The End of the Journey

 T. S. Eliot suggests that the end of all our life’s journeys is to arrive home and to know the place for the first time. (See “Little Gidding.”) There is a sense in which we are always students, but our subject-matter is not really history or culture or mathematics or engineering or any other such matter that’s “out there.” Rather, we are learning about what’s right around us, our home, the place in which we are who we are. You leave home in order to understand home. You go away so that you can come back. And what you bring with you when you return is not knowledge about some other place, but rather something much more humble, something, really, much smaller.

Samwise Gamgee was part of the great quest to destroy the ring of power. In his journeys he met people of vastly different sorts. He had his own subsidiary role in the great struggle of his time between good and evil. But how wise it is, how true, that his story ends with him greeting his wife and children at his door. “I’m back,” he says, and (as I recall, I don’t have the book with me) those are the final words of the very long book. (See J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings.)

I write these words from Santiago, at the end of the road. I arrived yesterday in rain, and this morning am mostly dry (for which I give thanks). I saw the west facade of the vast cathedral yesterday, with Santiago—Saint James—as pilgrim high above. Today I hope to pray at his tomb, which will be the true end of this journey. By the time you read these words, I am likely to have left this city for another; I might be in Madrid, or even back in Dallas, the place which for nearly eight years has been home to me. I don’t think I’ll know Dallas as if for the first time, but there is something about home that I feel more strongly now than before walking the Camino. 

To walk day after day on the Way to Santiago has something to do with the battle, which is really a cosmic battle, between good and evil. Saint James is depicted here not only as our fellow pilgrim but also (if somewhat disturbingly) as Matamoros, the Moor-slayer. The Camino is rooted in the historic battles to protect Christianity in Spain, battles in which (one must acknowledge) there were mixed motives all around. That history is a chapter, but not the only chapter, in the struggle of right and wrong that will never be resolved until Christ returns. The Camino thus invites the pilgrim to contemplate this deep struggle between right and wrong and to wonder about his participation in it. That is to say, among other things, the Camino is an invitation to a soul-struggle.

Every one of us is engaged, in some subsidiary way, in the struggle of good and evil. Ultimately this is the effort to join with the apostles (like Saint James) to make a place for the gospel to be seen and heard. So we make crosses. We remember the meal and the death. We erect churches. We ponder the mystery that Jesus had enemies, and, with Jesus, we pray for them. We walk. We try to purify our own deeds and the motivations behind them.

All of this, it seems to me, is not far away and long ago. It is at hand now. In a complex and mysterious and wonderful way it makes possible for us to have a home.

— 

    Out & About: I am to preach on May 26, Trinity Sunday, at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Dallas. And the next Good Books & Good Talk seminar will be at St. Matthew’s on June 2, on Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro.

 

Posted by The Rev. Canon Dr. Victor Lee Austin with

Coming 'Round the Mountain

The author of a widely read guidebook on the Camino Francés does not like walking through cities. It’s understandable that he holds this view, since much of the good of a pilgrimage is to get outside our usual life—and most of us can do that more easily when we are removed from the distractions of cities. In addition, cities are often ugly. The roofless stone structure that seems abandoned in a pasture speaks still of an earlier time, a simpler age, a slower and less artificial life; whereas a boarded up, graffiti-covered building from the mid-20th century is just ugly and sad.

Call me stubborn, but I like walking through cities. (Apart from this, however, I find the guidebook helpful in both practical detail and spiritual insight, and I’m grateful to the author, the late John Brierley, for his important work as a friend of the Camino in its resurgence over the last several decades.) Even in their dreary parts, even in their oppressiveness, cities are still important; they are one of the “layers” I’ve written about, and they are worth walking through, perhaps especially when one is on a pilgrimage.

I think the Camino is an experience that one needs to submit to as a whole, and not pick and choose the agreeable parts. Let me show you what I mean. First picture: You are getting close to León; there are cars and buildings of various sorts and large stores with parking lots and names like “Brico Depot”; it becomes easy to feel you are losing your soul. And then you climb along the hillside above the traffic, and the hill falls away, and you turn to look to your right: and there is the great city lying before you. It is still far away, but you are so high you can see just about all of it. You pick out the old city center, and rising above it, distinguishable although too far away for your phone’s camera to catch it, the cathedral, Gothic, magnificent. I stopped. Others stopped. We all tried to take pictures. But the pictures were nothing like the reality. We were breathless as we saw modern commerce put in its place and ancient religious aspiration rise over it all.

It will take you still an hour of walking, but eventually you will reach that cathedral and enter its gates.

— 

Second picture: You are entering the mountains of the final part of the Camino. Here the land is green and cool; it looks, you think, like the Shire. The next day it is raining; you walk through mud and, perforce, have to keep your attention on your feet. The next morning it is raining still, at times even harder, yet your slippery ascent continues. Then the rain lets up. You reach a turning point at the top of a hill. You step a bit to the side of the trail. The clouds have lifted: all around you, in every direction, are mountains. The view is truly panoramic. Your eyes tear up and you say to those nearby, “This is why we are here!”

The words just sprang out from me. I think what I meant was: we are here, on this earth, to praise God. Sometimes it happens when you come around the mountain and see the heart of a city; sometimes it happens when you make a turn and see distant mountains everywhere. 

In the end, I think, we will take our final turn around the mountain and suddenly see the Son of God in his true glory. To see, to give thanks, to be taken out of ourselves: This is why we are here.

— 

    Hymnody: I’ve been trying to memorize “All My Hope on God Is Founded.” These lines seem particularly relevant to what I have just written:

    “Daily doth th’almighty Giver / Bounteous gifts on us bestow. / His desire our soul delighteth, / Pleasure leads us where we go.”

    And then about praising God for these daily bounteous gifts:

    “Still from man to God eternal / Sacrifice of praise be done, / High above all praises praising / For the gift of Christ His Son.”

    To praise God above all else for Christ is why we are here.

— 
    Out & About: I am soon to emerge from the Camino, preaching on May 26, Trinity Sunday, at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Dallas. And the next Good Books & Good Talk seminar will be at St. Matthew’s on June 2, on Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro.

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The Rev. Canon Victor Lee Austin. Ph.D., is the Theologian-in-Residence for the diocese and is the author of several books including, "Friendship: The Heart of Being Human" and "A Post-Covid Catechesis.: 

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