In May 2009 the Community made a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in the company of a group of friends. We walked a little over 100km in 6 days along the Portuguese route starting at Tui on the Spain/Portugal border. We arrived in Santiago in time for the Ascension Day celebrations across the city.
Here are our photos (suggest you click on a folder then use the slideshow viewing option top right)
Reflections and feedback below.
Plus a few clips with a poor soundtrack ...
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Feedback from Hillary
I almost stayed at home at the last minute, having acquired a very sore heel in training less than a fortnight before we were due to set off. Thankfully, Sarah read a Roger McGough poem in chapel – can’t remember any of the words but it was called What If and I decided I have missed enough opportunities in my life by being timid so I was going, even if I had to come home or couldn’t do all the walk! And thanks to the judicious use of some wonderful stuff called chiropody felt I was able to relish my second Camino experience. Enjoyed the countryside, wild flowers, varied scenery, vignettes of other people’s lives as we walked, good company, food and wine, comfy beds. Loved the sense of walking through an area and seeing subtle changes in the landscape, and the signs both great and small that many others had followed the route over hundreds of years – pilgrim churches and tiny wayside shrines, the shell symbol in unexpected places. Slightly drunk on NOT having to write ANY LISTS or be responsible for anything other than myself, the simplicity of just doing the next thing, walking on to the next place en route. Refreshed by the pleasure of being “absent” from normal daily life, yet feeling a strong sense of the parallels – steady periods of walking with gentle gradients, climbs and descents, sunshine and rain, sore feet and tired muscles, the need to simply keep on keeping on and get through the next stage, tarmac and unlovely suburbs followed by a section when it all felt easy. Thrilled to actually see the Botafumeiro being theatrically swung at the end of midday mass on Ascension Day. Thrilled is not the word to describe the ride on the big ferris wheel – once in 50 years is quite enough, I shan’t rush to repeat the experience! Appreciated the company of fellow pilgrims especially just quietly walking together without the need to talk. Great opportunities for people watching. Reminded by the peasant way of life we saw as we walked, and the obvious signs of poverty and dereliction in Porto, of what a comfortable, fortunate life I have. Missed my dog, the sheep, Sheldon and a proper cup of tea in the morning. Now I’m home I miss the Camino, the journeying – but it’s here in daily and interior life if I just look.
Feedback from Philip ‘Slow was beautiful’ – even in the rain! The speed of my legs, compared with the speed of the cars and lorries, when we crossed motorways or dual carriageways, were worlds apart. And the pace gave such a wonderful space for reflection, conversation, prayer. The very beauty of the Camiño, its flowers, its trees, yes even the built-up bits, was in itself refreshing. And the feeling of having planted my feet on the path that so many pilgrims had travelled before, made me have a sense that, as well as being in the company of Sheldon friends, I was also somehow in the company of those who’d preceded me.
I’m a Myers-Briggs INTJ (is it obvious?). So the ‘T’ bit of me, along with my anglican English reserve, has a mild suspicion of pilgrimage! If, through the resurrection, God-in-Jesus is universally available through the Holy Spirit, what is the point of making an expensive or time consuming journey to seek him in a ‘holy place’. Even Gregory of Nyssa, back in the fourth century, said that ‘ye who fear the Lord, praise Him in the places where ye now are: change of place does not effect any drawing nearer unto God’!
But another, better?, part of me (my mum was a good Catholic, born in Vienna) has always wanted to ‘do’ a pilgrimage. Because the possibilities of encountering the divine seem so much greater. Am I fanciful to think that I made an active communion with the world around me? It certainly felt like it at times (and I don’t just mean the occasional foray into the bushes along the way for personal comfort!). It seemed to me that the walking itself, sometimes in silence or alone, sometimes in conversation or in company, was truly a sacrament, an ‘outward and visible sign of an inner and spiritual grace’. For surely Jesus is not ‘the answer’ or ‘the destination’, but rather he is ‘the way, the truth and the life’. The walking each day felt like a massive ‘coming up for air’ for me, and the pilgrimage is something I will not easily forget.
So – I want to say a massive thank you for being my companions on the journey to Santiago – and especially to you at Sheldon, Carl, Sarah, Hilary, for making it all possible. It was the best possible start to a sabbatical that I could possibly have imagined.
And being in Santiago for Ascension was terrific (even being sung at by The Dean)! Despite my loquaciousness about ‘the journey’, I will always remember the quiet half-hour I had in the crypt beneath the high altar, very early in morning and alone before the ‘grockles’ had arrived, in front of the reliquary of St James. I prayed the morning office there, and had a wonderful ‘God-moment’ with St James (or whatever poor soul is buried there, who, if it is not him, must be very fed up!). And the deliberately back-to-front carving above the Pilgrim entrance to the Cathedral, ‘Omega and Alpha’, reminding me that, even though my pilgrimage had ended, my pilgrimage of life begins afresh each day with the God who not only lives in Compstela but lives with me wherever and with whoever I spend the rest of the year. For surely if I ever think I have ‘arrived’, then my soul has died. Once again a big thank you.
I’ve stumbled across this little line again, I think possibly written by a celtic monk from a vanished world of the past, which seems to sum up my mood at the moment. (For ‘Rome’ of course, read ‘Santiago’):
“To go to Rome is of much trouble, little profit;
For the king whom you seek,
Unless you bring him with you,
You will not find.”
With much love and gratitude, Philip
Feedback from Sue
Thank you all for thinking up the plan; for organising it' for inviting me to join it and finally making it possible for me to achieve a long held ambition - walk some of the Camino to Santiago! It is AMAZING what a bit of a push in the first instance, then determination or "bloody mindedness" will get one in the end!! I am so thrilled to have done it and I can't thank you all enough! The icing on the cake as it were, will be over £300 sponsorship [for the Long Barn appeal] which will come to you when I've collected it all together. I think I have recovered now but it has taken a little while to get back into what we call the 'real' world. I miss the peace, the outdoors and looking forward each day to a new bit of countryside .... All blessings and love and thanks to you all. PS The photos are brilliant!
Reflections from Carl
Although I find Port rather sweet these days its sister cheese is one of my delights. So in the early days of planning the thought of starting from Porto on the Portuguese Camino was something which warmed my heart. It was after flights had been booked and I’d studied the pilgrimage route more carefully that on one of my morose evenings I said to Sarah “Oh God, you realise this means we’re going to follow St James’s cortege* - so it’s going to be death all the way.”
The previous Camino in 2007 occurred literally two or three weeks after having buried my Mum, and also having discovered that one of my mentors was about to die. Lo and behold, a few hours before we few from Bristol, Hillary and attended the funeral of a friend of 30+ years in his early 60s, whose family I’d had quite a lot to do with over the years. So death has managed to accompany me in one form or another on two caminos.
Leading the Sheldon Community means that I often have a public face, and all of us here at Sheldon are not just partly introvert but sincerely introvert, and so do not energise ourselves by groups. None the less, we know that there are times when we are called to do things which means we, and a lot of friends, fulfil things in our lives that we couldn’t do on our own. Despite the gloom and doom, a major highlight for me was the celebration at the Basilica at Pontevedra. The somehow holding together of daily life, faith, God, love and celebration is something I find uniquely in European countries. Those who have known Sheldon over the years will know this is something close to my heart which I try on occasions to pull together at Sheldon. To feed me with the stuff of heaven is to stand me outside that Basilica and see families from 0 to 90 celebrate their faith with shouts and cheers and smiles. The second occasion was the arrival at Santiago, a city I have fallen deeply in love with for its apparent completeness. As someone who subscribes weekly to a newspaper called “World’s Fair”, the big wheel and its surrounds were home, as equally the Mass of the cathedral or the illegal fireworks going off around us. Another world, yes, but to me a glimpse of my earthbound heaven.
I was immensely grateful that I was not asked lots of personal questions along the route, and I shall be eternally grateful to the hotel Mercure in Porto for its hospitality, especially when faced with Sarah’s “indisposition”. Many of you were aware there were quite often discrepancies in what we had been promised and what was actually delivered, and it was only as things progressed that we realised the difficult situation that the walk leader found herself in. Another Camino completed. No, another serious glimpse of heaven, at least for me. *The Camino Portugues follows the route along which the disciples of St James’s are supposed to have brought his body to Santiago for burial.
