​​Omnium peregrinorum amicus et frater

 

In the modern history of the Camino, two figures stand out: Don Elias Valiña Sampedro and John Brierley.  Don Elias, now buried at one of the oldest churches on the Camino, the Iglesia de Santa María la Real at O’Cebreiro in Galicia, was a priest and historian, and instrumental in reviving the Camino in the 1970s.  Through his judicious application of paint on walls, rocks, trees, and roads — from the French border to Santiago de Compostela — he left a trail of yellow arrows that have since pointed the way for several million people.  At one time in eastern Navarra, his behaviour with bucket and brush aroused the suspicions of the Guardia Civil who questioned what he doing so near the border?  He replied magnificently, “Preparing a great invasion from France!”  That invasion had been traced on the ground, but the army still needed a general; it found it in the person of John Brierley.

 

In his youth, Brierley attended St Columba’s College in Dublin, and just as that saint had visions of heaven and earth ‘as if all were illumined by a single ray of the sun’, so Brierley at the tomb of Don Elias experienced his own vision: ‘a rare ray of sunshine shone through the little window in the wall high above me and bathed me in sunlight.  In floods of tears, I committed myself there and then to write the guides’.1  He drew upon his professional skills as a qualified chartered surveyor, who had built and owned his own company, to produce his now-classic guides with their own bespoke maps. Through removing so much of the clutter of modern maps, like crowded contours and irrelevant roads, he revealed the Camino landscape, serving pilgrim needs, whether they were physical (like the location of the next water fountain) or spiritual.  Each map ascended from the bottom of the page and contained a ‘sun-compass’ to aid physical and spiritual orientation; an explicit reminder that we are not the centre of the universe.  The true measure of his books’ value is not monetary, nor even that they will be found in every shop that sells Camino-related literature, but that one will never see them in a second-hand shop.  One may loan or borrow one of his guides, for inspirational or practical purposes, but one does not part with a Brierley, any more than he will part from the Camino family.

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When the sunlight shines on Don Elias’ tomb, one can clearly read the epithet omnium peregrinorum amicus et frater (‘a friend and brother of all pilgrims’); it could equally be applied to John Brierley.

 

John was a friend to us, faithful and true.

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Tá sé imithe ar shlí na Fírinne. He has gone on the path of Truth.

Dr Denis Casey, Maynooth University.        

 

 

 

1. Quoted in Peter Hore, ‘John Brierley, 1948-2023’, Bulletin of the Confraternity of Saint James 155 (Autumn 2003), 68–70: 69.