2. The Beginning of the Camino

Pilgrims' mass in Roncesvalles, From Tauxu2000

I went to the pilgrims mass in Roncesvalles in 10 languages. I had a feeling the priest was showing off a little and only pretending to speak Japanese. I pride myself on my fluent Spanish and I swear he did say.

All non-Catholics can join in with the mass.

That must mean, I thought, that I finally get to eat the host, not as an ingredient of hand-crafted Mexican confectionery, with caramelized peanuts, but eat it with full symbolic force.

This may help me understand the religious significance of the walk to Santiago de Compostela - as a method actor might.  I convinced myself.


So I stood up, dizzy from the coach trip and altitude, and and ate the transubstantiated flesh of The Christ.

Well that was very generous of them; to share a bit of their God.

Then I realised I had made a mistake. In fact, I realised I was making the mistake as soon as I stood up. Of course I shouldn't be doing this! I was wrong. You have to be baptised, confirmed and confessed first, before you join  in at this point of a mass.

I am not even baptised because my parents were young romantics, inspired by the ideas of communism and anti-colonialism in Africa. They were also vegetarians for a while. My grandmother was worried by the effect this woud have on my constituion and so, in secret fed me from tubs of chicken liver and schmaltz at the bottom of the garden, when I was three. "Poor thing, she said. You wolfed it down."

The start of my walk was propitious, or it augured disaster, or it was a spiritual faux pas. I was sure there must be a 'waifer waiver' in the Catholic doctrine somewhere that  said.  

In case of accidental consumption of a consecrated wafer, don't panic. 

I married a Catholic and my children are Catholics and I used to go to church to keep my family company and I did everything with them except genuflect and say the creed until, one day, a priest in my wife's home town, Uruapan, an unpleasant, ungenerous creature of indeterminate sex, said:

He said. Don't hang around Catholics and come to mass if you aren't Catholic.

I stopped going. Consequently, thanks to that fool, I have missed  out on a fair part of my children's spiritual life. If he had said that in London of course, and non-Catholics had listened to him, the churches would be echoing. Catholic churches in England are brimming with the spouses of Catholics. These people try to win brownie points with God, without being able to completely submit to religion's dictates.

Whenever my wife loses something she offers masses in return for finding it again. One mass, two masses, three masses, four masses. When we first met there were masses for her dead homosexual friend Alberto. More recently for my German Grandmother, a Lutheran in the end and for my parents. We need some help with a house purchase.

The British Archbishop, Rowan Williams  comes out and says: "God has no need of us and we fool ourselves to think he does.@ He echoes C. S. Lewis who said that the love of a parent for his children is the only love that approaches the divine.

We give nothing to God and God gives everything to us. Really? Then this British God is a cold God, a damp squib. He doesn't need his children's love according. Maybe Williams projects his own upbringing using the sputtering gas lamp of Anglican theology.

God gave us everything so we should be truly grateful for what we receive and not mind when God takes it all back again. When we are tortured to death by hunger or cancer, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's or Osteoporosis  we should show British Phlegm and mutter something along the lines of.

'Well, it was jolly nice while it lasted.'

Which reminds me  of a fatuous statement my grandfather used to repeat that he tried to create as a self replicating thought:

We'll never die of hunger, will we. Philly? He used to say.

He's dead now, but my retort should have been: Who, exactly, is 'we' Grandpa? 

You and me? Were you including my mother in that statement, who nearly died of malnutrition during the war?  How about her Grandmother starved in the Prague Ghetto. How about the people both parents saw dying in famines in Ethiopia and Maharashtra? Who the hell did you mean, when you said 'We' Grandpa John?

Of course I knew what he meant. That we children should have been more grateful and aware all that our parents and forebears did together to enable 'Us' to eat. Perhaps he should have chosen his words better.

In any event, if you ask most of the pilgrims on the way why they walk most of them turn out to be devotees of Aleister Crowley and Rabelais - they are gnostics at best.

Why do you walk to Santiago? I asked them all.

To reflect on my life. To be on my own. To meditate on my life. Some of them saidwent. Nothing about God there.

And sure enough, these Europeans, walking to Santiago, were taking sharp little bites out of the Marian- Christian religion, and in doing so they were vampirically nurturing their adolescent psyches.

The way to Santiago is about Me.

So I had 30 days to reflect on Me along with most of the other pilgrims. Europeans finding an excuse to walk the Catholic way, and too embarrassed to admit their Christianity.

Of course there is an associated cautionary  tale. On the way to Santiago on a mountain ridge called O Cebreiro there is a church - where I left a candle burning. It's run by Benedictines and there, many years ago a faithless priest prepared mass in midwinter and assumed that no one would come.

What for he said. It's not worth it. And anyway, I don't believe in this transubstantiation guff.

But one farmer did make his way through the wind and snow to come to mass and so the priest held the mass, rather irritated. Whereupon the host turned into the bloody, dripping flesh  of Christ and the goblet of wine turned into blood.

In a way, one wishes the same on all these seekers of self along the Camino de Santiago. That it would turn to real flesh and blood in their mouths. And I wished this for myself too. That my dry philosophy would transform, and fill up with a little Christian sap.