What we did (2) in Aug 2016 Ringwood #unitarians

So while some of us were meeting in Ringwood this month, other encounters were going on elsewhere.  In France there was a trip to a pilgrim refuge on the Limoges route to Santiago in Spain – one of the branches of the Camino de Santiago de Compostella.  This is one of the toughest branches of the famous pilgrim trail, and people researching taking that route are advised that their motivation will be well tested.  On this route there are only three refuges especially set aside for pilgrims; otherwise pilgrims must find their accommodation in the normal range of B&Bs or hotels.

The refuge at St Ferme in Gironde is simple, build as a mezzanine to a barn, and comprising a kitchen/dining room/office, a bedroom with bunks for six, two showers, a loo and a washing machine.  There is a small separate bedroom set aside for the hospitalier who welcomes and hosts the pilgrims, and who themselves must have completed the pilgrim route in the past.  All pilgrims must move on after one night.  It was the hospitalier for the week that we went to visit; someone known to us in the UK, someone who gives up a fortnight a year to live in very bare circumstances alongside pilgrims who are doing the same.  

While visiting our friend, we also visited the Benedictine Abbey of St Ferme, which is vastly larger than such a small hamlet as St Ferme would normally be associated with. And the Abbey is visited by many of the Santiago pilgrims, as a sanctuary in which to restore their spirits, and perhaps once more focus on why they have chosen to make their pilgrimage.

In this part of France it is clear that the whittling down of pilgrim paths to the few that are well documented and supported today is a very new thing.  Many villages and towns not today recognised as being on the pilgrimage route still display the scallop shell denoting a pilgrim in little architectural details, over the doors of chapels, or houses.

Until contemporary times it is likely that pilgrims drifted down towards the crossing into Spain across a much broader swathe of countryside.  Some were welcomed, but in other areas the pilgrims were seen as harbingers of disease, and were strongly encouraged to remain outside the precincts of the bourg.  Little chapels in the middle of nowhere, established to allow pilgrims to pray apart from the townsfolk, are still found in some places.

Another interesting August encounter was with the French nun of the Russian Orthodox convent near Grassac, in the Charente.  There are now four sisters there and the convent, which is regularly open to the public, was inaugurated in the late 1980s.  All the icons inside were painted by the sisters themselves, and they cover the interior walls of the striking church.  Like Ely Cathedral, there is a lantern window in the very centre of the church that lets light down into the nave below.  Unlike Ely, the flat ceiling of this lantern is painted with an icon of Christ, and this too was painted by one of the sisters, some 15 m above the floor of the nave.

Our nun guide lit up when she understood that some among our visiting party were Scots, and she broke into good English to describe how she was for quite some years a nun at a Buddhist community outside Glasgow.  The hamlet with the Russian Orthodox convent is even smaller than St Ferme, yet the nuns have set up a long, new-ish building set aside for inter-religious conferences, meetings and training sessions.  We couldn’t help thinking that the nun’s experience as a Buddhist before finding her vocation in the Russian Orthodox Church, as well as the experience of being Russian Orthodox in a secular state like France (yet faintly influenced by the Roman Catholic Church), probably explains the success of this venture.