Customer Reviews

Pilgrims Road

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It's been a while since I've read this book, but it still lingers. Selby, a middle-aged woman biking alone through the Pyrenees and across Spain to Santiago de Compostela, is full of wit, great stories, and endless energy (how she kept peddling after quaffing a bit of the free vino offered to pilgrims itself is amazing). It inspires an amateur bicyclist like me to pedal a few extra miles whenever I envision her journey. Even if you are not a bike enthusiast, you'll love her tales of the people she meets, the tiny towns she travels through, and the sense of triumph she feels upon reaching her destination

I went on pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in 2003, and am going again the day after Easter this year (4/9/2012). I have read many books on the Camino de Santiago de Compostela. Though the author professes to be Christian, he desire to go on this "pilgrimage" seems to be more for the sense of adventure than it is for spiritual reasons. It is a very good description of the pilgrimage, the villages, the sense of adventure that accompanies this pilgrimage.

I am a Catholic priest, so my approach to pilgrimage would be very much centered on my faith and on my identity as a Catholic priest. I will say, however, that the last chapter was really wonderful from a spiritual perspective and really made me appreciate the book in a much different way. In meditating on the possibility that St James' body really is not housed in the tomb in Santiago, she notes that the St James she experienced on the pilgrimage has less to do with the body in the tomb and more to do with the St James that "had come from the hearts and minds of the thousands and thousands of people who had walked the Camino de Santiago for all these hundreds of years, struggling with meanings, with conscience, with faith and with the lack of it. It was because of them that there was a Camino, and all I could hope to do was to add my prayers to theirs..."

Discovering the heart of a pilgrim that is within me really has made a different to me in my spiritual life and in my identity as s priest. I talk a lot about my identity as a pilgrim to my parishioners, and I feel that it really adds to my preaching and teaching as a priest. I really appreciated this book a lot, especially in light of the closing observations she made in the last chapter. This is a good book for all who are interesting in the Camino de Santiago.