OPINION: Last week the President walked across Spain on the Camino de Santiago de Compostela
PRESIDENT MARY McAleese will resume her official duties as President today when she hosts a reception in the Áras for Ireland’s Grand Slam rugby team. I expect it will be a pleasant occasion for all concerned – due recognition by our first citizen for a marvellous achievement in the name of Ireland.
For much of the past week, however, the President has been doing something in private which, no offence to the team, I think will live with her long after that unforgettable drop goal kicked them all into the history books.
Early last week, McAleese got herself to Sarria, a provincial city in Galicia, northwest Spain. From there, she and her husband Martin and some friends walked 112 kilometres west to Santiago de Compostela, following the Camino, a path trod by tens of millions of people over millennia.
Christian pilgrims have been doing the Camino since the ninth century at least (when remains, said to be of the Apostle James, were proclaimed found in Santiago) but the tradition of pilgrimage to Galicia predates the find by many centuries. In pagan times, when it was believed the souls of the dead lay with the setting sun, people flocked to Finisterra (the end of the earth) just west of Santiago on Spain’s Atlantic coast.
The reasons for doing the Camino are varied and usually quite personal. The President is known to be a very religious and spiritual person. She’s also a great walker. So the Camino was a win-win for her.
Something similar did it for me a year ago when I walked 310km from Leon to Santiago with my daughter, Natasha. We often talk about it still: the people we met; the rain, snow and sunburn; the simplicity of eating and sleeping in refugios (pilgrim hostels); and the vibrancy of nature.
Now, the absence of an ’09 car or not enough money to buy just what you want, when you want it – now all of that matters less. In boom times or recession, the Camino imposes a healthier perspective than the advertising agencies. I hope Mary McAleese talks a little of her Camino because I strongly suspect she could say things that would ring true for many people right now.
I got an e-mail the other day from a friend, a 74-year-old man walking the Camino for the sixth time. He tried to explain its appeal, how it led to “a meditative or contemplative experience . . . What meaning one gives this could be called a grace,” he wrote. The elements of this were a substantial period (six to eight hours) of strenuous physical effort each day; silence; a simple life with few outside responsibilities and simple material requirements; and the physical rhythm of walking.
“More and more, as the Camino goes on,” he wrote, “I find myself nodding and swaying to the regular beat of my feet and my walking sticks . . . when the whole of my walking ensemble is hanging just right, working just right, bag hangs so that I am barley aware of it, my feet are supported so comfortably in my boots, my sticks are extended to the appropriate length so that they work in tandem with the opposite foot. When all of these elements are present I easily slip into a – what to call it? – a trance, a meditative state at times leading to a wonderful feeling of peace . . . At times when I come out of one of these states I do not remember what I had been thinking about, if anything.”
*Clarification: Last week in this space, I wrote critically about the US TV channel Fox News and the platform it gives to rabid neo-conservative commentators who spew bile at Barack Obama. It now appears that their incessant bleatings ("Obama is a socialist! A socialist!" they shriek) may not be falling on deaf ears.
According to a new Rasmussen poll, 37 per cent of Americans under age 30 prefer capitalism, but an unprecedented 33 per cent prefer socialism and 30 per cent are undecided. Obama, as seen from Europe is, of course, a social democrat. But if young Americans are starting to think like this after eight years of hard right hectoring, the future is bright.
Truly, the Lord moves in mysterious ways . . .