THE FRENCH WAY

I wrote about the Camino di Santiago, the Way of St James, my pilgrimage from Burgos to Compostella in Northern Spain, in a previous edition of the Parish Paper. I ended by saying I was going to go back to the beginning and walk from Le Puy in France.
And I did. I walked about 15 miles a day for seventeen days, ending up at Moissac
on the Garonne, some 260 miles later.

Naively, I thought it would be much the same as in Spain, quite tough, but warm and jolly with lots of cafes to stop at on the way if I needed a rest. I had been warned. Friends who had walked this part of the route said it was a lot harder going.  I know now what they meant.  Having said that, it was an incredible experience, both physically and emotionally. I’ve been thinking a whole lot more about the Way, and if some of this turns out to be a sermon, I don’t apologise.

Le Puy is in southern central France, in a mountainous area, the Massif Central. Billions of years ago, it was full of volcanoes, and the town is built on the cone of a dead one, with two further pillars of rock, the cores of dead volcanoes left after the rest has eroded, nearby, one with a statue of Mary on top, the other with a chapel. I’ve no idea how they got their building materials up its near vertical sides.  A thousand years ago, its bishop learned about the shrine of St James at Compostella and made his pilgrimage there (it’s about 1,000 miles away!), and thereafter Le Puy became a major starting point for pilgrims to Santiago.  And as I said last time, that walk has been revived in the last decade or so, so now it’s a very popular route for sporty as well as religious types. 
I got there by train from Lyon: it’s at the head of the river Loire, which flows north for many miles before turning west and reaching the Atlantic (I met some chaps who were cycling the whole length of the river northwards).

Pilgrims gather in the cathedral in Le Puy for a blessing before they set off and so did I, feeling somehow called to make this journey, challenged to face up to my personal loss and grief and walk the Way to learn how to live with this burden.  The start is a climb down many steps to the town and then up again. And every day, I had to climb up and down many times. These climbs were often very steep and very, very long, up paths that had been eroded by rain, were sometimes blocked by fallen rocks and trees, were often also streams, and were never smooth or easy.
 
At the end of the first day I felt exhausted: I’d slipped down a hillside (too rough to dignify it with the name “path”) and fell into the first lodging house I came to.  Here I met my first friends, a German doctor and his wife with their Labrador: we had many chats over the next ten days, as we fetched up at the same places. Two days later the weather stopped being sunny (but with a cold north wind, and at 1500m the temperature was only about 15 degrees).  Walking in the rain is no fun.  But when I staggered into a barn at a very remote farm, I found another group of walkers, and we all go to know each other over the next few days. The two chaps had both lost their wives to breast cancer.  One was a music teacher and organist. We had lots in common - mercifully
I speak French, so there was no language barrier.

I parted from these friends at Conques: a pilgrimage site in its own right, the monks having stolen some very holy relics from somewhere else to enhance their trade (where’s the morality in religion?).  The cathedral is very tall and beautiful, built at the same time as St Giles was founded. Its lofty pillars (two tiers of them) lift eyes and mind to heaven in awe.  The next stages took me to the River Lot and then across more country to the Tarn and the Garonne, and it got a lot warmer. And again I met a group of people: what was really lovely was that on my last night in Moissac, we all had dinner together, quite unplanned. And then there’s the church in Moissac.  Its cloisters (like at Conques) have pillars with beautiful carving, and are known world wide.  But for me, its glory is the carving over the south doorway.  There is Christ in majesty, looking very solemn and mediaeval, surrounded by the symbols of the four gospel writers. But below and all round are twenty four kings, or elders, all with musical instruments in their hands and all with cups of wine.  This is the City of God, the mediaeval vision of heaven: it’s a great big party, a ceilidh.  It’s what I’d been experiencing all along the way. Conviviality, a celebration of humanity, people living in friendship together.

Jesus said “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life”. Very hard to interpret these days: what did he mean?  Well, now I know. His Way is hard, but immensely rewarding.        It hurts, and it revives.  It is full of space for reflection and also full of friends for sharing its delights.  That Life is hard is something we all have to admit.  Living it with joy overcomes its pains. Passing through pain to joy, one comes at last to this Truth.

William Marsterson, June 2007