Feeling At Home

I spent five whole days in one place, in Montserrat, up in the hills outside Barcelona. And lo and behold, I started to feel really comfortable there, the way I sometimes do when I go to a retreat center in the "normal" world and spend a few days. I started to know where to find the better cup of coffee, understand which doors to push and which to pull, know which trails led where, and stuff like that. More, some of the staff started to know who I was and exchange pleasantries.

But there was one thing: being in Catalunya is like being in Quebec, only more so. As with French speakers in Quebec, there are people who mainly speak the local language, Catalá, and have a kind of basic grasp of the "other" language, in this case, not English, but Castellano (that´s Spanish, to those of us who are not into emphasizing that Spain has more than one language). So I was walking around, feeling happy and comfortable among all these people whose speech was simply a kind of unknown music flowing by.

It was strange-- the feeling of comfort made me want to speak English with them, and sometimes that was the better choice, because English is also taught in school and has less political baggage than Castellano. The church services were conducted in this alien tongue, so I just let it all wash over me (a good thing, in this case, not to understand what they were saying). Beautiful Gregorian and other chants by the monks who live there. If I had understood better, I might have felt less at home.

Anyway, on St. John´s eve, I went up for the bonfire and the fireworks and learned the steps for the sardana, so I´ve begun my initiation as a Catalan. Now, the language, that´s another story! And the wanting to speak English? Maybe that mainly means it´s time to go home for real.

On The Rocks

I took a walk up the hill from the monastery in Montserrat, a gentle and upward path to the little chapel above the St. Michael´s lookout over the cliffs. People on pilgrimage to this place to see the special image of the Virgin and Child used to climb up from the little village far below, and then, I read, they would gather themselves into a procession to walk the rest of the way. I imagine singing and carrying of special objects aloft, and a generally festive atmosphere, since the direction of travel is a gentle downward slope rather than the steep climb up from Colbató. And I remember walking with the pilgrims on the Way of Saint James, the Camino de Santiago, and imagined how they would be feeling when they finally arrived in Santiago de Compostela. Festive, and tired! (There´s a giant censer in the Santiago church designed to overcome the smell of thousands of pilgrims all at once. Bathing facilities have improved since the middle ages...)


Today the pilgrimage to Montserrat is made pretty much exlusively by bus, train, and car. I suppose you could climb the trail from Colbató, which would be like reaching the summit of Mount Washington on foot, only worse!The nicely dressed pilgrims would look at you as if you were a bit of a freak in your climbing clothes, then get back on their buses and wonder who whose inappropriate ruffians were? I wonder about the spiritual benefits of pilgrimages by bus, but then, I have a kind of Henry David Thoreau approach to matters of the spirit. The folks on the Santiago chat were always chiding each other about looking down the nose at non-walkers. It´s easy to do. They stroll into the great spiritual monument, then out again, go buy an ice cream, have a look around. Has any inner anything changed for them?

As they say on the Camino, "Everyone has their own pilgrimage". So I´ll hold my judgment and concentrate on my own Way. Today, some people celebrating the 75th anniversary of their town´s "giants" brought them on pilgrimage to Montserrat, danced them around in the plaza outside the basilica, with festive drum and bagpipe-chanter accompaniment. Who says pilgrimage has to be solemn and serious?

Go, Stop, Then?

After all these weeks of traveling from one place to another, I´m in one place now for five whole days, with nothing in particular to do. I´m in Montserrat, Spain, and I´ve been here before, so it´s not like I have to explore all the great sights. I do have to go walking on these wonderful mountains, and I do have to do something "spiritual", since this is such a spiritual place, but this moment is about stopping, gathering myself for a return to normal life, whatever that might be.

I just got an email message from the yogi I met in Mexico City, reminding me that I want to be home so I can tell people about his work with the street kids of his town. Yesterday, while I was visiting with two of the leaders of the Madrid UU congregation (very small, but strong), I received a copy of their service for this Sunday and I thought, "how can I use this?" I confess, I talked with Mike Palmer on the phone to get an update on church politics so I can be prepared for re-entry, and I´ve been in touch with Cyn to keep abreast of the pastoral care landscape. Talking with Cyn also makes me want to be home so I can check in with folks in person

Television here includes CNN in English. In Madrid, TV was totally Spanish and all about Rafa Nadal, the new and Spanish world champion tennis player, and of course Real Madrid, who just won the Spanish national football championship. With a little Basque separatism on the side. So with the help of TV, re-entry is starting to happen. June 30, I should be back in New Hampshire, and I´m hoping to bring body, mind, and spirit all at once!

Theological Irregularities

I´ve been looking at religious paintings and sculpture more than is my ususal custom during this trip to Catholic places. Having unearthed that theological irregularity about the Unitarian Visigoths, it´s occurring to me that I have seen evidence of plenty more. Some are subtle, like paintings that show the Virgin Mary with a red garment covered with a blue one, that is, divine on the inside and human on the outside, like the way they color the robes of Jesus. Some reflect a controversy, like the "old" Joseph versus the "young" Joseph. God must be the father of Jesus if Joseph is really old, yes? Then what we to make of the wonderful, happy young Joseph showing off his baby in the Burgos cathedral? There´s the Big Mother thing, and the madonnas from the caves, miraculously discovered at early stages of christianization all over the places I have visited. There is one from Guadalupe(really) in Extramadura, Spain, and like the others, she tends to be dark skinned, with a long, thin face. Who is she?

I am bemused by the view that Mary was so Virginal she didn´t really have her baby the way a normal mother would. There are paintings of her standing, surprised, looking at a baby that seems to have suddenly appeared on the floor in front of her. "Oh, there you are!" (And I remember the drawing from Leonardo´s notebooks showing the angel bringing the annunciation of Mary´s pregnancy in what could euphemistically be called the usual way...)

There´s a really intriguing painting by El Greco of the burial of a nobleman everyone loved, showing two saints having come down from heaven to help him into the grave. Above the scene of the burial, an angel assists a little, pale something into what looks like a birth canal that will allow it (the soul of the deceased, one supposes) to pass into the heavenly realm, pictured with billowing clouds and populated with the usual dignitaries. And among the paintings of heavenly realms, there is indeed variation about who is there and who is highest.

People had different ideas about those old stories during the Middle Ages, even as they do now, and the Powers That Be had their hands full keeping their doctrines straight. So what else old is new?

The First Unitarian Kingdom

Here I am in Toledo, Spain, and I have news: The first Unitarian kingdom was here in Spain, the rule of the Visigoths in the fifth and sixth centuries. First thing: these folks were Christians, but not the Roman or Byzantine kind. They had been evangelized in their earlier home of Dacia by their kinsman Wulfila, a student of Arius, the famous first Unitarian heretic. They had rites and books, architecture, music and customs. All of these had gradually changed, no doubt, during their passage through Northern Italy on their way to take over the administration of the Iberian provinces of the collapsing western Roman Empire. Second thing: They managed to pacify and hold most of the Iberian peninsula for awhile, until things got complicated and the Muslims invaded from the South. (Prior to that, their king had converted to Roman Catholicism, so the Unitarian version of the kingdom must be said to have ended then).


After the Muslims took over, the Visigothic church evolved into an institution that was able to co-exist with the Muslims and the Jews. Their rites continued to be observed in Latin, but gradually everyone´s daily language shifted to Arabic. There is no reason to believe that the post-conquest church was any less Unitarian than its predecessor, though I don´t know very much about that part. I do know that the Visigothic kings had appointed the bishops. I think unitarian christianity is particularly well adapted to coexistence with Muslims and Jews, so I´m hoping this information will be encouraging to christians to move away from trinitarian absolutism.

Visigoths. Who would have thought? Originally from what is now Sweden, they say. Hardly barbarians by the time they were pushed out of Dacia by the Huns. Interesting folks.

Piles of History

Yesterday I was in Burgos, today I am in Toledo, and even with that relatively brief interval in the realm of modern transportation, it´s all an experience of piles of history. The piles are deep and high. They go back to Roman times and before, though the Romans were the ones who really got serious about piling up stones and making sure things stayed put.

When they dig under the streets, they find remnants of Roman and pre-Roman settlements, sometimes graves, sometimes just stuff, sometimes walls and floors. When they take the paint or plaster off the walls, they uncover frescoes that were put there a thousand years ago. The guest house where I stayed in Toledo has a plexiglas window through the floor into a lower level where they found a medieval cistern preserved with its cover, ready to use the next time the city water system fails.

Digging through all this material, what you find depends a lot on what you think beforehand. There´s a long-running argument in one town about whether a certain building was originally a church or originally a synagogue, with lines drawn between people who want to assert a long-running Christian hegemony and those who believe the earlier settlements were more diverse.

Diversity seems to be gaining in popularity. Here in Toledo, there is a former church that has been restored as a museum of the synagogue it once was. And a church building no longer in use but still owned by a local parish that is being restored as a sort of hybrid of mosque and early church. The local Catholic icon, San Ildefonso, is these days being identified with his Visigothic roots. Since the Visigoths were Unitarians, this is quite an exciting development for some of us!

It would be nice if some of the anti-diversity of the intervening past could be erased, but still, this looks like progress to me, this reconstruction of the ancient past to reinterpret who was here and what they believed.

Enough for Now

I have been walking with the pilgrims on the Way of Saint James, the Camino de Santiago. Today I am in Santo Domingo de la Calzada after walking here from Nájera. It was a really great day of walking, and it was my last. Tomorrow I´ll take the bus to Burgos, beginning the last segment of my travels. This has been a great experience, even if I spoke less Spanish than I wanted, due to the international nature of the pilgrimage.


It was also an inexpensive segment of my travels. The system of albergues makes it very affordable to stay overnight if you have a sleeping bag or sheet sack. Of course, it´s pretty interesting for a whole lot of people to share just a few toilets, wash basins, and showers, but after awhile, you get into a kind of group rhythm that makes it work. Is this kind of walking possible anywhere in the United States? We have places that would be just as good... and they wouldn´t have all those annoying gold retablos in the churches, and the walk wouldn´t come with any sense that visiting churches was a big part of it, maybe.


It´s different from the Appalachian Trail, which is all about getting in touch with the lingering wildness still visible in the East. It´s about culture and civilization and history, with walking thrown to slow you down as you pass through it.


Of course, some people manage to pass through all this culture and civilization and history on foot without really seeing much of it. They focus on their kilometers per day -- forty is a favoite number for this group. Then there are those who become preoccupied with the care of their feet and knees, so the only place they visit in any town where they stop is the farmacia. I got to do some of that, and it is culturally interesting, learning what another group of people think is the right way to treat this and that, but it´s pretty narrow.



But I´m wondering, do we already have anything like this? and if we wanted to have one, where would it be?

A Grandmother

I have been expecting to become a grandmother now for months, and yesterday I got the news that baby Melody Rose McNally has arrived safely. Mother and baby are well, father (my son) is completely tongue-tied with delight. It´s really strange to be so far away. I did give some thought to the value of walking for expectant mothers as I walked along the Camino de Santiago. I remembered the special statue of the Mother and Child in the cathedral at Valencia where pregnant women bring flowers and then walk around the ambulatory nine times to bring them a healthy delivery. But at the very end, Megan was told to rest -- no more lawn mowing!--mostly because the weather was so hot.


Anyway, I´m a grandmother. I´m excited, but I won´t get to see this baby until some time in July. The women I am more or less walking with congratulated me, of course, and started calling me "granny". Now what? Maybe it´s unusual or maybe it´s normal for this part of Spain, but it´s really hot during the day. Since we are not grapes, who grow everywhere here and enjoy the hot weather, we have to get up really, really, early to walk before it gets just too awful. Grandmother or not, the road is waiting, and I am walking.

Inside the Cathedral

There are big churches everywhere along the Way of Saint James, the Camino de Santiago. Some of them are falling into disuse, others are being tended by smallish congregations, and some have the support of large communities of faith. Many reflect the Spanish "golden age" of the seventeenth century, which was indeed an age of gold. It generally just makes me angry to see the huge golden retablos, because I think about the people who were native to the Americas who died by hundreds and thousands to make that gilding possible. Yet some of the art work is truly gorgeous. In Viana, a city that is much less important now than it was in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, I entered a gilded church with wonderful, vibrant figures of saints and angels reaching out from their sculpted places with lifelike grace and enthusiasm. And I had to think. Some of my thoughts were about now.


Here in Viana, artists worked with the materials that came to them, creating inspiring images. Those materials made it possible to have the four different shades of gilding, among other things. When you´re an artist, what shame is there in working with the best to create the best? And don´t we do the same? We work with the materials at hand to create our art and our lives, not really thinking about where things come from and what the human or environmental cost might be of what we are using. Because it´s there, right? And somehow it is okay, because the materials are there.


I don´t know what to do about this, other than to find ways to make sure the materials come to us from sources that don´t do violence to humans, other beings, or the Earth herself.


I stayed at the refuge for pilgrims provided by the church in Viana, and after the evening service, the parish priest presided over an informal and pleasant spaghetti supper for those of us who were spending the night there. Then he invited us to come back into the church by a passage that led from our quarters to the choir loft. Soft music played in the gathering dark. The silence was very serene within the great stone space of the building. The gold was far below. Just the quiet spirit remained. Inside the cathedral, many things are possible -- in the silence, there is no need to pray to any deity, and it´s easy to absorb the peace that seems to emanate from the walls. I left confused. It was not all right, that business with the gold. And I don´t even know what awfulness attended the raising of the great stone structure in the first place. Yet here, something breathes from the walls that really is all right.


I guess it´s true. Things are usually mixtures of good and bad.

Your Own Camino

It´s a kind of odd, rolling party in some ways, walking the Way of St. James, the Camino de Santiago. People drift along the trail, passing one another or meeting at stopping places to share a snack. People drift into the albergues, washing socks shoulder to shoulder, and drift around town on tired feet, looking for food in the tiny grocery stores and in restaurants. So we´re always meeting each other, especially in the small towns. Some keep to themselves, others reach out to ask about food, health information (feet!), news from the trail, and such.

Some people are taking the bus between places, some are riding bikes, and a great many are walking. Today, it was getting really hot by noontime in Logroño, and a lot of people decided not to go on in the afternoon. So there was a big crowd of pilgrims outside the refugio as its opening time neared. No way that crowd would all fit into the 80 beds available. I went with two other women to look for a different kind of accommodation. There, in a fourth floor walkup, was a pleasant room with a bed for each of us. Wonderful!

Different ones of us do different things. Some move right along, walking or riding fast, burning up the trail to get there quickly. It is, after all, the point of this exercise to cover the kilometers and arrive at Santiago de Compostela. But there are those of us for whom the journey is more important than the destination. There´s nature, history, argiculture and industry, and especially people to meet along the Way. That would include me. And that goes better by foot.

Different ones of us have different orientations to the spiritual journey. Some are inclined to travel in silence, even to go fasting, carrying symbols of the religious faith they live by, attending services at every opportunity. Others treat it more as a hiking vacation, enjoying the passing scene very much in a spirit of relaxation and fun. Then there are those with some kind of in-between attitude.

We meet one another, and learn something of everyone´s journey. Everyone has their own Camino. And all Caminos are of value-- there is no one right way.

20 km till breakfast

I am walking with the pilgrims of the Way of Saint James, the Camino de Santiago, through Northern Spain. We sleep in albergues, dormitory-style housing for pilgrims, some private, some sponsored by the local town government. Everyone gets up early, packs up their pack, puts on their boots, and heads out the door -- usually the people in charge want everyone out of there by 8:00 AM. And usually, there is breakfast somewhere in the picture. Either at the albergue or at the coffee shop down the block. In Zubiri, high in the Pyrenees Basque country, there would be breakfast at the local bar at 9:00, which seemed a long time to wait. So most of us headed down the trail, thinking there would be a cafe con leche and a pastry in the next town. We were soooo wrong! In this old-fashioned farming part of the world, coffee shops are just not done. Despite the fact that we were passing through four respectable sized towns, there was no coffee and no pastry.



The Spanish couple I had shared the table with the night before while we had a little supper told me that they usually had dinner at 11:00 PM, which made it possible for them to simply get up and go to work the next morning without breakfast. And so they did on this day, setting off aat 7:30 or so for their day on the trail. For those of us with the breakfast habit, it was a hard day. I had some leftover hard sausage and cheese, so there was at least something to eat at 10:30, when it became clear there would be nothing from the villages.



When several of us gathered at 2:00 in the next place we would stay overnight, it was time for comida, Spanish dinner. So we ate, and afterwards we had coffee, not the usual after-dinner cortado, but the breakfast cafe con leche. It had been 20 kilometers from getting out the door of the alberge to the first sip of coffee, way to long for my taste! But when a shorter version of this pre-breakfast walking began to happen a couple of days later, I was ready. The folks at the little store only six kilometers away were able to rustle up a bocadillo--a sandwich on a tiny french-bread style loaf -- that worked really well, and I had convinced myself that breakfast coffee is truly optional.



This walking is quite an experience. There is solitude, and there is camaraderie. There are chances to speak Spanish, even chances to interpret for people, and there are conversations with no Spanish at all-- English, spoken in various degrees by people of many nationalities, French (which I still have not recovered but now understand somewhat), German (totally unknown to me). We sit at table or meet on the road and find out what we can say to one another. It is often very good.

Big Mother

I am traveling in Northern Spain, walking with the pilgrims of the Way of Saint James, the Camino de Santiago.

It´s true that the very early images of Mary the Mother from this part of Spain show someone who is very large, holding a grown man on her lap. I like to think this has something to do with an idea about a mother goddess, a holdover from what people knew about the unseen world before the coming of Christianity. But Big Mary went away, replaced by a young mother who delights in her infant son.


Then occasionally you see an image that evokes that Big Mother feeling, but the image is of Saint Anne, who is sometimes sculpted as holding a grownup Mary on her lap, with the grownup Mary cheerfully cuddling her baby. I like Saint Anne, the Big Mother. I understand that in the South of France, where grapes are farmed without irrigation, it is Saint Anne to whom the farmers address their concerns, and Saint Anne whom they thank with generous offerings after the harvest.

Who says the old ways have passed into the mists of forgetfulness?