A Proper Pilgrimage

A person may only be released from this vow by the Pope.

Reasons for walking the camino - excercise, culture, religious...

Serious Catholics should consider things seriously before taking a vow to walk El Camino de Santiago or the Way of St. James in Northern Spain. Legend has it that the remains of the apostle James is buried in the Cathedral of Santiago De Compostela. Only the pope himself can absolve or release a person from such a commitment. For a serious Catholic the walk thus begins with a confession plus Mass and ends with one. It is (at least) a 100 kilometre journey of a penitent.

Why walk the camino?
Most people, however, walk El Camino for a combination of reasons. The route is:

• Enjoyable and can be sociable.
• Well-organized.
• Has beautiful wide expanses.
• Full of cultural and religious monuments and churches
• An excellent choice to wind-down from a stressful life.
• Good for body and soul.

In short, most pilgrims do the El Camino for the general reasons they travel as tourists. El Camino is a famous experience to sample. Why not try it out this autumn?

Cannot be planned
The point is, however, that travelling as a pilgrim along El Camino ever so often turns into something quite else than what was anticipated. The reason is double.

First of all, the movement through the landscape is, if properly undertaken, done by foot. A few days into the trip, most people will experience a serious slowing down of all bodily and spiritual functions. To be walking along the path is literally to discover how hurried most activities are undertaken in our daily lives. First there is a feeling of dogged boredom, then a sharpening of the senses and finally a meditative movement sets in. All this is accompanied by a new way of meeting other people who become in every sense nothing but fellow human beings.

"Movement into something else"
The best anthropological description of this is still that of Victor Turner in his analysis of the pilgrimage as a movement through luminal space, which is a movement out of our daily lives and into something else. This "something else" may be experienced as holy, as spiritual or just communal. In every sense it constitutes another kind of life different from what is normally experienced in the daily grind.

From tourist to pilgrim
This is the point: Our normal lives are built around pointillist moments of being and consuming. Time is no longer cyclical (peasant-time) or linear (modernist), it consists of post-modern moments filled with things to be done or overcome. The whole point of partaking in a pilgrimage is to pass from this senseless, hectic life on the constant look-out for consuming moments and into the border-zone between the ordinary and the different.

It is often said that a pilgrim is focused upon being on the way, while tourists are focused on where they are going. Walking El Camino reawakens in the tourist a different feeling for time, landscapes and other people. Sometimes it turns the tourist into a pilgrim.

References
The Ritual Process. Structure and Anti-structure. By Victor W. Turner. USA: De Gruyter 1969.

Pilgrim Stories. On and off the Road to Santiago. By Nancy Louise Frey. University of California 1998. (The best anthropological study of the phenomena).