt, within my spirit. So this little refrain “Here am I, Lord, I’ve come to do your will” sung to this tune, was my offering of myself as well as an acceptance that my lack of any spectacularly wonderful spiritual experience was, in itself, the experience I was meant to have.
Santiago de Compostella
When I arrived in Santiago a miracle or two later I had the pleasure of meeting Johnnie-Walker in the pilgrims’ office and of a Mass with the botafumiero. The Camino Francés had reminded me of many of the needs of others. I will not easily forget the Australian couple I met in a Hostal just before Léon. One of the women had lost her husband and had come with her friend hoping the pilgrimage would help her grieving, but her sadness had stayed and grown in every cell in her body and all she could say was, “This has been a waste of time.” Others were struggling with work-related problems and others with unemployment. I had had magic moments like when a woman, more elderly than me sat beside me in a coffee stop and we almost instantly discovered that we were both Associates of the Iona Community, she living in Switzerland and I in Spain and carrying the same Iona Community prayers.
From the old Seminary albergue
Yet still my prayer was, “Well I’ve done what I had believed I was to do. What was all that about?” “Here I am, Lord, I’ve come to do your will.”
I went back to the Cathedral before leaving and visited the chapel of adoration to say a prayer for all those who had asked me to pray for them on this and other Caminos. I rarely remember names but recall occasions quite well. When I was sitting there with people coming and going I was filled with a lightness which rushed physically through my veins reaching every part of my body and I knew then, with complete certainty, that this camino had done all it was meant to do. There was no point in trying to make sense or find great meaning in this Camino. For this moment everything was complete. It was a divine reassurance which has freed me from looking any further a “purpose” or for anything else in this Camino.
Iona Abbey from Dun I
This might have been the happy ending in itself but as if to say, “Well, if you’re wanting to write a Hollywood script for your spiritual life, try this.” A week later I flew to Scotland to spend six days on Iona. There I had days, “Living in joy”, praying, laughing and sharing with others making up the Community for that week. Iona is usually a peaceful retreat for me but this year it was a lesson in how to live in Joy, exactly what I had been praying for. Thank you, God, for answering my prayer and have mercy on all those who want Hollywood endings and sentences with full stops