Sant’Iago is a contraction of the Spanish name Saint James, an apostle of Jesus. According to legend, he preached the gospel on the Iberian Peninsula before returning to, and being beheaded in, Jerusalem, in the year 44AD. There are different versions of how his bones made their way back to Spain, then were lost for several centuries, until being miraculously discovered whena hermit saw a light shining in a field – the Campus Stellae, or Field of Stars, contracted to Compostela. Word of the miracle find spread and pilgrims began to trickle in to view the relics, and voila, the Christian pilgrimage was born. No problem. My resistance to the veneration of St James along the Camino lies in the reason he was chosen as the Patron Saint of Spain.
In 844AD, during the Reconquista, at the battle of Clavijo, he “appeared on a white horse, carrying a white banner, leading the Spanish Christians to victory in killing 5000 Muslims”, hence his nickname St. James the Moorslayer.
Personally, I have a strong aversion to war and violence in general, and religious war in particular. I have always been fascinated by the deep similarities, rather than the minor differences, all religious practices across time and space have shared, and stopped attending church in middle school because I could not reconcile the damnation of the Native Americans required by my fundamentalist church with the concept of a loving God. In my opinion, too much hatred, pain and suffering has been foisted by mankind upon each other in the names of God.
So, although I appreciated the artistry inherent in the statues and paintings along The Way depicting this event, even in the Sword of St. James itself, a good part of me was saddened by them as well. In Spain today, there is controversy over some of these pieces of art, in particular one of the statues in the Cathedral, and St. James is more likely to be depicted as a pilgrim than a religious warrior. But still the undercurrent is there.
Compostela, on the other hand, refers to both Fields of Stars associated with this area, the physical one where a mystical light was shining in the darkness, and the Milky Way, and the cosmic energetic alignment of this very “thin place” on the earth. A thin place is anywhere the veil between this dimension and others is more easily seen through, negotiated, or even nonexistent. A sacred place is a sacred place irregardless of the particular religious practices and legends that grow up around it in each generation. Again, I have found it fascinating that nearly all the cathedrals I visited are built on sacred Roman ruins, pointing to their underlying Cosmic positioning.
For me, being on the Camino was like being under an intense, unrelenting spotlight. Blessings by the tenfold every day, but also that Light shining in the dark, bringing up places of misalignment to be looked at, and hopefully, changed. I did not find the Divine Presence on the Camino to be subtle in the least.
Compostela, then, not Santiago, is the name that resonates within me as the Promised Land at the end of my journey.
A Compostela is also the official piece of paper you receive at the Cathedral for walking the last 100 km. I stood in line and received mine, though that wasn’t the point of the walk for me. It is rather pretty, and it was fun collecting the different stamps along the route as required.
Grace a Dieu.
