I was envious a few years ago when I heard that Paul Myers was walking El Camino, the ancient pilgrim way to Santiago de Compostella in northwest Spain. He travelled from Le Puy en Vallay, the town where the various pilgrimage routes through France met, to begin the journey into Spain and the long, hot slog to the shrine of St. James. Myers was, at that time, the minister of a Vancouver-area Presbyterian church and the whole venture seemed an enticing mixture of holiday and spiritual exercise, at least from my armchair. Recently, Myers wrote Rooster in the Cathedral, a description of his experiences on El Camino and I had the opportunity to speak with him about the book and about the spiritual journey it chronicles.
“Which section of the bookstore does it belong in,” I asked, “with the travel books, the religion section or elsewhere?” Myers replied that the publisher had labeled it a memoir, a book that tells a piece of the author’s life, a verdict he understands but does not entirely share. It certainly isn’t a travel book, though you will feel the heat of the Spanish sun, the grit on your face and, with imagination, the blisters on your feet. Don’t take it with you on the journey; it isn’t a guidebook and though not a heavy book in any sense of the word, it does weigh something. Myers admits that on the road he became obsessed by weight, even photocopying his guidebook and throwing pages away once he had passed a landmark. “Pilgrim, everything weighs something,” he reminds us, a truth of the spirit as well as of the backpack. But even that simple observation tells us what this book really is. It is actually “a tool to go about the business of reflecting on a spiritual journey.”
John Calvin, whose 500th anniversary our churches celebrated last year, lambasted “gadding about” on pilgrimage, but perhaps that harsh judgment belongs to his contentious time. By the way, one of the pilgrimage routes passed the front door of the house in which he grew up in Noyon, France. Perhaps his negative judgment was formed early. The Reformers objected to the idea that a pilgrimage to the shrine of a saint could be good work to earn God’s favour and earn remission of time in a purgatory to which the Bible bears no witness. Completion of the pilgrimage warranted 40 days relief, 200 days if the pilgrim’s procession was led by a mitered bishop, and if “it took place on the feast day of St. James, the exemption soared to 600 days.” Though commercial activity remains, it is now chiefly a matter of curios and mementos. That too is a reality that stretches back to the Middle Ages. In any case, today’s pilgrims on El Camino are by no means all practicing Catholics or even Christians. They walk for their own reasons, seeking God knows what. For some it is an opportunity for an inexpensive holiday; the “refugios,” Spartan pilgrim lodgings, cost very little. For most, the journey is more, however. In post-Christian Europe, El Camino is an exercise that bears testimony to a perennial thirst for the spiritual, which just might be an opening for evangelization in a society that has, for the most part, forgotten the church. Meeting, and in some cases meeting again, fellow pilgrims is a feature of El Camino and, through Myers’ mediation, the book also. In a book of ponder-worthy quotations, one of the most beautiful comes here, from the ancient poet Ovid, “Love will enter cloaked in friendship’s name.”
I asked Myers what part of the journey had been the most difficult for him, expecting him to reply that it was climbing the Pyrenees, the mountain range of near Rocky Mountain grandeur on the border of Spain and France. Not so. In fact, while climbing the mountain passes, he became lost and experienced at the hands of a shepherd driving an ancient vehicle, a “rattletrap miracle.” This Myers interprets as Providence and turns the experience into a testimony to the present activity of God in our lives and in the world. No, the hardest part of the journey was the Meseta, a high, nearly treeless, dry and, above all, hot plateau in northwest Spain. Here the reader too experiences the heat and blisters. Even here, however, there are moments of grace, such as cherries for unexpected sale in a grimy industrial suburb of one of the towns through which El Camino passes. Here, however, the author also reflects on the possibility of failure and loss. There is a difference between “false optimism and meaningful hope.” Sometimes loss and pain are so great that not even a “fleck of hope” remains. At that point, “Let there be others to hope for us.” Indeed, at times, fellow pilgrims provide just that hopeful encouragement.
One would like to claim that the church is the fellowship of those who hope for us when we cannot hope for ourselves. It is at this point, however, that Myers introduces the title metaphor of the book. In the Cathedral of Santo Domingo de la Calzado, the pilgrim is startled by the crowing of a rooster. High in the cathedral there hangs a cage with a live rooster and hen. This commemorates a highly unlikely 12th-century tale of a young pilgrim hanged, but miraculously preserved alive for many weeks, to the astonished delight of his parents. (To find out how poultry come into this, literally, fabulous story, you will have to read the book.) The point is not that medieval Catholics believed improbable tales. It is that at that time “the rooster meant something spiritual to them. Somehow the rooster helped them to think well of God.” That was then and this is now, but the rooster still crows in the cathedral. That could provoke a self-indulgent sense of Protestant superiority over the remains of medieval Catholicism, were it not for one unsettling question: “How many churches and their denominations, each in their own peculiar way, have some kind of anachronistic rooster crowing in their sanctuary?”
The Presbyterian Church in Canada, though not named, does not escape at this point. Myers does name our near fanatical attention to getting the exact wording of proposed changes to our rules of process just right, while congregations die around us. While care in legal process may not be, in my opinion, the worst of our Presbyterian characteristics, I would be hard pressed to deny the central charge. “Much of the traditional Church is dying because it does not deliver what people need. It is dying because it insists that we venerate a rooster of the past instead of searching for God in the present.” Still, as Myers insists, “anything can happen. Will there be a new Protestant Reformation, a next Evangelical Great Awakening?” At this point, Myers and I stopped talking about the book and started talking about the church. Now Myers is, in my opinion, one of the very best Presbyterian preachers around, but he is not at present in active ministry. That’s sad — we don’t have enough really good preachers in a church that gathers around the proclaimed word — and it has partly to do with those roosters. We Presbyterians had better name and do something about those roosters but I have no intention of sharing our private conversation here. If the book works for you as reader, however, this is exactly what will happen to you. You will enter a conversation with Myers about the state of your soul and the state of the church.
That leaves the reader of this review in too negative a place, however. This is a book about a pilgrimage and, in the end, at least some pilgrims arrive in Santiago and even beyond in Finisterre, the cape at the “land’s end” of the Roman world. And with arriving, there is joy. The rooster may be central in the book but it is not the final word. The last word is arrival, by the grace of one who is himself “Teacher, agitator, Camino.”
The book is ideal for bedtime reading; short chapter follows short chapter, experience and reflection in one-day legs of a literary and spiritual journey. It is daily spiritual stimulation, sometimes as niggling as a developing blister, sometimes as refreshing as a cool draft of water under the Spanish sun.
If you do plan on walking El Camino, use Google to find one of the many websites that describe the journey in detail. The best guidebook to the pilgrimage is in French not English. In the meantime, Myers extends to you the pilgrim’s greetings: “Buen Camino,” a good journey, and “Ultreia,” Onwards!
