[Gocamino] More on the Chalice

[blaroli@aol.com]

Hello you all,
I had absolutely no idea of the widespread interest on the Grail!  I'm astonished and grateful for the information, photos and offers of related books.
Next week I'll be going to Seville for a few days free that I have between the 23rd. and 30th of June.  There is nothing special going on there at this time other than the meetings of the Seville Friends of the Camino Assn. which is hard at work increasing the number of Via de la plata albergues. As you know, the number of Via de la Plata pilgrims has increased impressively.... and why wouldn't it?  with such treasures as Merida, Salamanca and Zamora smack on it.  
If I may offer a suggestion to Via de la Plata pilgrims: on nearing Santiago do not take the Astorga route that leads to the French Way, but stay on the one that goes through Ourense and arrives at Santiago crossing the Ulla river.  While this route is a few kilometers longer, its beauty, its lack of crowds and its facilities are eminently worthwhile.  (This approach also goes through "bread land", "wine land", "cheese land", and other towns very much deserving of their names).
As to the Grail:  Richard Wagner's monumental, and last, opera, Parsifal, is about the Grail. The medieval plot takes place on the Spanish Pyrenees on the southern crossing from France.  That would be just beyond Somport on the way to Jaca. As is its wont, the New York City Metropolitan Opera House stages its operas in the traditional way and eschews the modernistic versions. The Parsifal being sung now includes a Medieval Mass, with many knights and monks in attendance. The staged high point (it happens twice) is the Holy Grail being lifted from a tree-stump altar and shown to the knights (of the Holy Grail) and the monks.  As the cup is raised the color of its contents changes to blood-red illuminating the one hundred or so knights and monks around it with a glow that seems to purify and give them a vastly richer and more spiritually profound existence.
....I know, I know, that it is a matter of lights and shadows and some very talented technicians, but when the whole is part of the miraculous music of Richard Wagner, it comes pretty close to the real thing.
Wagner got the idea for his opera from a book written by a german eighteen century Santiago pilgrim who spent some time in O Cebreiro.  At the end of the opera its eponymous character, Parsifal, describes himself as a pilgrim.
In passing, I might mention that the one female part was sung by a fairly young, slim and beautiful German soprano who herself was out of this world (If you should read the reviews of the opera that appeared in the New york Times yesterday you'll see that she turned us, jaded New Yorkers, speechless and stunned with wonder). Another  teutonic singer, a bass-baritone, very young, very tall and  somehow Mongolian looking,  who sang one of the supporting parts was another cometic  lightening right from the sky.
The other singers couldn't, and didn't, keep up with those two wonders.... but it didn't matter.
......I guess there's a heck of a lot more to the idea of the Holy Grail than I ever knew.  And I guess that nothing will do but to go to Valencia.
Wagner may not be everyone's cup of tea (I personally have been worshipping at his altar all my adult life) and I thought that to enjoy his operas one would need to have spent years and years of apprenticeship, study and effort, but much to my surprise the fellow sitting next to me at the opera had never heard a Wagnerian opera before and he was besides himself with excitement, and a woman that I met at the line in the ladies' room could hardly hold herself together with the enthusiasm and emotion which the opera provoked within her; she  told me that this was the first Wagnerian opera that she had ever heard and that she had no idea that there could be an earthly expression of such spiritual grandeur!
 
Well,...... another Camino pilgrim in the making.
 
Big hug!
 
Rosina 
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