How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet.
While making a pilgrimage across northern Spain to the city of Santiago de Compostela,
I learned to appreciate the beauty of feet.
Bearers of burdens, points of contact with God's creation and instruments of discovery.
The philosopher Paracelsus once said, "The world is a great
book and we turn its pages with our feet as we walk pilgrimly."
The pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, the traditional burial place of the apostle James,
became one of the medieval world's most transformative manifestations
of the Christian covenant, a literal coming together.
Pilgrims from all over the known world met on the road. They shared their stories there,
and their songs, and their ideas of beauty and their ideas of the sacred.
The tradition continues with well over 300,000 individuals from 175 countries
each year completing at least a part of the Camino.
Simone Weil taught us that the holy grail belongs to the first person who asked the cup's guardian,
a king three-quarters paralyzed by the most grievous wound, "What are you going through?"
Through might be an affliction; but it might also be a journey. What village or valley
or vineyard are you going through? What do you see there, what do you hear, what do you taste?
What is the company you keep through your throughing?
The answer depends on our attentiveness. In the grail story, the seeker pays attention to
the guardian's journey: his life, and his losses. On the pilgrimage we attend to the trees, and the
streams and to the stone poetry of the churches. But especially to the people: the pilgrims
and those who care for their needs. Paying attention is a form of listening
and of prayer. That is why Weil insists that paying attention is like a sacrament.
By that she means that studying, serving, walking, throughing
develops the faculty of attention that allows us to connect with God and with others.
That I think is what Paracelsus meant by walking pilgrimly.
Sigmund Bauman worried that we have moved from a period when we understood ourselves
as pilgrims, in search of deeper meaning, to one in which we act as tourists.
Walking the Camino de Santiago—nearly 500 miles of it—helped me discover some of those deeper things.
For example, seeing a medieval church for the second or third or even fourth
time, and wondering how much more learning
and living would be required before I might be able to see it again as if for the first time.
Or finding hospitality, a word that in Latin, "hospes" meant
both host and guest. In the greeting of a villager
who came out to greet us like Abraham on the plains of Mamra, because it was his duty.
Hospitality invites us to play both sacred roles. Christ being the perfect exemplar
of the perpetually needy guest and the perfect host, and learning new ways of walking: watchful
but watchless, because time doesn't matter. Alone with myself, but always along with others,
or of keeping the pilgrimage seen in the actions
of the locals who repair the trail, offer water and refreshment, but also guaranteeing the road's
survival in their repairs. And keeping the pilgrimage as a sabbath with reverence and
restraint, hosannas and helping hands, keeping it close and keeping it alive.
Walking the Camino de Santiago immersed me in the beauty of the forest, and the
mountain and the meadow. The beauty of our attempt to imitate the creator
in our own creations. The beauty of fellow pilgrims: their pains and afflictions, redemptions
and kindnesses. The beauty of their feet upon the mountains.