Sinning Across Spain

Sep 18

3 min read

A book review:

Sinning Across Spain by Ailsa Piper,

Victory Books, Melbourne, 2012, 2017

(pictures in this post are my own)

A storm threatening on the Meseta.

Like many others who have walked the Camino Santiago, Australian actress Ailsa Piper finished, and found herself powerfully changed, and with a deep sense of longing to return to the Path of Miracles. This book is the story of that return. Seeking a more solitary walk than her previous traverse of the popular Camino Frances, she chose, for her second walk, the Camino Mosárabe, the 1200 km path from Granada in the South East of Spain to Santiago de Compostela in the North West. Preparing for her second pilgrimage, she researched the history and lore of the track and discovered that in Medieval times pilgrimage was regarded as a way of assuaging sin, and that wealthy people sometimes paid others to walk the pilgrimage to get rid of sins on their behalf.

Ailsa Piper, with a Catholic education and a healthy set of doubts about most of the key concepts of the faith, was intrigued. She advertised amongst family and friends for people who might pay her to carry their sins from Granada to Santiago and, to her surprise, a number of people responded. With touching depth and honesty they entrusted her with their guilty secrets, their fears and their shortcomings, written accounts of which she carried in her backpack when she finally set out.

A church in the Basque Country, Camino Norte

This account of her journey is breathtaking. Piper is an actress, an author and a lover of poetry, so the prose of the book is wonderful. She brings to life the sensual joys of Spain - the scenery, architecture, food, wine and weather - as she makes her way slowly along the ancient trail. She conveys precisely the depth and fragility of pilgrim relationships as her "camino village" forms, reforms, changes and then ends. She speaks of the story of her camino - as many others of us have experienced it -as a drama in three acts:

i. The body; ii. the mind; and iii. the soul, as each part of her being is, in turn, challenged and tested along the way. She speaks authentically of the pain and discomforts of the path and of its exhultant joys. She is the best writer I have yet encountered for conveying what it is actually like to be a peregrino. And she is thoughtful and perceptive about the spirituality of the Camino.

Early morning start, Camino Norte

The Camino Santiago is often referred to as "The Path of Miracles" and most people who have walked it understand why. As Ailsa Piper notes, You don't walk the Camino, the Camino walks you. She finds, as many others do, that the act of walking has a way of surfacing and of healing personal issues. She is perplexed by the whole notion of sin, and by the odd notion of someone being able to get rid of sins by having another perform a penance on their behalf, but during her walk the sins she is carrying in her backpack have an odd way of surfacing in her own experience. She is not a religious person in the strictest sense of the term, but her journey is filled with those strange coincidences, and inexplicable happenings which many others report from the Way of St James. She is intelligent and well informed about those aspects of the human condition which religion often claims as its own. She raises questions and invites reflection, as she presents a version of human wholeness which is understandable by people of various faiths or of none. Through walking, through companionship, through poetry and story, through hospitality, through solitude and conversation, through the lengthy discipline of putting one foot in front of the other and thereby accomplishing a goal which many deem unattainable, through joy and sheer determination she completes the path and somehow furthers her journey on the greater path which she - like every living person - is following.

Night time in Santillana del Mar - "the Town of the Three Lies" - Camino Norte

It was a joy to accompany her on a journey with so many resonances for me. The edition of the book I read has a poignant, powerfully moving postscript written about five years after Ailsa Piper finished her walk. It bears witness to the unpredictable dynamism of life. She has written a recent book about the events related in the postscript which I will read very soon. I am grateful for her reminders of why I walked the Camino and why it called me back. Why it still calls me back.