The Spirit Well

On the Road Again

Human beings are made to travel, it seems. And a lot happens on roads. Most ancient cultures revered the road as a sacred place-the Celts, for example, considered the junction where two roads crossed a holy place. Certainly, the road is a metaphor for change and transformation-originating, perhaps, in tales such as Homer’s Odyssey and expressed in modern terms in books like On the Road by Jack Kerouac.

In Hollywood “the road” is enshrined in a genre all its own: the road movie. From the larky string of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby productions such as The Road to Rio all the way to Thelma and Louise and extending even to absurdities like Dumb amp; Dumber, the road movie is both a symbol and a celebration of the innate spiritual desire to change, to be transformed. As physicist Werner Heisenberg, a man who knew something about the elusive nature of reality and its effects on the human spirit, put it, “The human race seems to love nothing more than a long detour.”

The road and its inherent detours, dangers, and disasters can be a forceful agent of change. Approaching the outskirts of Damascus in the Arab Spring of 2011, I could easily recall the journey of the man who would become known to history as Saint Paul. In the early first century, however, he was still known as Saul, and he was on his way from Jerusalem with a heart full of hate when he was struck down by a flash of light so powerful it could not be ignored; Saul fell to the ground, and God spoke. Ironically, the purpose of his journey was to destroy the men and women who claimed to belong to “The Way”- the name given then to those we now call Christians.

Once in Damascus, Saul was led down what the gospel of Luke terms “the Street called Straight” where, blinded, humbled, and desperate to make sense of what had happened to him, the newest convert to The Way was eventually taken to the house of a man named Ananias. While strolling down that famous Straight Street myself, it became clear to me that my early familiarity with the biblical story of Paul’s dramatic journey on the road must have contributed to, if not inspired, my use of ley lines as portals between realms of existence-an impression enhanced, I expect, by my surroundings: Damascus is one of the world’s timeless cities, a place where the remnants of successive empires have each left their indelible marks-a place where a traveller could easily believe he or she was two thousand years in the past.

The tale unfolding in the five books of the Bright Empires series has been growing in my mind for over fifteen years. In common with the characters in the tale, and by way of research to enable a more accurate atmosphere in the telling, I have walked down canyoned alleyways in London, strode between parallel ranks of sphinxes in Egypt, descended into the sunken, sacred tufa roads of Tuscany-the current name for old Etruria-and followed the straight path through the Dordogne, Syria, Arizona, Eastern Europe, and most recently, Lebanon. Placing my feet exactly where countless others have placed theirs, often over many millennia, I can easily imagine emerging at the other end of the passage a different person, in a different time.

This is, of course, the imperative and the appeal of pilgrimage: to change over the course of a journey. As the landscape approaches and then disappears, the traveller confronts his hopes and fears, his questions and doubts… and then leaves them behind as he walks, it is hoped, into a place of enlightenment and welcome.

Walking on the Camino de Santiago in Spain, the venerable pilgrim route that begins almost anywhere in Europe before finally merging on the French side of the Pyrenees to cross over into Northern Spain, I saw and experienced firsthand the power of the pilgrim path. At the beginning of the journey, many of my fellow pilgrims carried huge rucksacks stacked high and bulging with the necessities of travel, with foam cushions and sleeping bags, teddy bears, tin cups, and extra clothing, flags, and all sorts of bric-a-brac dangling from their massive backpacks.

As the trail wound through mountains and hills, across arid plains and stretches of wilderness to Santiago de Compostela, and as the days bled into weeks, those same overstuffed packs tended to lose their bulk. Near the top of one particularly challenging mountain a day or two from journey’s end, I came upon a veritable cairn of T-shirts and waterproofs, paperback books, socks, trousers, bedrolls, and-yes-those teddy bears and tin cups. Labouring up the mountain with my fellow pilgrims, one weary foot in front of another, it was clear that the sense of adventure with which we had all started out had now turned into something else altogether. We were all on the road, el camino — but some of us were also, clearly, on The Way.

And the road was growing difficult. Everything unnecessary had to be jettisoned. Everything that hindered, that held back, that weighed down and encumbered-it all had to go.

Entering Santiago, I observed triumphant pilgrims walking or dragging themselves into the city with flaccid packs, a few carrying only what they had stood up in that morning: a hat, a stick, a bottle of water stuck in a pocket. Everything else had been cast aside in order to complete the journey.

The destination was important, to be sure; the path was not an aimless wandering through the wilds of Spain, after all. Santiago had long gleamed like a city of gold in our imaginations, and that image of safety, rest, and refreshment exerted a mighty pull. But it was the journey itself, the physical act of going, that transformed the pilgrims. For if there was to be any transformation in the spiritual orientation of the pilgrim’s soul, that change would take place not on arrival as if by magic, but in the long, hard work of The Way.