Kevin A. Codd - Beyond Even the Stars: A Compostela Pilgrim in France

A Compostela Pilgrim in France

Kevin A. Codd

I fear I am forgetting what it is to be a pilgrim. Some years back, I walked the Spanish Camino de Santiago from the French village of Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, just north of the Spanish border, and across northern Spain to the ancient city of Santiago de Compostela. It took a month plus a few days to complete the walk; well, it was more than a walk. It was, in fact, a pilgrimage , something much grander. I wrote a book about the experience and titled it To the Field of Stars. I now wish it could have been a deeper book, a truer book, one that captured not just what the walk was like, but how much that month- plus would affect me long after I had walked the last step. With the passage of months and then years, the pilgrimage experience quietly bore ever more deeply into my heart, and I slowly but surely found that it had changed meand changed me a lot.

How did it change me? It is not so easy to put into words, but these are the best Ive found so far: it humbled me. Which is to say that I came to know my own fragility as a human being as well as the goodness of everything beyond me: the whole big-banged universe, the tender earth, other people. I found I had my place in all this goodness, and I lost much of my fear of death, though certainly not all. After I had walked that last step, I promised myself that I would never lapse back into the person I had been before I had become a pilgrim.

Alas, of late, I am feeling myself more like that pre-pilgrim me and less like the person I thought I had become following my arrival in Santiago de Compostela. The power of that long, slow pilgrim prayer has diminished; the lessons have receded under the weight of lifes quotidian duties. I have become increasingly aware that I have been slowly losing the memory of those walking days. The particular memories have congealed into a generality; the specificity of each day, each hour, each moment of that previous pilgrimage is being lost to me. I dont like that feeling: of losing my grip on the details of the thing, for it is in the details that one finds the things meaning. Yes, that long walk was a prayer for me, now that I look back on it, and I dont want to forget the words to that prayer, the steps, the solitude, the community, the joy, and yes, even the pain of blisters and tendonitis.

One night not long ago, I awoke to a dream. It was one of those dreams that is clear and clean of mental clutter and easily remembered. Most of all, it seemed very real and felt very true .

So this was my dream.

I am walking. I am happy beyond words. I am on a gently winding road, a road that is rising. The sun is brightly shining, but it is not hot, and a breeze is cooling my face. My shirt is open to both wind and the shine of the sun. I have nothing on my back, and my feet are almost prancing, or maybe, dancing as I climb. The increasing elevation does not slow me; it lifts me. My smile is wide, my eyes are alive, and my heart is beating in time to my footsteps. I come over a final rise, look up from the road, and there is sea as far as I can see. And sky. The blue of one melding with the blue of the other along a hazy thin line that is the horizon. This is the very end of the earth and the beginning of the heavens, and I am walking into it. I am not afraid, for the road and the sea and the sky and all that is beyond is so beautiful. I lift my arms and soundlessly shout across the universe: Ahhh! And with that cry, as one does in dreams, I fly. Or better, I am lifted up and carried beyond the horizon, beyond the End of the Earth, beyond even the stars above, and... into... into... into... ? Well, I dont knowinto God perhaps.

I awake. I am not flying at all, but altogether horizontal in my old bed. And this is old Leuven in old Belgium where I have lived these past eight years. I climb out from under my blanket, walk to the bedroom balcony and step outside into the Belgian night. I can see only a few stars here for the lights of the city are strong, and there are clouds. In the few stars able to break through the halogen haze, I imagine the outline of the ancient apostle with his walking stick and floppy hat, a cockleshell tied to his breast. He waves his staff and invites me to follow him. I nod and say to the stars, Yes! I shall come. And so it is that I make a pact with James the Great, Santiago, Jacques, Jacobus Maximus himself, to walk back to the Field of Stars, Compostela, and this time, to walk beyond it, to Finisterre , the End of the Earth, and to do my best to walk, then, into God.

T o this end, that is, to walk to the End of the Earth, I have a plan.

I have completed my work as rector of my old seminary in Leuven, The American College; my trunks are packed, and I have made my goodbyes to eight years worth of friends. Tomorrow morning, Sunday, the First Day of the Week, the first day of July, I will commence my second pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, but this time I intend to walk from home, from my home in Belgium: Leuven. From my front door, like pilgrims of old, I will begin this new pilgrimage. I shall first walk in a southerly direction across Wallonia, the French-speaking part of Belgium, then, in about a week, I shall enter France. I will then hoof it across that country, north to south, back to Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port in the Pyrenees, and if all is still well, once again cross Spain to Compostela. And then I shall walk three days more to the eastern shore of the Atlantic, to medieval Europes last bit of land before there was nothing but unknowable sea and sky, Finis Terrae . All in all, I will walk about , kilometers, a little more than , miles, if all goes well.

I spend a long night packing a grand new backpack that bears the brand name Gregory. At about four in the morning, I prod the last bits and pieces into the pack and weigh it on my bathroom scale. I am disheartened to see that it pushes the needle to just over forty pounds; thats about ten too many. But it is now very late, and I am very tired, and I have to get up early, so I leave it as it is, its broad seams straining to hold all that I have stuffed within. In its heft, the mute bag seems almost to have a personality of its own, so I dub him Gregorius Magnus , Gregory the Great, one of those grand popes of times past.

In the two hours remaining to me before I must arise and begin my new pilgrimage from this place to that of Saint James the Apostle, I barely doze and certainly do not sleep. A voice within my brain calculates the foolishness I have gotten myself into: That Gregory is not just Great, he is obese ! You can never carry that much weight across , kilometers! Somehow, Ill manage. I HAVE TO! But have you forgotten the last pilgrimage across Spain? Dont you remember the blisters? Are you ready for that again? And the ten days of tendonitis? That about killed you! Yes, I remember, only too well; but I made it, didnt I? But it is impossible! NO, I dont care if it is impossible! My final words on the subject: My job is to begin, just to begin.