Flames on the Pilgrimage Road

As the Middle East burns, as French and American fighters explode their bombs over Qaddafi's magical kingdom, as Japan founders in radioactive waters, sparks have lit up our corner of the globe. In a strange serendipity two major fires occurred on our block within minutes of each other. Is Qadaffi's retaliation beginning? Crazier tales are told by the tyrant.

A #63 bus burned in acrid rubber fumes yesterday afternoon, up on rue des Ecoles. No explanation from the lofty French media. As the bus was reduced to a blackened shell and rue St. Jacques streamed with firefighters' foam, across the street white smoke began pouring from the La Tour de Notre Dame hotel just over the charming graffiti across from our block. A hefty policeman walked around speaking on a cell phone as a crowds gathered to watch the smoke. Hours later firemen were still fighting flames in the chambres de bonne above. What a strange rhythm of catastrophes! And a man collapsed on Blvd. St. Germaine as we walked through the crowds.

Tour St. Jacques, courtesy Vassil, Wikimedia

Rue St. Jacques is one of the two oldest streets in Paris, along with rue Mouffetard. A Roman road, it later became the pilgrimage road to Compostella. The magificent beasts of Tour St. Jacques have recently been unveiled after years of renovation, in that perfection of gothic flamboyante, the hint of the medieval in its lavish beauty. It was built on the site of a church founded by Charlemagne, who had been visited by the ghost of St. Jacques and ordered to deliver his relics to that road, what is now rue St. Jacques.

Saint's remains at Santa Maria dei Servi, Siena

Just follow it south and you're on the road we plan on taking someday, the pilgrimage road to Compostella into Spain where the earliest Romanesque architecture dots the lonely path. In the Middle Ages, thousands of pilgrims took to the road, rich and poor, peasant and noble, to commune with the relics that various churches kept, to ask for help in their earthly lives that had been filled with war and famine and despair. As many as 10,000 pilgrims could visit a cathedral in a single day. A churchman might show a peasant Christ's skull as a boy, and then an additional skull for the adult Christ--the untutored were looking for hope. Martin Luther said that enough thorns from Christ's true crown exist in the churches of Europe to build an entire forest. But their journeys took them onward, a great cosmopolitan experience of the finest architecture in Europe. And pilgrims still exist. Jacques' own schoolmates have walked to Chartres, that great Queen of the gothic style who still rises in lone magnificence from the fields.

Today's pilgrims follow their destiny through the smoke and flame, and they are throwing their sparks on us, on the old pilgrim road.