A number of years ago we found ourselves in Arles, France quite by accident. We were on a driving trip from Lisbon, Portugal to Nice, France with no real plans of where we might stop and visit in between. When we couldn’t find accommodations in one place where we wanted to go, the friend we were going to visit in Nice recommended Arles. What a delightful discovery. This is the ancient Roman city where Van Gogh lived and painted. We also stopped at Lourdes, the place made famous by a Bernadette Soubrious and now a much visited site by people seeking miraculous cures by bathing in the spring waters here.

Both Arles and Lourdes are places we will be visiting on this pilgrimage but not as tourists.

Peter Sills, the leader of this pilgrimage says, “There is a difference in the way that pilgrims and tourist travel. Tourism tends to put the desires and needs of the tourist first; the traveler is the subject of the journey, the places and people on the way the object. The pilgrim seeks to reverse this, allowing the places and people that are encountered to be the subject, and he or she comes to learn from them. A pilgrimage also differs from tourism in the way the journey is made. Pilgrims are companions on the way; that is, they share bread together.” The word “companion” is from the Latin words “com” and “panis” meaning “with bread.”

In the ninth century a burial ground was discovered in a field in Spain and it came to be believed that this was where the bones of St. James were buried. (More about him in a later blog.) Soon kings and bishops recognized the importance of having the shrine of St. James visited and in modern times “walking the Camiño” has become so popular that Santiago de Compostela has become the third most popular Christian pilgrimage destination. Rome and Jerusalem are the top two. Though there are several established routes for this pilgrimage, the one we are following has Arles as a starting point. One could travel this route either to Rome or to Santiago. The route we will be traveling is called the Via Tolosana. The name comes from one of the cities to which we will be traveling, Toulouse, Fance’s fourth largest city.