It is soon to be Thanksgiving, and we’ve got pilgrims on our minds, perhaps. Maybe we’re booing and hissing, because we know the genocide they wrought and the ongoing decimation of the First Peoples. It has crossed my mind that a lot of UCC churches are called “Pilgrim” because those first settlers were mostly Congregationalists, our forebears in faith. "How are we complicit?" is the constant question. So we ponder.
Today, though, I’m pondering “pilgrim” for a different reason. You know my imagination has been captured by the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, an ancient walk through Spain peppered by churches and villages and miracles and signs and relics and lore, and ending at the Church of St. James, where the apostle's body is said to be buried. So, my bedtime reading for these last couple of months has been a series of books, memoirs of pilgrims — peregrinas/peregrinos — who have walked hundreds of miles on “the way of St. James,” as it is rendered in English.
That is, “Camino de Santiago” is rendered “the way of St. James.” But what of the Compostela part? And what does it mean to be a pilgrim anyway?
The latest in my series of reads is Off the Road by Jack Hitt (and if you saw the movie The Way, you’ll recognize some of the stories). (Detour into useless trivia: Jack Hitt is from South Carolina, and his brother Bobby was a prominent reporter in Columbia when I was a journalism student at USC.)
Hitt, as other pilgrim writers, tells of the journey in part by describing the people he meets along the way, people who live along the Camino and offer hospitality to pilgrims, and pilgrims from all over the world who have come for a variety of reasons to walk this Way.
Somewhere deep in the eighth chapter, Hitt becomes embroiled in a controversy about what it means to be a true pilgrim. This controversy arose at this moment because Hitt had chosen for the night a modest hotel, instead of the raw hostels (albergues) with bunks sometimes many dozens to a room and minimal toilet and shower facilities. Pilgrims who aren’t sufficiently dirty, bone-weary and dehydrated are sometimes looked upon with disdain by the more hardcore travelers and residents; suffering, some believe, is key to the experience. (For the record, in every book I’ve read, the pilgrim chooses one or more nights in a hotel, since the walk takes weeks or months to complete.)
So there was a fracture in the camaraderie when Hitt let it slip that, after weeks of thunderstorms and shadeless heat and wild dogs and hunger and hallucinations, sleeping in rustic albergues or his tiny tent, he would be in a hotel for the night.
After dinner, and impromptu entertainment by a Flemish buffoon named Claudy, debate ensued, lasting for hours into the night, in a tent full of international travelers all searching for something. Is a real pilgrim the one who travels exactly like the ancient first travelers? Or can others be pilgrims also, who travel in a different way? The official rules of The Camino are few, but the traditions weigh heavy.
Hitt eventually connected the question of who is a real pilgrim with the question of what Compostela means, reflecting an energetic exchange between a pilgrim named Miguel and another known only as the German. And this is when I decided I wanted to share this with you all.
"Miguel says that Compostela is a contraction of the Latin phrase 'campus stellar, literally the field of the star.' The German, after boasting that he has university credentials, says the name derives from the Latin 'compostum,' meaning 'burial place.'”
"Even in this recondite discussion, one can make out the themes of the evening’s debate. For the German, Compostela is buried, a grave, a dark closed place to be dug out and discovered. For Miguel, the possibilities of Santiago are visible, shimmering with light, open-ended.
"The fragile theology in this tent is at its crudest when it centers on who’s in and who’s out. But it is also the language of discovery versus improvisation. It’s the difference between looking for what you know is there and making it up."
Hitt is torn, though he doesn’t give up his hotel room. He ponders:
"I want to say that those of us who are troubled by doubt are somehow superior to the German and his allies. I want to make a case for Claudy and drunk pilgrims and bicyclists and eaters of fine meals and sleepers in comfortable beds. But the German will always win these arguments because he has so much material to draw on for support — the reservoir of tradition.
"The rest of us have only the nub of our developing and feeble tale with few uninspiring details. We’ve only just started. I want to say that ours is the riskier proposition because we are out beyond what is taken for granted. Per agrum. Out past the fields. Pilgrims."
Hitt concedes the etymology of Compostela as a burial place (related to our word compost), but his pondering of tradition vs discovery stays on my mind.
And I think of us who claim the mantle of Jesus.
While I think “Pilgrim” as a name for congregations ought to be reconsidered, I want to believe that we who follow Jesus' way are pilgrims, informed by tradition, by ancient truths, but propelled every day on a road of discovery — how to be church, how to be neighbors, how to resist the things that would devour us, how to live a new life.
I’m not sure the word can be redeemed completely, but in the broadest sense, I think in some ways we are all pilgrims. We hope we are embracing the field of stars, not the burying place. America is in a challenging moment just now, threatened by rising fascism and bad actors on the right, plus the diminishing health of the planet itself. Tradition informs, history informs, but a hopeful vision drives.
Only a hopeful vision can drive us. Our energy, our imagination, our passion, all are needed. Can we imagine that we are, all of us, pilgrims on a discovery way?