Camino de Santiago

Abstract

Camino de Santiago Kevin Honold (bio) They who undertake many pilgrimages seldom become holy. —Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ In the high meadows where horses and long-haired sheep graze, magpies fly from stone to stone. A granite peak gleams in the distance, touched with sunlight as with snow. In late afternoon we reach Roncesvalles, where the Basques killed Roland, and find bunks in a seminary. From Roncesvalles the path leads through a forest thick with fog at dawn. These woods are legendary as a rendezvous for witches, according to a sign, but I find only little orange birds picking at acorns. Box elder, hazelnut, and oak give way to fields and meadows stretching away beneath the flat-keeled clouds of autumn. In late afternoon, from a wooded hill, Pamplona’s Catedral de Santa María heaves into view like a tall ship on the horizon. Dave is an Irishman from Waterford who works as a ship’s navigator in the North Sea. We share bunks at a hostel in town, and in the morning set off through empty streets in a steady, predawn rain. By mid-morning, the sun appears, and the rainclouds slip back across the saddles of the hills as we follow the path through open country toward Estella, picking blackberries along the way. After a few hours’ walk, we break for a swim in Río Ulzama, beneath the medieval bridge at Trinidad de Arre, then lay in the grass to share a smoke and a chat as we dry. The days pass in this manner. [End Page 39] Bales of straw are stacked high in the shorn fields. It is a clean, productive country, with old churches on the hilltops, and humpbacked footbridges spanning quick black streams. ________ In the eight-hundred-year-old church of Santa María at Logroño, I confess to Mary that I am an intolerant man who finds fault with many people. Namely, those peregrinos who walk twelve or fifteen miles on a given day, then crowd the hostel kitchens in the evening to prepare elaborate meals served with sauces, conversing loudly over glasses of wine as they eat. It is September of 2012, and in the cities to the south, the economic troubles have led to riots. The Spanish government’s austerity measures have slashed social services, and many factories have been shuttered. What would these pilgrims say if I told them that an unseemly love of food, as well as its inordinate consumption, both count as gluttony? That their boisterous indulgence is an affront to the hungry? I’d be scorned, and I’d deserve it, because I’m a hypocrite. In a small plaza near the albergue, the homeless sleep and drink and panhandle, but I don’t give them anything. I’m all talk. I have nothing but criticism. I’m a reasonable, and therefore timid, man. Reading Don Quixote in the dorms at night, I’m reminded of this. The life of self-forgetful freedom to which Christians are summoned, with all its attendant sorrow and shame, was embraced by the good knight. Quixote’s lunacy is fearless, doctrinally sound, exemplary, and beyond me. Cincinnati, Ohio, 1980 The church had bought ten new albs for the altar boys. In the vestry, before mass, the priest extolled the garments and admonished us to take great care of them, for they’d been purchased with parishioners’ donations, and we’d be held responsible for any damages. Matthew and I donned the robes and set about preparing for the ten-thirty service: filling cruets with wine or water, preparing finger bowls and towels, polishing brass dishes that would hold the Eucharist. Not for the first time, we stuffed our mouths with unconsecrated wafers and washed them down with unblessed wine. Matthew thumped my back, and I choked and dribbled wine down the front of the spotless alb. Long streaks stained the [End Page 40] cloth like bloody gashes from a grizzly’s claws. I returned the alb to the closet and hung it there, smoothed and straightened, among its mates, and chose another. As I walked the brass candle-lighter down the aisle, I barely kept...