St. James the Greater was one of the twelve apostles and one of Jesus’ closest disciples. His connection with walking and running long distances arose because the alleged site of his relics, in Compostela, Spain, became one of the most important pilgrimage destinations of Christianity. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, for instance, half a million or more people per year made the thousand-mile pilgrimage from western France to Compostela, in the extreme northwest of Spain. The pilgrimage lasted for months (sometimes years) and involved extreme danger and hardship, the terrain being rugged and remote, shepherds and their flocks abounding. Today, thousands of people each year continue to make this pilgrimage on foot, carrying backpacks and making the thousand-mile walk (sometimes run) across the same paths people have been taking for eight hundred years. A connection between extreme physical exertion and spirituality lies at the deepest level of many religions. An example is the Buddhist marathon monks of Mount Hiei, Japan. As part of a spiritual practice, some of these monks walk/run 38,632 miles over 1,000 days, the course going up and down the sides of rugged mountains. That is, the monks, wearing primitive straw sandals, run/walk an average of 38.6 miles (= 1.5 Olympic marathons) per day for 1,000 days. One of the goals of these extreme physical trials in a religious context is that  by extending the repetitious act of walking or running one becomes so immersed in the present and so weary that ordinary categories of thought (good and evil, weariness or exhilaration, worry about the past or future...) begin to fall away and one experiences the world and oneself from a stripped-down but fresh and enlightened perspective. In this small statue, James is shown as he often is in sacred statuary: as a pilgrim, walking. The shell he wears was the symbol of the medieval Christian pilgrim. In his left hand he carries a gourd, the medieval canteen. He strolls with one of the other creatures who, like pilgrims, inhabit the route to Compostela.