|
St. James
Patron of Walkers and Runners
St. James the Greater was one of the twelve apostles and one Jesus'closest disciples. His connection with walking and running long distances arose because the alleged site of his relics, in Compostela, Spain, became one of the most important pilgrimage destinations of Christianity. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, for instance, half a million or more people per year made the thousand-mile pilgrimage from western France to Compostela, in the extreme northwest of Spain. The pilgrimage lasted for months (sometimes years) and involved extreme danger and hardship, the terrain being rugged and remote, shepherds and their flocks abounding. Today thousands of people each year continue to make this pilgrimage on foot, carrrying backpacks and making the thousand-mile walk (sometimes run) across the same paths people have been taking for eight hundred years. A connection between extreme physical exertion and spirituality lies at the deepest level of many religions. An example is the Buddhist marathon monks of Mount Hiei, Japan. As part of a spiritual practice, some of these monks walk/run 38,632 miles over 1,000 days the course going up and down the sides of rugged mountains. That is, the monks, wearing primitive straw sandals, run/walk an average of 38.6 miles (=1.5 marathons) per day for 1,000 days. One of the goals of these extreme physical trials in a relegious context is that by extending the repetitious act of walking or running one becomes so immersed in the present and so weary that ordinary categories of thought (good and evil, weariness or exhilaration, worry about the past or future...) begin to fall away and one experiences the world and oneself from a stripped-down but fresh and enlightened perspective.
|
|
