|
Larissa Taylor walks through the foothills of the French Pyrenees, trekking toward Santiago de Compostela, the sacred shrine on the northwest coast of Spain. Her wooden staff, which may come in handy to fend off the legendary Spanish dogs, signifies the wood of Christ's cross. To shield herself from the sun she wears a brimmed hat, the scallop shell on the front of the crown identifying her as a soul on pilgrimage. Parts of the route are rugged. Walking along roads on the plain was easy until she reached the hills, but from here it's still several hundred miles to Santiago. For more than a thousand years, thousands of pilgrims from all over Europe have journeyed along "the shining way" to this holy shrine, in the early centuries braving many dangers, protected only by a stave and the sacred sign, the scallop shell. St. James's first miracle, legend has it, involved saving a scallop fisherman. Right now only sheep and cows graze in the distance, and Taylor revels in the long periods of solitude walking alone. At some point she thinks she'll happen on a group she met earlier along the route. Some are in their 80s and 90s, some suffer terminal illnesses; their bodies flag, their feet hurt. From Taylor's small, open backpack--symbolically, a pilgrim is open to experience--they may take out food or water; she may take food or water from theirs, signifying dependence on others and on God for sustenance. She also packs blister cream for ministering to sore feet. That, too, involves religious symbolism. Taylor savors talking with her fellow pilgrims about their routes, their experiences, their reasons for giving themselves to something so "medieval." A historian of medieval Europe, Taylor has devoted herself to completing a book on pilgrimage comparing the medieval spiritual mindset with her own experience and the experience of others on pilgrimage today. When they meet, the pilgrims, like the pilgrims in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, share the story of their lives. Those stories will be shared when the pilgrims return home. A pilgrimage is not fully realized until the pilgrims recount how their experience changed them or enriched or disrupted their lives. Taylor turns back a few miles from the Spanish border. Four separate routes, each one hundreds of miles, wind through France toward Santiago de Compostela, and she's traveled them all, though never for the two to four months it takes to walk all the way. It's the process, the going, that matters. Life, the pilgrims say, is a journey you're always in the middle of. As an undergraduate on scholarship at Wellesley, Taylor was drawn to canon law, then to Anglican theology under the tutelage of influential teachers. Divorced at 24, she transferred to Harvard after two years at Wellesley to immerse herself in the study of religious history. Initially it was the psychological aspect of belief that intrigued her. "I found myself getting interested in why people believed what they did," Taylor said, back in her Colby office. "I was interested in why someone would want to be burned at the stake, why they'd be willing to die for theological beliefs--interpretation of the Eucharist or Lord's Supper, for instance--or would want to burn someone at the stake. It made me wonder about people's state of mind." |
© Colby College Colby Magazine Summer 2002 mag@colby.edu