Day 15. Singing Nuns

On this day I made it to Carrion de Los Condes and stayed at the Albergue Santa Maria, run by nuns and featuring folk singing in the evening. The walk there was relatively uneventful, the first time I have felt bored by the Meseta, which has a reputation for being boring. The fields are big and the land is flat.  At our time of year they are green but I am sure that later they will be brown. There is also almost no shade, which causes some pilgrims to dread this part of the Camino. Still, at a rest stop there were huge healthy chickens wandering around

And I had wonderful conversations with a fellow pilgrim who started the journey from his home in Germany. He says that his staff was much taller then. 

Anyway, back to the singing nuns. Five of them were running the Albergue I stayed at. They have a mother house somewhere else in central Spain. I went to a vesper service first and the voices of these five nuns resounded through the church. Afterwards they held a song fest in the small entry hall of the Albergue. Perhaps most powerfully at that time, they had us all (about 30 packed into the small space and spilling up the stairway) go around and tell our names, where we were from and briefly why we were on the Camino. People from Korea, Japan, Lithuania, Latvia, Croatia, Germany, Italy, Spain, Ireland, Canada, and the US. About 3/4 spoke in English and others in Spanish. The youngest was a 13 year old boy traveling with his whole family from Spain. I don't know the oldest but there was a Korean man, over 70, who seemed to be doing this for the third time, partly in gratitude for God healing his back. Many young people just finishing college. Many retired people. All kinds of reasons for doing the Camino but perhaps the most common was one that resonates with my own reasons: a sense that this is the start of a new season in our lives and a wish either to learn what that is or simply to dedicate that to God. 

The nuns had us sing a number of songs connected to the spiritual sense of the Camino, and encouraged people to sing a song in their own language that was also a song of their heart as they walked. Two of the songs that they sang really spoke to me. Ultreia is a French song commonly sing along the Camino though this was the first I had heard it. Today the Camino greeting is "Buen Camino" and this is said anytime pilgrims meet each other or pass each other on the road as well as many times from villagers to us. But in the Middle Ages the greeting was apparently "Ultreia!" With the response "E sus eia!"  There's some debate about this, but roughly, it's "Onward" " Go further". So a French singer wrote a song around this which is sing a lot, particularly in the French segments of the pilgrimage. Ultreia being sung