The Camino to Santiago tends to bring out the best in those who tackle it, writes Wilf Jones.
For most people, putting one foot in front of the other is something they take for granted. My iPhone tells me that five friends and I did so about 204,000 times each during Easter week this year, treading the ancient pilgrim road between Vigo and Santiago de Compostela, the last six days of the “Portuguese” route of the famous Camino. Being in my twenties (just) and in good health, there’s not usually any reason for joy in the act of taking a step. It’s just something I do. While I can’t say that I paid attention to every step I took, it brought back the experiences of long lockdown walks and gave me a chance to process some of the last few years.
Following a network of ancient trading routes, the pilgrimage to Santiago finishes beneath the high altar of the cathedral, in front of the relics of the apostle St James the Great. First popularised in the 11th and 12th centuries, the number of pilgrims waned until it was resurrected by the Francoist government in the 1950s. Reading about the recent history of Spanish Catholicism along the way, the historical tensions of this ritual walk became part of the experience.
The group that I was with was perhaps a little unusual in that we met singing together in a chapel choir at university. Having not sung together for years, we had arranged with some of the churches on the route that we would stop to sing for their Masses. When we arrived at our first hostel in Arcade, the Visitation sister who ran it showed us to our room and said we were welcome to practise in the garden. As we wrapped up our first rehearsal, she surprised us by asking (through Google translate) if we would sing some motets at Mass that evening. We did so, surreptitiously filmed by the sisters on their phones, who then sent the video to the countertenor on WhatsApp and struck up a conversation.
Of the group, two of us arrived in Spain fresh from the triduum: mine with the Norbertines in Peckham, and a friend at the Anglican parish of All Saints in Fulham. The others sit in the position of many who take part in church music. They have a love for the music, and an affection for some of the moral and cultural aspects of Christianity, but they don’t believe in God and have some points of opposition to the Church’s teaching and role in society. They don’t chat with nuns on WhatsApp. Church musicians make the best atheists because they genuinely listen to what we claim each Sunday. The Camino opened a space where we could talk as friends about politics, faith, spirituality and personal contradiction.
In our rucksacks, we carried copies of John Taverner’s Dum transisset Sabbatum, along with some later polyphony. Taverner, the first organist of what is now Christ Church, Oxford, was pardoned of his minor dalliance with Lutheranism for the same reason as the later (and more ideologically committed) organist of St George’s Chapel, Windsor, John Merbecke: that he was nothing more than a musician. If the inquisitors had walked a few miles with him, perhaps they would have found a more complex person.
Dum transisset Sabbatum certainly has no hint of Lutheranism. Richly Catholic in its textures and idiom, it sets the Matins Responsory for Easter Sunday, presenting the myrrhbearers stepping towards the tomb. What makes it such a captivating piece isn’t the soaring topline, nor the word painting of the sweet-smelling spices, but the momentary hiatus between the sections. In the right acoustic, the music dies away as the women come to anoint the body and it’s as if the whole building gasps with the choir’s breath at the emptiness that greets them, and explodes with one of the greatest “alleluias” ever written.
Although pilgrims had stopped along the way to listen to us rehearse it in the tiny chapel of St Martha outside Pontevedra, the first time we really sang the Taverner in public was at the incongruously dedicated church of St Thomas Becket in Caldas de Reis. Becket had completed the pilgrimage to Santiago in 1167 after a mission to Rome, and stopped in the spa town to take the waters. As the lines of polyphony wove in and out of each other, it became apparent how much we were relying on each other in our singing as well as our walks. We were listening to each other, giving space for others’ melodies to come out of the texture, encouraging one another, knowing the right times to be more expressive and when to play down our part. In our singing we were experiencing the perfect versions of our relationships and learning how to be with each other. This came out in Padrón, where (aside from me burning some peppers), we sat in the garden of the hostel with a bottle of sherry and laughed until we cried.
At the end of our Camino, we sang for the Saturday-evening pilgrim Mass at the cathedral and met with the Auxiliares Parroquiales sisters who organise the world heritage site’s liturgies. After Mass, the sister who welcomed us recalled singing the same alleluia chant on Divine Mercy Sunday in her noviciate. Because music exists in time and in the mind rather than as dimensions in space, it has that power of drawing different moments in our memory together into the present. Talking with the organ scholar, the sister invited us to sing the whole Mass the following morning. On the Sunday, the celebrant (for whom polyphony would not have been in keeping with the liturgical tastes of his youth) spoke of how music that is integral to the liturgy draws us into prayer, comparing the liturgy in which we were participating with those where the music is like an “aperitif”.
At the end, he announced an impromptu period of exposition so that we could hang onto that moment with God that we’d enjoyed in the liturgy. And so a largely secular bunch of twenty-somethings, in trainers and smart concert clothes, sang to the source and summit of all creation about our souls longing for God as the deer longs for the water brook. I don’t know what the others were thinking at that moment, but it felt as though – if only for that moment – no one sang a word of a lie. The Camino holds together personal, inter-personal and epochal tensions because, as trite as it might sound, putting one foot in front of the other matters as well as the ultimate destination.
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