Pilgrims' joy
The
somewhat obscure battle cry of medieval French warriors was Montjoie, a shortened version of the
more expansive Montjoie Saint-Denis. As we know from Shakespeare’s Henry V,
Montjoy could also be a personal name. For pilgrims, the joyful aspects of mountains, if
there are any, must be retrospective.
Dante’s vision of Purgatory is that of a steep and steeply ramped
mountain. It feels really good
when you quit climbing, and the whole mountain quivers in joy when a soul
finally completes the task.
Even
though our pilgrimage was Camino light and mainly diesel-powered I was
accordingly happy, and perhaps even joyous, to arrive at the Monte do Gozo a
few kilometers above Santiago.
That means the Mount of Pleasure, roughly speaking, the pleasure being
that in earlier, more deforested centuries a pilgrim could from this steep
place catch the first sight of the distant towers of the cathedral that had
been the object of such long and arduous toil. The experience was pleasing to me not only in spiritual but
also in linguistic terms.
Having recently finished writing a book about an old Portuguese poem, I
reacted favorably to the Galician form of the preposition. It appears that Galician and Portuguese
are the closest of cousins.
However I later made the mistake of asking our Galician guide Diego a
question about the current state of the Gallegan “dialect”. Diego is a cheerful and irenic chap, in
addition to being witty and knowledgeable, but he rather bristled at the
implied slur in the word dialect. Galician, he assured me, is a language.
Things
are a good deal quieter in Santiago than they were when I was last here. There is a thinner stream of pilgrims
than there will be a few weeks hence, let alone in the height of summer, but
the place is still pretty much of a madhouse. No aspect of the medieval pilgrimage has been more perfectly
preserved than its often-impenetrable ambiguity, the rich mélange of naïve
spirituality, manifest commercialism, and utterly irreligious high-jinks. I suppose it is precisely because of
the grave difficulty we have in cleanly separating flesh and spirit that the
Apostle must remind us that we have our treasures in earthen vessels.
On
our final full day in Compostela we were determined to take in the noontime
service arranged especially for pilgrims, a group from many lands, speaking
many tongues. One special part of
the Pilgrim’s Mass, a justly famous one, is the censing of the congregants
gathered in the Cathedral’s two transepts. The cathedral chapter has a gigantic thurible—and I mean gigantic--called the botafumeiro. It works on an elaborate pulley and suspension system
requiring several strong and skilled bell-ringers to operate. The censing of the medieval pilgrims
probably had a practical as well as a symbolic motive. Tramping for weeks on end along dusty
roads and through muddy bogs is a considerable challenge to personal
hygiene. I was sitting in the very
first row of the south transept, and next to the aisle separating the transept
seating into two halves. It is
over that aisle that the heavy thurible swung in its awesome pendulum stroke,
swishing and fuming, the bright fire of the coals clearly visible through the
ventilations in the silver. I
suppose that one is allowed to ask God for almost anything in a pilgrimage
church, but I still felt a little awkward entertaining a mental petition to be
kept safe from what seemed to be an all-too-real threat of liturgical
decapitation. My prayer was
answered. Thus passed the only
sure chance I shall ever have of exiting this vale of tears in the odor of
sanctity, guaranteed.
It
would not be easy to identify a single “high point” of a journey so enjoyable
in so many ways. We saw mile upon
mile of varied and beautiful countryside in its spring glory. Each day we feasted our eyes on
architectural and artistic treasures.
We dined liked monarchs.
But near the top, surely, I would have to place the peculiar form of
companionship and camaraderie—Chaucer used the word felawschipe—that so swiftly binds together a disparate band of
pilgrims briefly and fortuitously thrown together. I shall not soon forget the fully occupied glazed poultry
coop kept in the church of Santo Domingo de la Calzada in testimony to one of
James’s more extravagant miracles—the only known example of the sacral
de-fricasseeing of a chicken. But
no sooner will I forget the pleasures born of new and unexpected friendship,
and of the companionship born of intensely shared experience.
On
Monday night most of us had taken advantage of our coach to drive to
Finisterre, the “end of the earth” as it was known in the Middle Ages to such
as Chaucer’s Shipman. That day had
begun with bad news. One of our
fellow pilgrims had just learned of a sudden death in his family that would
require him to set off for home as soon as possible. The fleeting nature of human life no less than its preciousness is one of the great themes of pilgrimage. The art and architecture of the pilgrimage roads to which we had devoted much of the last ten days is largely funereal and memorial. Our absent friend was very much in our hearts as most of the rest of us
gathered on the rude rocks surrounding the Fisterra lighthouse to sip a glass
of champagne and congratulate ourselves on journey’s end as we watched a huge
sun set beneath the western sea.
How many others, in legend or in history, had seen such a sight?—among
them Dante’s Ulysses at the Pillars of Hercules, Henry the Navigator at his
wind-swept maritime academy on Cape Saint Vincent, Columbus as he pressed
toward the Azores. But we knew
something they could not yet have known, that beyond that setting sun lay our
own homeland and our own homes.
There we would now return and, however greatly enriched by our journey,
return eagerly. Perhaps no
pilgrimage is really done until all is done. I thought of the strange old Romance word shouted out by
medieval pilgrims to encourage themselves and their fellows not to flag, to
keep on moving faster and further: Ultreia!
