Insights from the end of a pilgrimage
As I walked the final kilometres towards the twin spires of Santiago, I noticed once again a familiar pattern: to access the heart of a place I many times passed through an outer ugliness.
I realised then that this is how it is with all of life. That to get to the inner temple we have to walk a wilderness, a suburb of the soul, and brave whatever conditions are thrown at us.
And I had also seen that when I stayed on The Way, everything I needed was provided and would come toward me with no effort on my part, except the passing of one foot in front of the other.
It was the simplest and most obvious insight, and as the old city breached into view, I was overcome with sobs from a raw nakedness within and knew that I had, over 500 miles, been stripped bare.
Tears rolled down my face and I can only compare it to witnessing the birth of my children many years before. Grief, pain, joy and love all came together, as if they had secretly been ganging up and awaiting another opportunity to reach me.
I was just in time for the daily pilgrim mass just after noon, but what I was really wanting to see was the swinging by half a dozen robed attendants of the Botafumeiro, the giant incense burner, originally used to fumigate the sweaty pilgrims of yesteryear, millions of whom walked this trail.
The service was long, incomprehensible in Spanish, and I felt all my resistance to organised religion surface, but as it ended, I could see the giant burner begin its slow ascent.
Higher and higher it went, a religious rollercoaster, incongruous in a place of silence and prayer, yet somehow perfect, a divine energy in a world of matter. The building was heaving with a unique confluence of energies: tourists, priests, locals and the steady flow of pilgrims that turned this gem of a city into one long carnival.
There is no place in the world quite like Santiago de Compostela and I would urge anyone to take a flight for a long weekend in the north of Spain.
The next day I sat with a friend in one of the many cafes and realised that I had been hurled back into life, one so different to that which I had been living. I watched the world rush by — charity workers veiled in yellow vests and youthful charm, men with muzzled dogs, beggars, women in T-shirts that read, bizarrely, ‘Camino Bunny’, waiters delivering croquettes and coffee. Each person marching, strolling, walking, a jungle of humanity I knew was infinitely loved.
I felt once again an incredible love for life and an inseparable sadness that this would all end, and I knew that as it says on a memorial for the victims of the twin towers in New York:
‘Grief is the price we pay for love.’