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Reviews

To journey with Paul Myers along the Camino is to travel both inwards and outwards.  The feel of the age-old pathway is there--the heat, the dust, the chapels and pilgrims along the way--but moreso, with Myers one undertakes the eternal human pilgrimage, the striving for meaning, for relationship to oneself and to the Holy.  Poetic, philosophical, and provoking, this is a book that invites you to walk, but also to pause and ponder.

-- Cathy Sosnowsky, author of Holding On

Rooster in the Cathedral taps deeply into the motherlode of the meaning of pilgrimage: Life is a process, a journey, and the wisest know this in the marrow of their soul. A compact missive that threads together a literal pilgrimage with heartfelt reflections on larger life issues we all must confront, the Camino path has taught Myers well about the ancient ways of insight. Rooster in the Cathedral is a must read and keeper. Do read each chapter slowly, as if you were walking the Camino with Myers, where the deeper meaning of rooster, cathedral and pilgrim become vivid and tantalizingly clear.

-- Ron Dart, Professor of Political Science, Philosophy, and Religious Studies at the University of the Fraser Valley. Author of numerous books of poetry, the humanities, philosophy, and mountaineering.

This is a thoughtful book, a funny and at times hilarious book. I found myself alternately immersed in the ideas and laughing out loud. Myers’ down-to-earth words strike a chord. As readers accompany Myers they are never allowed to forget that this journey from France to Spain is a microcosm of the much larger journey through life we must all make. He eloquently draws the reader into the things which are pivotal in all our lives – relationships, the self, success, failure, fear, pain, tolerance, mystery, faith. Of all the things you might take away from this book, I think Myers would want you to remember this one message: “The greatest adversary to the pilgrim is the false sense that we have finally ‘arrived’.”

-- K. Ritchie, BC Christian News

Almost the entire time I was reading this book I had a half-smile on my face, which regularly expanded into a chuckle. It’s an eloquent and bittersweet book, a mid-life memoir brought into focus by Paul’s walking of the Camino. Each chapter explores an aspect of the human condition (success and failure; being alone, being with someone; fear) and then ruminates and reflects. Most of the time he is talking to himself, and lets us overhear his thoughts, some crazy, many profound.
          And they are the thoughts of someone who himself has known joy and known sorrow, success and failure, confusion and clarity; he brings a sense of integration about such dichotomies to his invitation to us to walk and talk with him as he deals with blisters, inconsiderate fellow-pilgrims, and the cruel noon-day sun. His walking of the Camino was a deep learning time for him, and thereby for us his readers. The Camino was his teacher, and in this book he passes on the lessons he has learned from it with a winsome eloquence.
          I note in particular his recording of the changes in the way he has held his Christian faith: it still feeds his hunger, he says, but he holds it less tenaciously; “there are always more questions than answers” (p. 14). This is integrative faith, mature mid-life faith, faith that accepts that to some questions there are no answers, that acknowledges that at a certain point conviction morphs into mystery. He doesn’t require of his readers that they share his faith in an explicit way; but he wants to keep the conversation going.
          I loved his description (ch. 1) of how his pack became lighter and lighter. Did he really need the camping pillow? No. Did he relinquish the second pair of sandals he had picked up only three days earlier? Yes. The whole journey was in fact an exercise in surrender—to the Camino, to the heat, to himself, to the Mystery sometimes named as God. The daily walking provided him, as it does every real pilgrim, with an opportunity to solve and dissolve, to remember and sort out and let go.
          I’m glad for him that he went on this big walk. I’m glad for us that he wrote the book to share his experience. When I taught a course on pilgrimage at Simon Fraser University, I offered to my students this definition: “pilgrimage is a journey to a sacred place in the expectation of transformation.”  Through walking, through enduring, through thinking long thoughts on a long road, he did come to a place of transformation. He came back to us the same, only different. At the book’s conclusion he offers his own definition, one which I am totally ready to accept and place beside my own. A pilgrimage, he says, “is a walk in search of love”(p. 158). With a definition like that, who would not want to walk with him?

--- Donald Grayston, is an Anglican priest and professor of Religious Studies at Simon Fraser for 15 years. While at SFU, he offered courses on pilgrimage, world religions, Gandhi, the Holocaust and Thomas Merton.