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By Katherine Ritchie
• Paul Myers: Rooster in the Cathedral, Shoreline Press, 2009
THIS is a thoughtful book, a funny and at times hilarious book. I found myself alternately immersed in the ideas and laughing out loud. Myers’ down-to-earth words strike a chord.
 | | Author Paul Myers taking the way of the pilgrim in Spain. |
Rooster in the Cathedral is a result of Myers’ reflections while walking the long and famous pilgrimage from Le-Puy-En-Velay in central France to the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela in the northwest of Spain.
It is quite a walk – incredibly beautiful and rugged, at times very difficult and painful.
Readers accompany Myers, a pastor/writer living on the Sunshine Coast, as he makes this pilgrimage, and they are never allowed to forget that this journey from France to Spain is a microcosm of the much larger and longer journey through life we all must make.
Myers spins together snippets of his pilgrimage – of the people he met and the things he saw – with stories from his past and the musings that absorb him.
He discusses the big questions, eloquently drawing the reader into the things which are pivotal in all of our lives – love, relationships, the self (survival, selfishness), success, failure, fear, pain, honesty, integrity, tolerance, mystery, faith, redemption and joy.
Myers tells the amusing story of the cathedral in Santo Domingo, which houses a rooster.
According to lore, the rooster is sure to give you good luck if it crows when you are near enough to hear.
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The legend dates back to the 12th century when a couple of roast chickens jumped up off their plates and began to crow. This was taken for a miracle, and since then a live rooster has been kept in the cathedral.
At one time, the rooster’s presence presumably inspired faith – at a time when the world was “brimming with angels and miracles” and “there was little in the way of science and technology.”
The rooster remains, long after it has lost its power to inspire belief in God and inspires instead a sense of the ridiculous in the many tourists who eagerly wait to hear it squawk.
To Myers, the rooster symbolizes not only the conflict between modern science and ancient faith but, more importantly, the conflict between the ‘professional faith-protectors’ (those many Christian denominations that insist that their beliefs and particular practices are the ‘right’ way) and the everyday faithful.
Roosters can also take the form of outdated beliefs and practices that may have lost all meaning and relevance in themselves, but nonetheless continue to dog a person’s faith.
Myers writes: “Whenever I begin to think that I know so much about God, or even enough about God, rather than being at all times humbled by mystery – then the rooster is ready.”
Of all the things you might take away from this book, to pack away for your own personal journey through life, I think Myers would want you to remember this one message: “The greatest adversary to the pilgrim is the false sense that we have finally ‘arrived’.”
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For questions or to purchase a copy, go to paulmyers.ca.
Myers will do a reading March 20, 1 – 3 pm, at Sign of the Fish Bookstore in North Vancouver.
March 2010
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