Also from the Tablet, a brief account of a pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago

Most pilgrims have at least one story like that to tell, and confidence in Divine Providence is one of the many fruits of the camino. I walked a while with 67-year-old Walter, who had had a heart bypass operation last year and was walking to Santiago for two reasons: firstly, because he could, and secondly, because he wanted to thank God that he could. His pilgrimage had begun at the front door of his own house in Frankfurt: he had walked 2,000 kilometres when we met, and had several hundred more to go. When I asked him how he had survived the first part of the journey, where there is no infrastructure of affordable refuges in which to stay, he said that something had always turned up, and he had quickly realised that it always would. He had called in at churches and always found someone to put him up. He had asked strangers if they had any idea where he might stay, and many of them had said: “Yes, with me.” When people stopped him to ask where he was going, as often as not they had offered him supper and a bed.

There are many books on this pilgrimage (which one of the Bush daughters is currently making, I believe). My favorite is On Pilgrimage by the late Jennifer Lash, who was also the mother of the acting Fiennes brothers.

The pilgrimage also plays an important role in David Lodge’s excellent midlife crisis novel, Therapy.