Lately I have been thinking a great deal about the concept of pilgrimage as a spiritual exercise. In part this is because my wife and I are in the final stages of planning a six-week trip that will take us to a number of significant holy sites-Lindisfarne in England and the Greek island of Patmos, as well as to Skye in Scotland, my ancestral homeland. Now to be honest, we’re doing this more as travellers than as pilgrims. With my 13-year-old stepdaughter in tow, we’ll drive across the causeway to Lindisfarne and stay there in an inn, which is hardly the stuff of a medieval pilgrimage. And while my heart might be set on visiting Corinth, she’s insisting that we can’t visit Greece without a stop on Santorini.
But it is not just the prospect of travel that has placed pilgrimage on my mind. On July 3, 2008, the Canadian violinist Oliver Schroer succumbed to leukemia. Schroer was in his early 50s, and had enjoyed a successful career as a solo artist, crossing folk and roots with various other musical influences, and gaining a loyal following in Canada and well beyond. His battle with leukemia was fairly short; it was less than 18 months from diagnosis to death, but even during that time he continued to record (Hymns and Hers, a project he described as “an album of hymns and introspective ensemble pieces”) and to play concerts. The final concert of his life took place on June 5, 2008, less than a month before his death.
It is not Hymns and Hers that is relevant here, but rather the 2006 Camino album, a beautifully packaged audio journal of the 1000-kilometre pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago that the musician made in 2004. Accompanied by his wife and two friends, Schroer packed along his violin and portable recording equipment, and created atmospheric and evocative improvised pieces in churches and on roadsides along the walk. One of the friends on the pilgrimage was the photographer Peter Coffman, and his work is presented in the 28-page CD booklet, offering visual illumination to the recordings.
Pilgrimage seems to be somewhat in fashion in our day, and a quick online search will turn up dozens of books written about the Camino experience. Among them are books by New Age hero Shirley MacLaine (The Camino: A Journey of the Spirit), as well as a brand-new one by Mennonite theologian Arthur Paul Boers entitled The Way is Made by Walking: A Pilgrimage Along the Camino de Santiago. I have read two Camino books: Joyce Rupp’s Walk in a Relaxed Manner: Life Lessons from the Camino, which is a mature and solidly liberal catholic reflection on the experience, and Fumbling: A Journey of Love, Adventure, and Renewal on the Camino de Santiago, a much less seasoned work by the young writer Kerry Egan, in which she explores issues ranging from her father’s death to her romance with her travelling companion to her struggles to believe in God. Between these two works, I came to think that I had at least some appreciation of the diversity and complexity of the pilgrim quest, yet it was not until I heard Schroer’s work that I came to understand the deep appeal of such a journey.
I actually wonder if the title of Boers’s book, The Way is Made by Walking, wouldn’t have been a better title for the Camino album. That title is so similar to the sentiments of St. Augustine when he said, “it is solved by walking,” catches wonderfully the heart of Schroer’s project, and in a very real sense anticipates how he faced his own death.
In an interview with Toronto Star reporter Diane Flacks, Schroer spoke of death as being the “waterfall we’re all facing.” “We’re all dying, you know,” he remarked, and then in response to a question about what he expected of death, he said this:
“At the moment we pass through that portal, things rearrange themselves so thoroughly [that] it cannot make any sense to us now. I have the feeling that, at the moment that I slip across, it will make ultimate sense. And I’m not going to look back.”
This strikes me as being less the stuff of the soft New Age mysticism that would characterize someone like Shirley MacLaine, and more akin to what the medievals would have called “a good death.” With time to prepare to die-with time to put one’s life in perspective and one’s soul in order-death can be faced with calm confidence.
I can only speculate here-and I suppose such speculation might be either naive or irresponsible-but if one has listened carefully to Camino, it is not hard to imagine that the long walk had something to do with Schroer being able to die well. And actually, you have to more than just listen to this album: you must hear it, savour it, pour over the photographs, and dwell on the gently poetic liner notes. It is not an album for background listening, nor is it particularly one that can be listened to in any way other than something like prayerful solitude. I have sat out on my screened porch on a summer night and heard it. I have walked through the woods while it played on my little MP3 player. I have prayed with it while sitting in the garden at St. John’s Abbey in Minnesota. Each time, I find myself walking with that little company along a dusty pilgrim’s road, and each time I’m a little richer for it.
To return briefly to my travel plans, I suspect that part of what might happen in this trip is that I’ll find my appetite whetted for a return visit, and one that will be built around walking St. Cuthbert’s Way or spending time exploring life in a place like Taizé, or maybe even out on the long road that is the Camino. Maybe I’ll be made a little more deeply aware of how it is that “the way is made by walking,” or at least be recalled to the truth that our lives should not be seen not as static or settled things but rather as a way. If I can trust that insight-if I can trust the promise of the One who named himself as the Way (and the Truth and the Life), then like the Canadian violinist whose theological work was executed in the doing of his music more than by anything he actually said or wrote, an enacted theology and a good death lie on my horizon as well.
