The unwritten rules for Camino ‘heroes’ are: walk long and hard, stay in hostels every night, walk through the pain, take no buses, and pride yourself on finishing. In many ways this is an anti-hero journey, full of paradoxes. He returns home free of his burden and at peace for the first time since his brother’s death. After bathing in the sea he feels like a new person- evoking images of baptism and new birth. Barry SJ, US spiritual director and authorĪ simple unplanned ritual becomes a cathartic release of his grief, agonizing but ultimately freeing. Riveting and intense this is no walk in the park, but an invitation to see Ignatian discernment in action and to accompany a grieving man going through great darkness to light. ‘Brendan McManus has writt en a very vivid and absorbing account of his personal pilgrimage on the Camino de Compostela. In a chance encounter with a fellow Jesuit, he reluctantly joins him going out by bus to Finisterre (meaning literally the ‘end of the world’) on the Atlantic coast. Bringing his brother’s t-shirt to the altar at the high pilgrim mass, he thinks it’s all over and wants to collapse, exhausted. However, this is a God of the unexpected, and after many trials and tribulations he reaches his planned destination, Santiago de Compostela. Feeling his raw humanity and frailty on the hard road is a humbling experience of limitation and he is sorely tempted to abandon his quest. In this searingly honest human and spiritual search, the author is confronted with his limits and faces failure several times. Undertaking the entire 500 miles from the French border, Brendan walks for forty days on the grueling northern coastal route, which roughly equates to climbing a mountain a day. He is not just a Jesuit priest walking an ancient trail, but essentially a person grieving after his brother’s suicide, trying to make sense of life and faith. In this book the author, Brendan McManus SJ, writes about his personal experience as a pilgrim on the medieval pilgrimage route, the Camino de Santiago.

Redemption road novel