Over the holidays K and I saw the new movie The Way. It is based on a novel written by a former college classmate of mine. The protagonist is an ophthalmologist living the hard earned “good life” whose adult son decides, against his father’s judgement, to drop out of so-called life for a few months and walk the Camino de Santiago, the Way of St. James, a five hundred mile pilgrimage from France through the Pyrenees, through the Spanish Basque country and ending at Santiago de Compostelo in the northwest of Spain. The cathedral there, as over a thousand years of tradition has it, contains the relics of St. James the apostle of Jesus. Next to journeys to Rome it is the most travelled pilgrimage in Europe. In the movie the son is killed in a weather related freak accident in the mountains and his father travels to France to collect his remains. The father then decides to bear his son’s ashes on the Camino de Santiago. He calls home, cancels two months of appointments and sets out alone on the Way. It is a beautiful film (and runs tonight and tomorrow at the Crescent Theater)
The doctor is a solitary man, hardened by the brute force of life, as sadly happens to many of us. His quest is to scatter his son’s ashes along the five hundred mile camino….a solitary man on a solitary and solemn journey. But soon upon his departure he encounters other pilgrims along the way…pilgrims from all over the world bearing their own stories, their own burdens…Soon, because they just happen to be at the same point along the road, an unlikely fellowship forms between the doctor, a Canadian woman, a Dutchman and an Irish writer…At first the doctor merely tolerates their company, but as the miles wear on, the stories of each become known to each other, and the walls between the doctor and his companions wear down, and the fellowship becomes one of love and trust, and the doctor in the end rediscovers his humanity.
The lead character, the doctor, is played by Martin Sheen (and directed by his son Emilio Estevez) and he said in a recent interview about the film that it is chiefly concerned with the integrity with which we bear our burdens, our baggage, our wounds, the weight life puts upon us, especially as we grow older…but that to do so one is able to discover, or rediscover new life and purpose in decidedly unexpected ways…and finally he says that one can only do this in community…there is no way to walk life’s journey alone, he said…Preach on brother, I thought.
What is it about the journey? Clearly throughout literary history in every culture I know of, the journey amid vibrant fellowship is an archetype…In scripture, all the narratives take place amid a journey…the road to Emmaus…the escape of the people Israel from Egypt and the sojourn in the desert, crossing the Jordan, the Jabbok, the Galilean lake…In the literature of our own tradition: The Canterbury Tales, Don Quixote, Moby Dick, The Grapes of Wrath, McCarthy’s the Road, on and on… the best told tales happen on the journey.
Why so? Certainly the journey is a metaphor for life, but there is more. Perhaps because there is increased danger on a journey, we are more aware of our vulnerability. Our adrenaline, our imaginations quicken, our senses heightened out of necessity on the road… I know that in our family travels our most ardent conversations and memories occurred there. We are required to be more open to each other…maybe some ancient memory of our tribal roots wherein the survival depends on each other in the solidarity of fellowship. And, we are never the same after a journey. T.S. Eliot in Four Quartets says “Fare forward travelers; you are not the same people who left the station”, so the journey is also about transformation and renewal, something for which our souls ache. The doctor in the film finds himself not through a herculean effort of his own, but he finds himself, his human citizenship, his transformation in the stranger become friend, in the vulnerabilities of strangers become friends…Perhaps we might be so lucky as to encounter our true selves, our human citizenship along this journey we call life….don’t fear the journey as dangerous as it may seem…don’t fear the stranger….because there among the stories of other lives lived, we will surely find our own, a glowing epic tale, and we will know it is one worth telling.
