Pilgrim's Road

dilapidation that was exposed to public view had been arrested and stabilised, but not entirely dispelled — an admirable Spanish compromise. The complex of church, shrine and priest’s house presented a serene spectacle in the late afternoon, with the light falling obliquely across the fine west façade of the monastery church.
    Don José María Alonso was the priest in sole charge of this beautiful place, and apart from him it was quite deserted. When I arrived he was sitting in his car, listening to a football commentary on the radio, the excited chatter an incongruous intrusion in the stillness. Like his sainted twelfth-century predecessor, Don José was a friend of pilgrims and devoted to their welfare. He insisted on leaving his football to welcome me and make me coffee. He would have prepared a full-scale meal had I not protested that I had eaten a large lunch only an hour or so before and could manage nothing else. Only when he had shown me the pilgrim quarters and made sure I had everything I needed did he return to his football match, and was soon once more deeply engrossed.
    After paying my respects at the saint’s fine tomb and exploring the other buildings, I spent most of the remaining hours of daylight sitting on a bench in a sheltered spot outside, enjoying the sun and writing up my journal. As it was Sunday, and I had not found a church service to attend, I also read through the ‘Office of None’ in the monastery church. Parts of this lovely church were as San Juan had built it, a testament to his great skill as an architect. The long and thoughtful Psalm 119 which formed the bulk of the ‘Office of None’ seemed an appropriate reading and something with which San Juan himself would have been familiar. Whether it was reading it aloud there, or whether the joy of the day itself made me see everything with new eyes, I don’t know, but the psalm struck me with a new force of meaning I had not seen in it before. Being all about the keeping of laws and commandments it had never been a favourite of mine. I associated it with a horrible part of my childhood when, because of the war, I had been evacuated to a particularly narrow and bigoted non-conformist household. In an atmosphere of dark ignorance I suffered several years of the most miserable Sabbaths imaginable (I still cannot say the word Sabbath without a shudder). Forced to sit inactive and desperately bored for hour after hour, without even the solace of a book simply because it was the ‘Lord’s Day’ was a dreadful experience. The sense of imprisonment was bad enough for a six-year-old child, but the implanting of the image of a ‘vengeful and judgemental God who required his creatures to be miserable’ was the greater and more insidious evil. How I even partially recovered from this early warping could only, I think, have been through an act of grace.
    But this day in the lovely setting of San Juan’s church I was able to read through Psalm 119 as though for the first time, and I saw that in fact it was all about freedom, not coercion, a response of the heart. The whole psalm in fact seemed to be about approaching God and his commandments through joy; the complete reverse of what my oppressive guardians had attempted to instil in me.
    There was also a short sentence from Galatians in this ‘Office of None’ which echoes the tone of the Psalm 119, but strikes home more immediately.
     
    ‘Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.’
     
    I sat on for a while, wondering just how solitary travellers could bear one another’s burdens. Thinking about what I had read in the log book of the Bar León and in the refugios , it seemed to me that, although not face-to-face encounters, people did relate to one another through this sharing of their thoughts, and sometimes quite powerfully. Slowly I had become aware, not only of people making the journey today, but of a great network of people past and present, all travelling the Camino. The log books were a constant reminder that I was not making the journey alone. From there it was a only a step to having these people in mind and a part of daily prayer.
    A pilgrim I was particularly aware of at this time was a young woman named Tamsin Hooper whose entries I had come across several times. She had passed this way in early February, and because she was walking I hoped I might catch up with her before Santiago. I never did but she was a real companion of the way. Her