Pilgrimage Through a Pandemic
by Rebecca Widdicombe
I’ve been thinking about the Camino a lot lately. In one week it will be exactly a year since our little group of pilgrims left Winnipeg for Spain. These days I find myself once again lacing up my Camino hiking boots and walking what’s commonly referred to as “the loop” – following, and crossing, the river from Wolseley to Wellington and back.
It’s strange to think now that the Camino would be the perfect path of contagion. Or maybe it’s not strange at all; after all it’s in our nature to pass things on – stories, fire, germs, faith.
Together with pilgrims from all over the world, we broke all the current Covid-19 laws we’re now learning to obey. For starters, we boarded a plane. We shared our food and many of our possessions. We walked the road shoulder to shoulder, touched the same crosses and stone monuments, dipped our fingers into the same pools of holy water and rested our weary heads against the smooth wood of the same old church pews. At night we slept side-by-side in crowded dorms, falling asleep to the whispers of many languages, all of us inhaling the same stale air.
The writer Arundathi Roy recently wrote that pandemics have always been a “a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.” This is also what a pilgrimage is – a gap in time, a blank space, an open road between life as you know it and whatever lies ahead.
Roy is critical of the pandemic “war rhetoric” deployed by leaders and politicians. So she reaches for something simpler – the language of a pilgrim. She writes: “We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through it lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”
In other words, we can make a pilgrimage through this pandemic. A pilgrimage is not an accomplishment. Don’t mistake it for an impressive list of #quarantinegoals. To walk and walk and walk some more is to walk straight into nothingness. Until all you have left is faith – faith in your feet, faith in the people beside you, faith in a God who is good beyond your understanding.
Pilgrims walk at their own pace. But as we walked we encountered many who planned to arrive at Santiago on the same day as us. Sometimes we’d go days without seeing them, but invariably we’d catch up, or they’d catch up, and we’d repeat the same prayer: “Friday, in Santiago! See you there.” I joked that ‘Friday in Santiago’ was beginning to sound a lot like Heaven: that glorious place where all the faces you’ve met along the road are there to greet you in the town square.
As it was for our little group of pilgrims, the world is now, for all of us, so much smaller, reduced to the people under our one roof. It is suddenly silly to ask, “How was school? How was work?” when you already know the answer. But our world is also suddenly so much bigger than we have known before. A doctor in Italy. A man in China as old as your father. A child in Washington gazing wistfully out a window at an empty street.
The most beautiful thing about walking the Camino is the knowledge that you are physically linked, step-by-step, to countless people, both in the present and throughout history, who have walked the very same road. Walking becomes a form of Communion.
When at last we walked into Santiago, the famous Cathedral was closed – we were unlucky pilgrims who chose to embark during a season of renovations – but it didn’t matter. It was Friday in Santiago, and everyone was there.
The liturgical year is itself a loop. As Lowell wrote recently, we know how the thing will end. It’s just that the present moment is forever no closer to the end than it is to the beginning. So much of what we do is just walking between the two, training ourselves to pay attention to the things that are good, the luggage that is worth carrying, the dream that is worth fighting for, and building up the endurance to lace up our boots in the morning and keep walking.