Entrez en visiteur, repartez en pèlerin. (“Enter as a visitor, leave as a pilgrim.”)
Those words are etched into a plaque on the wall of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in the city of Le Puy-en-Velay, in southern France. I read them as I stepped inside the cathedral, hoping they would describe the journey I was about to take.
It was May 2021. Two years earlier, I had walked a portion of the famous Camino de Santiago, a 500-mile pilgrimage route from the Pyrenees Mountains in Spain to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela.
I’m retired from a career in public health and teaching English as a foreign language. I live part-time in France and love to travel. I’d walked the Camino out of curiosity, not from any deep religious conviction.
I had grown up Catholic and raised two children with my husband, who was a minister. Yet I was not a person of faith. The impression of God I’d received as a child was harsh and
