There must be a reason

“So why are you here?” The question draws looks of rapidly concealed panic followed by a sly narrowing of the eyes and a glance off to the distant horizon. Or else by a blank stare then a frown while the person thus confronted struggles to remember.

“Euuh … I heard there were some pretty places to see,” we might eventually hear, or “I lost my job.” Sometimes it’s “I saw an exhibition in the Cathedral.”

What we don’t hear, ever, is that the pilgrim is making for Santiago because he or she believes that proximity to the relics of St James will provide a miracle cure for some illness or will speed their souls through purgatory towards heaven. Or at least, not in so many words.

One of our more naïve preconceptions about walking the Camino de Santiago (right up there in naivety with thinking it would be easy) was that each of our fellow travellers would have strong and specific reasons for undertaking the challenge. It hadn’t occurred to us that most would have the same woolly rationale that we had for setting out. Now that we are many days into the easy if short-lived intimacies among people undergoing the same privations we have the chance to pose the question. But the answers are far from compelling.

First, to be equitable, I should state our own excuses – or at least as we present them in exchange for other people’s revelations:

We have wanted to take a year off for some adventure for a while now; it had always been part of our long-term plans. The intention had been to travel in the Americas, north and south. But with David’s grandmother being of a great age and unsteady health, we didn’t want to be so far away in an emergency. Then three years ago, on a holiday in the Auvergne, we went for a walk and kept criss-crossing some strange scallop shell signs and got curious … The next day, visiting Conques, we saw hikers enter the monastery buildings behind the church as if it were a youth hostel. It was so mysterious and beautiful, and we wondered what we would have to do to, to be allowed to sleep there too. And so we discovered the St Jacques route, which fitted with our liking for those slow travels through a country that gradually reveal the evolution of its topography, climate, agriculture and architecture.

And so for more of other people’s reasons:
“I’ve been bringing up my children on my own and now they have both left home. It’s destabilising. I need to time to find myself again.”
“Because it’s cheap.”
“To see if my body can be relied on that much.”
“To have time to think.”
“I wanted a long walk to challenge myself but on this route I knew I would often have company. My parents were relieved about that.”
“It’s a holiday with exercise.”
“Thirty years ago I met a man walking home again from Santiago. I thought that was wonderful and promised myself I would go there. And an old friend agreed to come with me. We leave our families behind – it feels a little guilty.”
“To visit other parts if France I don’t know.”
“Because so many of my friends have already been.”
“Because I read a book.”
“I had a few weeks to spare before harvest,”
“Because when he walks with his friends it is too steep and I can’t keep up. This walk we can do together.”

Given that these days the “get out of purgatory free” card is rarely played, it’s wondrous how many human beings put themselves – voluntarily – through rituals and rigour. Not just the hundred thousand and more who travel to Santiago de Compostela each year but all those other thousands who go to the Ganges, to Mecca, to the Barabar Hills, to Jerusalem or Rome. And all those secular tests of marathon runs, pentathlons, mountain hikes or cycle rides for charity. Given the costs, the perils, the discomfort and often the boredom of it, why do we do it? What in our psyche seeks such ritualistic pain?

It seems the need for ritual testing must be part of our makeup. Tribes both ancient and far-flung have or used to have rites of passage marking the transition to adulthood, and they mostly involved fear or pain. The games of “chicken”, the drinking contests at University all fit the same mould. Just because more modern religions have transmuted their rites into mere symbolic or intellectual tests doesn’t take away the need for a ritual. Nor does it seem to take away the need for pain and difficulty. When baptism by total immersion was replaced by a token wetting of the forehead, it wasn’t long before a pilgrimage or a stretch living as a hermit came to be the ambition of all Christians. And I bet there’s a similar progression in other religions too. Medieval Christian pilgrimages may have been elective (or may not: many were prescribed by church or criminal courts to atone for some sin) but they were clearly answering to a deep-felt need. There’s some kind of validation that we’re all after – of ourselves and our bodies, perhaps, but mostly it’s a spiritual urge to be tested and to pass the test that is within us, whether we recognise it as such, or not.

Of equal interest to the reasons for starting the pilgrim route, if not more, are the reasons why people stop. These are harder to track down. If people give up they are likely to flee, so we have to rely on the hearsay of the accommodation owners or “hospitaleros” for information. We hear of broken ankles from slipping in muddy tracks in the rain. Broken arms after falling off a bike in a steep lane. There have been foot-engulfing and infected blisters with which some pilgrims manage to stagger on for days before conceding defeat. There is the occasional heart attack or hip operation tested too soon. Bed bugs. And then there were those who simply couldn’t stand the rain a day longer. A Japanese man who has three times walked from St-Jean-Pied-de-Port to Santiago decided to give up on the French path because it wiggled too much. One woman admitted she had walked successive sections for a few years, but life was too short, she wants to do something different next year. A German man was leaving the road to enter a retreat in a Buddhist monastery.

But my favourite reason came from the woman who left us at Nogaro to go and pick cherries on a friend’s farm in Switzerland. Now that seems perfectly reasonable to me.

23rd June 2008