The road seen, then not seen, the hillside
hiding then revealing the way you should take,
the road dropping away from you as if leaving you
to walk on thin air, then catching you, holding you up,
when you thought you would fall,
That is the beginning of the poem Santiago written by the English poet David Whyte from his collection Pilgrim. Through this sequence he reflects on the experience of walking the Camino de Santiago de Compostella – that great pilgrimage route across Spain to the shrine of St James the Apostle whose feast we celebrate today.
It remains one of my ambitions to walk the Camino, to follow the path of countless others along those lanes that lead to Compostella. A practice which, like so much, has been curtailed by these years of pandemic. But a practice which remains extraordinarily and stubbornly popular in our supposedly secular age.
A few years ago, in the parish where I was Vicar, our Lent course reflected on the Martin Sheen film The Way where the lead character mourns the death of his son by walking the Camino. This was such a powerful experience for one in the group that only a few short months later she packed a rucksack and got on a plane to France and spent six weeks walking the 780km from St. Jean Pied de Port in the French foothills of the Pyrenees to Compostela.
I’ve never spoken to her directly about David Whyte’s poems,
but I remember us sitting together on her return clearly physically and
spiritually transformed by the experience. When I remember that conversation my
thoughts are drawn to David Whyte’s reflection on the deep and transformative
spiritual power of pilgrimage:
and the way forward always in the end
the way that you followed, the way that carried you
into your future, that brought you to this place,
As we continue to walk through this pandemic-season many of us can only dream of the journeys and pilgrimages that we would like to take. The holidays cancelled, the meetings lost, the places we have not been as we have sought to keep each other safe.
Today, for instance, I would normally be preparing to leave
for my annual week of retreat. But this precious week of prayer and singing in
Tewkesbury Abbey has been cancelled for a second year in succession.
However, as things begin to open up again our eyes might rightly begin to look to the journeys we could begin to make.
On this feast of St James, and as we reflect on this theme of pilgrimage, it is worth remembering that the greatest account of pilgrimage in the English language – Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales – begins as the disparate group of pilgrims emerge from a time of constraint and limitation.
The historian Tom Holland has suggested that this was not merely the long months of winter, but possibly also a season of plague that regularly would blight fourteenth-century London. Reflecting on his own experience of London locked down by the pandemic, Holland has speculated on what the source of the elation of Chaucer’s pilgrims:
What joy, then, when April arrived with its ‘shoures soote’, to bid farewell to a city that might well have been rotten with plague the whole winter, to feel the ‘sweete breeth’ of the open road in spring, and to head for the shrine of that blissful martyr St Thomas Beckett, ‘that hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.’
There will be, for many of us, an excitement at the
possibilities that the easing of restrictions will bring. Some of us will be
like that excited group of travellers gathered by Chaucer in that Southwark
Tavern. Able to journey out into the world that has seemed so suddenly small
over these long months.
For many of us the journeys we take this summer will be a pilgrimage of sorts. This week a friend stayed in Carlisle overnight on her way to Lindisfarne. Not a formal pilgrimage in the pattern of the Camino, but a journey to find some stillness and peace after the restlessness of this last year.
If we journey like this, we follow in the footsteps of James and the other Apostles. Through the Gospels we hear again and again how Jesus would travel to places of seclusion, to places of rest against the restlessness of his mission to the lost sheep of Israel. These physical journeys to places of rest revitalising him for the greater journey ahead.
As we remember St James we can imagine how in his missionary journeys which to Spain and to a martyrs death, would have been underpinned by these personal journeys of revitalisation and rest.
However, as restrictions are lifted we need to remember that not all of us will view this as a time of liberation. For those who remain clinically vulnerable, for those who have drawn inwards through this time, the opportunity to be loosed from the burdens of a Covid-winter will not be met with the enthusiasm and joy of the modern-day equivalents of Chaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrims.
But this does not mean that journeys of self-discovery are not open to those who are unable to make the physical journeys that so many pilgrimages represent.
The physical journeys we make by way of pilgrimage are merely an outward and visible sign of the deeper and more transforming inward and spiritual journeys God calls us all to make.
St Augustine – on whose tradition this Priory and Cathedral was founded – begins his Confessions, his very person account of his own lifelong journey of faith, with a deep recognition of the inward journeys we are all called to make. Beginning in prayer he says:
O Lord, you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.
Every part of our life, Augustine reminds us, not just the physical
journeys we choose to make, are a restless journey towards the rest we desire
to find in God.
In this way far from limiting our pilgrimages and journeys of faith, this last year has, for many been a revealing time of inner journey. Locked down, we have all had to find again those sources of strength and purpose from within ourselves that we can all too easily miss in the restlessness of our supposedly normal lives.
My experience through lockdown – which I know was replicated by many others in church settings – was that as our world shrank many found a renewed focus on prayer and the spiritual journeys God invites us all to take. Either through online communities of prayer or individually we found more and more people taking inwards journeys, seeking rest for their restless hearts amidst the turbulence and uncertainty of this last year.
As we continue to move through this period of change we will all be called and compelled to journeys we have not been able to make over this past year. As we embark on those outward journeys we need to not lose sight of the inner journeys that God invites us to take.
So whatever the paths that we take out of this pandemic may be, they do not simply lead us back inexorably to whatever we think normal might be.
Rather that the paths we take will instead be pilgrimages, leading us to places of rest for our restless hearts. Paths which, in the words of David Whyte’s poem Camino
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