Prayer does not change God ...

... but it changes him who prays. - Soren Kierkegaard

The mother of my host mother introduced me to another former pilgrim, an Englishwoman who has lived in the tiny village of Mann for 12 years and who barely speaks a word of French. She made the pilgrimage to Compostela 8 years ago, after her husband died, and she would like to make it again during a Jubilee Year, when the Feast of St James falls on a Sunday.

Anne told me that she started her pilgrimage without any set idea of how to conduct herself. Like many pilgrims, she wanted to be open and to allow circumstances and surroundings dictate her choices. Although she is not Catholic, she said that she began to attend Mass whenever she could along the way. At each pilgrim mass along the Chemin, the priest reads the name and nationality of each pilgrim. She spent long hours in contemplation and prayer, and each religious symbol she saw infused her with a sense of the holy.

However, it was not only the churches and religious relics that had this power, for Anne. She said that the people she met, the different paths she walked, the sun, the rain, the trees, the natural world, all seemed holy to her. She said that she had begun the Chemin very angry, and that she needed the struggle of the pilgrimage to become humble.
Anne noticed that people began to wave at her as she passed along the road. « At first I wondered why », she said. « Then I realized that I wasn't a tourist, not even a stranger. I had been walking through their village for centuries, because I was a pilgrim. »
And she told me that, slowly, she began to see like a pilgrim. To see that everywhere she looked, in even the smallest town, there was not just a church, but a cathedral, a beautiful ornate structure that had taken generations to build. A father had laid the foundation, his son and his son's son had built the walls, and their children had put on the roof. Anne was struck by the power that emanated from these works of art, shrines built with love and dedication and belief. She told me that the best pilgrims learned how to travel light, help other pilgrims and not damage or hurt anything along the way.
I asked her what she had taken away from the pilgrimage, and she told me that she had rediscovered her joy and gratitude at being alive. She said that the hospitality of the pilgrim way produced a warm feeling of goodwill.