Pilgrim's Road

term before being relieved by another team.
     

8
     
    The Lands of Old Castile
     
    I RODE out of the Rioja on a crisp blue day of rare calm. Although the sun shone, giving the illusion of warmth, my fingers ached and tingled with the cold and my breath hung in the sparkling air. The way led straight as an arrow over a broad green undulating plain with a scattering of brown trees just coming into leaf — early spring again — my third experience of it in a single year. It was as if time had forgotten to move on. Then suddenly above the green plains I saw the towering white outlines of the mountains of the Sierra de la Demanda. The stark snow-covered peaks transformed the landscape instantly. It no longer seemed strange to be feeling cold on so bright a day. The sense of coming into more exotic lands than I had seen so far on the journey quickened the pulse, and the idea of time standing still faded.
    It was a suitably impressive entry into the lands of Old Castile, the heartland of Spain, whose name reflects the great number of castles that were built there over the centuries in the long fight against the Moorish forces of Islam. And what a day to see it for the first time! From conditions of head down against the wind, grit the teeth and bear it, once more I had an embarrassment of riches. When the sun had taken the edge off the early morning chill it was pure bliss to be on a bicycle. I could have pushed on hour after hour, enjoying every turn of the pedals. Was this what the Roncesvalles questionnaire had meant by ‘sport’ as a motive for the pilgrimage, I wondered? If so then I would tick it twice over, for it is at times like these that I feel closest to God. Like the writer of the Psalms rejoicing in the wonder of creation and in man’s place in it, I too feel a great sense of awe and delight in the thought of ‘I am fearfully and wonderfully made’.
    But I could not give in completely to the sheer exhilaration of movement, for there was a continuous stream of things to stop and admire. There were villages to make detours to in order to view a particularly interesting font, or a line of old cottages, or a wayside cross — of which, not unnaturally, there were a great number on the Camino , and many of them quite lovely. Pausing by the roadside to enjoy the views more closely was also necessary, as the landscape continued to reveal fresh, arresting facets of itself.
    This was more like being on holiday than on a pilgrimage I thought, and immediately wondered what I meant by that. Was it wrong to be enjoying myself? Were pilgrims supposed to be miserable? I certainly hadn’t set out in the belief that pilgrimage needed to be a penitential journey, but by this stage in the journey I had studied a great many Last Judgements carved on the walls of medieval churches and I was satiated with depictions of hell and with all the ingenious and hideous tortures that the fertile medieval mind could dream up as the wages of sin. As a result, I had fallen into the trap of thinking that all serious pilgrims must be deeply troubled by the state of their souls and earnestly intent on expiating their sins before it was too late. The last few days of slogging onward against wind and rain had done little to dislodge that idea.
    John Bunyan has also been much in my mind because of his ubiquitous hymn ‘He Who Would Valiant Be’, and Bunyan’s pilgrim is certainly no model of jollity. I suppose writing his Pilgrim’s Progress in prison probably would give an author a rather jaundiced view of life. Certainly there is nowhere in Christian’s progress towards the Celestial City where you could say he was possessed of the sort of joy reflected in the Psalms. And then the Celestial City itself also presents a problem. Call it the New Jerusalem, heaven, Paradise, or what you will, it still comes over as a rather boring place. Who, other than a dedicated musician would feel happy at the prospect of strumming on a harp all day? Or ‘Praising the Lamb without Ceasing’? Of course I realise that it is a problem of language struggling to express the inexpressible, and most Christians interpret these words and images in their own way and presumably have differing ideas about what it all means. But hell is illustrated by examples from everyday life that are easy to relate to and it would, I think, help considerably to have similar ways of enhancing the image of heaven.
    The only writer I know who begins to quicken the