Pilgrim Stories by Nancy Louise Frey
PRUSAK, BERNARD G.
Pilgrim Stories On and off the Road to Santiago Nancy Louise Frey Bernard G. Prusak Three years ago I walked 1,000 miles across France and Spain in the company of strangers. What brought us...
...The pilgrimage, which many presentday pilgrims call the Camino or "Way," runs down through the Basque country and back up through Castile...
...Some talk of the pilgrimage's historical interest, say, its role in the development of the concept of Europe...
...As she remarks, "pilgrims frequently have a difficult time explaining why they are making the pilgrimage...
...To begin with the basics, Santiago is Saint James...
...The pilgrimage brings people together, but it also drives people apart...
...not the least reason is that there are so many different and conflicting answers to this question...
...As she understands it, the reanimation of the pilgrimage bespeaks "an unspoken lack" and a need to escape the "disheartening aspects of modern society," among others the domination of technology and the breakdown of community...
...She further argues that the meaning of the pilgrimage is constructed, deconstructed, reconstructed along the way...
...Here it may be worth noting that, though pilgrims come from far and wide, the pilgrimage is on the whole 23...
...influences what he or she finds, values, criticizes, or rejects...
...Motives change because, for many, the pilgrimage takes on a life of its own...
...Legend has it that the tomb of Saint James, abandoned and forgotten, was rediscovered by a hermit sometime in the ninth century...
...As the anthropologist Nancy Louise Frey documents in her new book, the pilgrimage has been resurrected from the dead to life in a new and perplexing form...
...Still others won't talk at all, because they're afraid of what other pilgrims might say or think, because they don't know what they themselves think, or because they couldn't care less what motivates other pilgrims and don't want to hear about it...
...Frey suggests that the "wish for transformation" may be what most draws people to the pilgrimage...
...The saint's body was subsequently translated to Spain in a stone boat...
...Walking the five hundred or so miles from the Pyrenees generally takes between four and ten weeks...
...41 to 44...
...After Pentecost, James was sent by the Virgin Mary to preach to the Iberians...
...She asks two basic questions: Why people today do it, and what they're "saying about the world," explicitly or implicitly, in doing so...
...What brought us together was that we were all doing something rather strange, namely making a medieval pilgrimage to the tomb of a saint who next to nobody today believes is entombed there...
...The pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in northwest Spain—to the tomb of the Apostle Saint James the Greater, son of Zebedee and brother of John— has enjoyed all kinds of strange fortunes in its twelve-hundred-year history, and the last thirty or so years have brought yet another surprising turn...
...He was not, however, very successful in his mission, and also evidently not very persevering, for Acts 12:2 records his death back in Jerusalem during the persecutions of Herod Agrippa, who ruled from a.d...
...Frey makes this point somewhat clumsily: "The pilgrimage is a 'realm of competing discourses' in which each person's life-world (personal, social, cultural, etc...
...But the pilgrimage also builds people up in ways they had not expected...
...Motives...change over the course of the Camino," she writes, as pilgrims struggle with the question of what they're doing and why...
...Frey gives order to this cacophony...
...Others won't stop talking about the pilgrimage's symbolism...
...I call the modern pilgrimage a journey of the suffering soul," writes Frey...
...How Saint James got to northwest Spain is told by another tale, which seems to have originated in the seventh century...
...In this wish she further discerns both a "critique of modern society" and the deeper meaning of the pilgrimage's reanimation...
...The meaning of the pilgrimage today is not any simpler than the legends about its origins, but here is where Fray's book is helpful...
...In 1996, when I was making my pilgramage, Frey reports "between 23,218 and 30,000 pilgrims made it to Santiago" by foot, bicycle, or horse...
...During this time and across this space (mountains and plains and mountains again), suffering of some kind—physical or psychic or both—is for most people inevitable...
...Santiago de Compostela is a city of 87,000, about thirty-five miles from the Atlantic and fifty north of Portugal, in the region of Galicia...
Vol. 126 • May 1999 • No. 10
