The Road to Compostela

continued

The more I read about this most demanding of the three journeys, from Paris nine hundred miles across mountains and forests, the more it seemed to me the perfect pattern for the pilgrimage of the spirit. And so in 1999 as our millennium ended, John and I set out to retrace - in the comfort of a car - the route taken by pilgrims in 999 at the close of the last millennium.

In a trip filled with discoveries, the most surprising one, for me, came at the very beginning. The staging area for pilgrims setting off from Paris, we'd learned, was the church of St.-James-at-the-Butcher-Stall. All that's left of it today is the bell tower, the Tour St. Jacques, the Tower of St. James, with a small park around it. Why, this was the very spot where we'd so often come with lunch makings when we lived in Paris in the late 1940s!

From the little park in 1999, John and I walked the pilgrim route across the Seine and through the Latin Quarter on the rue St. Jacques - once just a street name to us. Old maps indicated a hospice nearby for travelers bound for Compostela. Only the sanctuary connected to the hospital remains today - another Church of St. James. Coming to it, John and I exchanged looks of astonishment: The church was half a block from that walk-up apartment where I'd felt the waves of nausea as I climbed the stairs.

We'd walked past this church every day, taken the first steps along the old pilgrim way countless times. And never seen the road to Compostela literally beneath our feet. And I thought of Dad Sherrill's words, so meaningless to me once, so significant now. Whether my life is treadmill, saga, or pilgrimage depends not on where my feet are, but where my heart is.