APPROACHING SANTIAGO
So now, even with the weather degenerating, the rosy glow of certitude is starting to penetrate my welt-swollen face and enter my brain. With it comes lots of reflection about the trip—so much so that I largely ignore today’s weather, scenery, and landmarks. It’s only when you have some prize firmly in hand that you gain the luxury to question its value.
As I move inexorably closer to Santiago, one small human bedbug on the Spanish landscape, the more I ponder this whole enterprise that has enveloped me for a month now. For a thousand years, people have been “honoring” and “worshipping” St. James by walking to Santiago, often coming at great hardship—on foot, with limited money and food, through wars, skirting bandits, dodging the plague, and (worst of all) tormented by bedbugs. Why are they doing this? I could understand going to Jerusalem, which after all is the focal point (and tinder box) of three “great” (i.e., large) western religions. But Santiago? The city of Saint James?
Who was this Saint James, and why do we even care about him (if we do care at all)? It’s hard to say. Indeed, it is the central mystery here.
From what I have read, there is almost no mention of St. James in the Bible. He was not one of the four evangelists who wrote about things. He was not one of the two Bad Boys, Judas and Thomas Didymus (my namesake, “the doubter”), who are well known because the Bad Boys are always remembered, sometimes even more fondly than the Good Guys. Among the apostles, St. James was like one of the “easy” stages of the Camino—just another one thrown into the mix that no one notices or long remembers.
The story is that after the death of Christ, St. James went from Jerusalem to Spain to convert people to Christianity. But he was a hopeless failure at the task, converting no more than literally a handful of people. He gave up and went home. But that turns out to have been a bad career move for him. Someone back home named Herod, I believe, was still pretty sore about the trouble caused by this Jesus guy, so he chopped off James’s head. There is an estimable logic in that response, don’t you think? Jesus was a troublemaker, so chop up James. Of course.
At that point, for reasons never explained and without the slightest trace of historical evidence to support it, the story goes that James’s friends decided to load his body and head onto a boat and bring them back to the scene of his earlier failure—Spain. Duh? It’s starting to sound like an episode of The Simpsons.
It gets worse. There was a shipwreck in Galicia. Naturally, the body and the head floated off in different directions. (I know, this is starting to sound like the Ted Williams saga.) Eventually, they were recovered and, presto, they were reunited. (That reunification day has eluded Ted for quite some time now.)
Somewhere along the line, Spain became Catholic. And James became a saint. So, someone somewhere at sometime brought James’s various body parts to Santiago (which presumably had a different name at that time) and buried him there. But then the Moors came—or something else bad happened, like a mean Catholic king sacking the town and killing all the inhabitants. (The precise historical details, to which I am ever attentive, are slightly jumbled in my head at the moment. Too much of that Celtic witches’ brew, called Estrella, that I have begun imbibing at night.)
In any event, James’s various body parts had to be relocated to a secret place for a number of years, or decades, or centuries. Whatever. At a later time, that no one can really recall, they may (or may not) have been deposited in what is now the grand Cathedral in Santiago. So, now you can see why millions of people have spent their wealth and risked their lives (and suffered the ignominy of bedbug bites) taking the “pilgrimage” to Santiago. It’s obvious why people do it. It’s a no-brainer.