Chairman's Report for 2009
The following report was delivered at the Confraternity's AGM on 30 January 2010, and will be published in a forthcoming Bulletin. You may quote reasonable extracts without permission, though we would appreciate an acknowledgement. For more substantial use, please contact the Secretary. |
It is customary for the Chairman to include in his Address to the Confraternity a list of people to be thanked. But today is the last occasion for me to speak with you as Chairman, and the list of those I would thank would be endless, so this year I have left it to Marion to name these people in her Report. I would like instead to share with you some of my wanderings in Jacobsland. Jacobsland ? Where is that ? Well, Magdalena Stork Gadea uses the term in one of her books to describe the land of Santiago. We were once shown a film called “Viaje en Jacobsland”, and more recently there has been a Galician CD of that title. The boundaries of Jacobsland are very elastic, and it certainly does not just mean Galicia. Everywhere that a pilgrim wanders, from his own front door, in search of St James, is Jacobsland, and it continues after he has returned to his front door. We all know the poem by Antonio Machado with the lines :
“Caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar”
which might be rendered “Wayfarer, there is no such thing as the way ; the way comes into being by walking it .” One could imagine Machado also saying of our Confraternity :
“Cofrade, no hay Cofradia,
se hace Cofradia al fraternizar”.
That is, our Confraternity comes into being through our fraternization. So I invite you today to share what the Camino has meant to me, what the Confraternity has meant to me, over my last few years in Jacobsland.
How were the seeds planted that were to turn me into a pilgrim ? Growing up on the island of Malta, one seed must have been planted by my grandmother who used to take me on local pilgrimages, to shrines such as the cave that contains an icon attributed to St Luke. These pilgrimages would have been like a Spanish romeria, but I remember little about them except that we went in a fleet of hired coaches. A more significant seed came later, when I was at a Benedictine school in Somerset, and the Film Society showed Bunuel’s film “La Voie Lactée” . Two tramps are making their way through France to Santiago when they meet a mysterious man in a Spanish cloak, the start of many surreal encounters with heretics from ages past. I knew also from my general reading of the importance of the pilgrimage. There was even a reference to Compostella in one of the Flanders and Swann revue sketches, so popular with me and my schoolmates.
So when I first encountered the Confraternity, seeing a poster in 1984, the year after its foundation, I knew of the pilgrimage and had even been to places on the route in France, such as Rocamadour and Toulouse. But I had never yet been to Spain. Santiago, goal of pilgrims for centuries, seemed a good place to start. Furthermore, I had recently moved into a parish of SS Philip and James, so it seemed appropriate – but I didn’t realize it was the wrong St James ! For these very nebulous reasons I joined the Confraternity. My walking at that time did not amount to much more than an afternoon stroll. And such was the first Confraternity event I remember going on, a walk from Cheltenham to the church of St James at Stoke Orchard, with its remarkable wall paintings of the life of St James. Most of the group, led by Pat Quaife, arrived in Cheltenham by train, but I arrived separately and held up a scallop shell for recognition.
It was not until 1987 that I made my first visit to Santiago, and to Spain, traveling by air in a very congenial group led by Pat on the occasion of the declaration by the Council of Europe that the Ways to Santiago were a European Cultural Itinerary. We stood in Galician rain outside the Puerta del Camino as the first of the Council’s stylized shell waymarks was unveiled. We followed the Prince of Liechtenstein as he made the offering to St James, were mesmerized by the botafumeiro, joined Mary Remnant in singing “Ad honorem Regis summi” as part of a pilgrim service, and joined with the Amis de St Jacques, led by Jeannine Warcollier, in exploring Galicia. I went again the following year with 2 friends, travelling the length of the Camino by car, to arrive in Santiago for Corpus Christi. A splendid procession but no botafumeiro, and we made quite a nuisance of ourselves to a certain Canon by enquiring for one.
By now, I was beginning to think that my next arrival in Santiago should be done in the traditional way, on foot. Being by now a general practitioner, it was clear I could only do it in stages. I bought my first walking boots and began some kind of training, but still had doubts as to whether I could set off unaided. So I signed up for a group which the Amigos del Camino of Navarre had organized, which would be setting out at the Easter of 1990, with transport for baggage, along the Via de la Plata. Alas, it was not to be. There were various difficulties in my Practice which combined to make me severely depressed. I had the good fortune to be helped by a good psychiatrist, Dr Klaus Bergmann, who, it turned out, had a home in France not far from the Chemin. So when I explained to him what I was intending to do in the next few weeks, I was astonished by his reply : “But the Road to Santiago doesn’t begin in Seville, it begins in Le Puy !” With great regret I cancelled that year’s pilgrimage. The words I had sung so often :
“There’s no discouragement
Shall make him once relent
His first avowed intent
To be a pilgrim”
sounded very bitterly. But Dr Bergmann left me with some hope, reassuring me that on the day I would arrive at Santiago, the satisfaction experienced would be unimpaired.
There was much hope and healing too to be found in the Confraternity. Pat by this time had succeeded James Maple as Chairman, and Marion Marples had succeeded Pat in 1989 as an incomparable Secretary. I had myself joined the Committee, with special responsibility for pilgrim clothing. There were contacts with the other countries in Jacobsland, such as the very congenial Conference in Brussels in the summer of 1990.
In 1991 I made new plans, to start the Le Puy route with a Waymark Tours group, led by Pat Quaife. Alas, another disappointment. The difficulties in my Practice had reached their culmination, making it impossible to go. I took instead to walking the pilgrim routes of England at weekends : the Confraternity’s St James’s Way from Reading to Southampton , the Pilgrims’ Way from Winchester to Canterbury, and then others of varying historical authenticity. Also 1991 was the year that our first refugio at Rabanal opened. I was not in the working party but in the idle party, that is the group led by Pat who were based at the Monastery of San Isidoro in Leon, and who drove up to Rabanal for the unforgettable inaugural celebrations : the Blessing by the Bishop of Astorga, the satisfaction of seeing the transformation achieved in the building by the efforts of so many. Maragato pipers and dancers swept up our bekilted member Ian Tweedie ; the vino espanol was enriched by Jesus Jato’s queimada. I brought back from that visit a notable souvenir. Seeing a man in a Leon street wearing a Spanish cloak, I made enquiries and bespoke one from a tailor of traditional costume. It is in the Leonese style, rather longer than the Castilian, and I have sometimes worn it at Confraternity events. Indeed, when I met our member Theresa Kassell once at St-Jean-Pied-de-Port, she referred to it as my robe of office. But there is nothing official about that cloak. It derived from my seeing “La Voie Lactee” “years ago, and is merely a flight of fancy.
At last in 1992 I was able to set foot on the Le Puy route, in a wonderfully congenial group of 11 people led by Pat Quaife, but that year she was leading us from Conques to Moissac, so I did not start at the beginning. Our luggage was carried for us, and it was noticed that I sent with the luggage the very touristy pilgrim staff I had bought in Conques, and only used it for swanning around at our destinations. One of our companions , with very penetrating insight, accused me of being a poseur. The following year I set out from Le Puy itself, as far as Conques, with Sue Morgan. No carrying of luggage this time ; as a graduate of Sue’s School of Belting and Bucklecraft I found I could carry a full-sized rucksack and became a fan of gites d’etape. The wonderful encounters we had included one with a Labrador dog, surely the dog of Saint Roch, who attached himself to us for some days. Our pilgrim records contain a very rare stamp : that of the Animal Protection Society in Espalion, where we finally left him. That evening, we arrived at the Hospitalite Saint Jacques in Estaing, that beautiful community, founded the previous year, by a small group of former pilgrims who had discerned their calling in life to be the welcoming of pilgrims. Their own pilgrimage, I found, had taken place in 1990, the year I had to cancel my intended first pilgrimage. I felt that in some mysterious way, though neither they nor I knew it in 1990, they had made the pilgrimage that year on my behalf. It was clear that Estaing would be the place where I would return, once I had reached Santiago, to serve as an hospitalier.
In 1994 I felt ready, as ready as any pilgrim ever is, to set out alone on the next stage, from Moissac. At the end of my first day, I was walking up a hill into the village of Auvillar, and heard a voice address me from a balcony , in English (for the voice’s owner had judged from my somewhat laden appearance that I was English ) giving me instructions to join him in the gite. This was Jacques Camusat, veteran pilgrim and mountaineer, aged 74 that year, who was to be a dear friend until his sudden death in the Alps at the age of 87. An often infuriating friend, to be known to many in the Confraternity as “the dreaded Camusat”. Jacques and I walked on together, and the next morning, as so many mornings, he made us fall badly behind schedule by the length of time he spent in the Post Office, lightening his load by sending parcels of surplus clothing to Madame Jeanne Debril, the formidable regulator of pilgrims at St-Jean-Pied-de-port. He would also accost Mayors and urge them to provide fax machines for the use of pilgrims. I made a few attempts to escape from Jacques, but he always caught up with me, and, of course by the time we reached St-Jean, where I would end, but he would continue, we were firm friends. There, in spite of our insalubrious appearance, we were admitted for a splendid meal at the Hotel des Pyrenees, and he had his famous quarrel with Madame Debril, whom he accused of stealing some of the socks he had been posting to her. (Happily, they were reconciled later.) Jacques continued on into Spain, but he had been stirred by my account of the founding of the CSJ, and was determined to become, as he termed it, an “honourable member”. I was to see much of him over the years, at Confraternity events such as the walk through the Baztan valley later that year, and at his home near Paris, where his wife Anne was something of a calming influence.
It took me two years to complete the Spanish section of the Camino, with a break at Burgos. Getting off the train at St-Jean-Pied-de Port in the late morning, I doubted whether I could make it that day to Roncesvalles, but Madame Debril reassured me that I could. I made it to Roncesvalles just as the evening Mass was beginning – as you may read on page 54 of Nancy Frey’s “Pilgrim Stories”. I met many fine companions on that two-week stretch, and my last night at San Juan de Ortega, with the late Don Josemaria dispensing his famous garlic soup to us, was a veritable last supper. ( I commend to you the recipe for garlic soup in the Confraternity’s book “Que Aproveche”. You too can create a San Juan de Ortega feast). I was supported on this 2-year stretch by a magnificent bi-node pilgrim staff carved for me by Peter Fitzgerald. Flying out to Madrid the second year Iberia managed to lose the staff, but delivered it to me the following day at the Burgos refugio. As the Lost Luggage man put it : “Un baculo de peregrino : Importantisimo !” At last I arrived at Rabanal as a pilgrim. The hospitaleros were our American members, the distinguished scholar Annie Shaver-Crandell and her husband Keith. And – joy!-also there were Joe and Pat May. Joe who had been involved with the Gaucelmo project virtually from the start, co-ordinating hospitaleros, member of working parties, spread-eagled on the barn roof replacing tiles ; Joe, God rest his soul, who went to his reward just a few weeks ago ; and Pat, la peregrina, his support in all these activities, and in the illness of his last years. On to Villafranca del Bierzo, arriving very late and finding the Jato family seated around their supper, an industrial-sized tin of tuna. “You’re a bit late for a pilgrim” said Jesus Jato, “come in and join us.” Then the climb up to O Cebreiro, and happily our Chairman, Laurie Dennett, dividing her time as she does between London and Cebreiro, was there to welcome me in the ancient Hospederia. On 13 July 1996 I reached Santiago and collected my compostela. The postcards I sent my friends quoted T.S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi” : “it was (you may say) satisfactory.”
What does one do after reaching Santiago ? Will one be afflicted by post-Camino syndrome ? I was. The Confraternity was a solace. “Se hace la Cofradía al fraternizar.” And there was more pilgrimage : the pilgrimage along St James’s Way, from Southampton to Reading and Marlow, with our French friends from the Pyrénéés Atlantiques, led by our dearly missed Stephen Badger. Howard Nelson and I, for a completely different experience, even made the pilgrimage to Mount Athos.
And I made advances along two more of the routes to Santiago, from Calais and from Arles. I had set out from Calais some time before, one Bank Holiday weekend which was just enough time to reach Boulogne. As time allowed over the following years, I continued the route into Paris, and then on through Tours and down into the Saintonge. It was to the North of Paris that, on two occasions, my scallop shell was recognized by angels – as I have described in our booklet “Roads to Santiago”. The Arles route I found less frequented than the Le Puy route, so that the acts of kindness received there seemed even more personal. And what better summing up of the nature of pilgrimage can there be than the words called out to me, in a Gascon accent I shall not attempt to copy, by an old woman working in her field : “Vous faites le Chemin ? Vous faites le bien !”
So I continued to be a pilgrim. And also, for the first time, to give something back as an hospitalier at the Hospitalité St-Jacques in Estaing, where the families at the heart of the community continue their pilgrim spirit with a wonderful sense of dependence on Providence. After a while, I could take my turn in the rota to be the person for “accueil”, greeting the pilgrims as they arrive. At the community meeting next morning, the person for “accueil” is asked to report to the others his experiences under two categories : Difficulties and Wonders (rather good categories for considering all one’s experiences in life.) And so it came about that I reported the Wonder of having been on accueil duty when the bell rang and I found Alison Raju, wearing two rucksacs, as she walked the route to revise her guides to the Le Puy route.
An involvement in another aspect of hospitality was to begin in 2003, when I had been elected to succeed Laurie Dennett as your Chairman. Once a year the Committee have a less formal meeting, in somebody’s garden, as an opportunity for “blue sky thinking”, and the meeting in 2003 was discussing the problem of overcrowding on the Camino frances. Could we do something positive by improving the facilities on one of the other routes ? A meeting was held on Valentine’s Day 2004 to consider the possibilities, our choice gradually was focused down to the Northern Ruta de la Costa and we were offered the Casa Rectoral in Miraz, which began receiving pilgrims in 2005,and was blessed on behalf of the Bishop of Lugo in 2006. You are all familiar with the work that has been done at Miraz, and you are about to hear about the latest developments from Colin Jones who co-ordinates it all. All this without in any way lessening the Confraternity’s commitment to our refuge at Rabanal. “Se hace la Cofradía al fraternizar”.
I was granted a new direction for pilgrimage and hospitality in 2004, when John Hatfield drove me to Vézelay to attend a meeting of people giving hospitality on that route. I had long heard of the difficulties of the Vézelay route, aptly likened to a desert. I found at that meeting that the desert had flowered, thanks to the Amis de St-Jacques of the Vézelay route and their dynamic founders Monique and the late Jean-Charles Chassain. The encounter with Vézelay itself, its Basilica of St Mary Magdalen, and the sublime liturgies of the twin communities of Brothers and Sisters of Jerusalem was overwhelming too. We were shown a refuge at Corbigny about to open. Estaing by this time was well supplied with hospitaliers, so I offered myself as the first hospitalier at Corbigny, and also began walking the route. John has made the beauties of that route well known to our members, and several other Confraternity members have been hospitaliers in the refuges along the route.
So, why do we go on pilgrimage ? At the heart of all our pilgrimages is an experience of, a search for the Divine. But which of us can look on the face of God and live ? So, pilgrimage for most of us involves a process of disguise and of insulation from that unbearable reality. Like layers of insulation around a live electric wire, we prefer to say that we make the pilgrimage because of an interest in history, in culture, in music, in the beauties of nature. And, of course, for the sake of fellowship, “al fraternizar” . I thank all of you for the fellowship I have known in Jacobsland. The fellowship of pilgrims is more than just insulation.It enables us at times to remove some of those layers. In the conversations along the road and in the refugios, pilgrims may dare to remove some of their disguises, their masks, their cloaks. It was the boisterous, the dreaded Jacques Camusat who first took me to Chartres, and also he who introduced me, with tears in his eyes, to Charles Péguy, the poet of the Chartres pilgrimages. “La présentation de la Beauce a Notre Dame” describes just such a process of pilgrims laying down their disguises, their masks, and their cloaks :
« Quand nous aurons joués nos derniers personnages,
Quand nous aurons posé la cape et le manteau,
Quand nous aurons jeté le masque et le couteau,
Veuillez vous rappeler nos longs pèlerinages. »
William Griffiths