Wednesday, October 19, 2022

A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith

 


 

I have read other books by Timothy Egan, and really enjoy his writing style and the research he puts into his subjects.  As the New York Times book review put it, “Egan has a gift for sweeping narrative… and he has a journalist’s eye for telltale detail”.  This book is part spiritual pilgrimage, memoir, history lessons, and travel adventure.

Egan grew up in a family with a complicated history with the Catholic Church, but as an adult has not gone to mass for many years – nor confession, though tried the confessional in a Catholic cathedral in France along the way. (It didn’t go well).  He expresses a profound disillusionment with the church, due largely to history, the treatment he has personally experienced and the scandal of widespread sexual abuse of young and vulnerable youth by priests over the last decades. 

The story is about his thousand-mile pilgrimage through the theological cradle of Christianity, exploring one of the biggest trends of our time, the collapse of religion in the world that created it, and he notes, a similar trend is happening in North America where 71% of those ages 18 to 24 say they have no religion. In England only 15% of the people are Anglican and more than half have no religion at all. France apparently is even more secular.

He sets out to walk the Via Francigena, starting in Canterbury England, then through France, Switzerland and Italy.  When he gets to Rome, he hopes to meet Pope Francis, for whom he has great admiration. Egan is trying to make an honest search to see what he believes.  He says, I’ve come to believe that an agnostic, as Catholic comedian Stephen Colbert put it, is just an atheist without balls.  Time to decide what I believe or admit what I don’t.  He quotes the Archbishop of Canterbury, who asked, “How can you understand the world, without understanding religion?”

There are many stops on the Via, visiting sites where saints, according to the church, did miraculous acts, some of which sound like fairy tales, but devoted pilgrims along the way and common people pay homage.  He did have a startling and unsettling experience when he visited the crypt of Santa Lucia de Filippini, one of the ‘incorruptible’ saints, who, though she died in 1732, her body has not decayed.  He looks into her eyes that are half open, and a minute later he looks again, and she is slowly opening her eyes wider. 

His children join him for parts of the journey, a son and a daughter, and for the last part of the walk into Rome, his wife Joni.  As they spend time on the trail and around meals, they have time to talk, maybe as they haven’t talked before.  Wondering about religion and myths related to miracles his daughter asks, “are Catholics required to believe this stuff?”   But again, “her question is the result of my negligence as a parent, leaving my kids somewhat spiritually illiterate”.  He doesn’t want them to close the door to spiritual curiosity, and wishes they were open enough to allow themselves, as Pope Francis said, “to be surprised, and not foreclose on the idea that a great faith, though flawed, can contain great truths.  Both of his children say they are basically skeptical and, thus, agnostic.

It is in the personal and family stories, juxtapose with the exploration of Christian history along the Via Francigena, that I relate to my own feelings of not having been adequate in helping my own kids discover the truths of the faith.

In the end, in Rome, he visits many sites with supposed relics, a piece of wood from the cross, a bit of bone, the heads of Peter and Paul – not all believable, he thinks.  But he says, the VF has helped him to believe in the resurrection, even though he grew more disgusted by the powerful custodians of this life-affirming event. (Corrupt popes, religious wars, killing heretics, etc.)  But the evidence from the first century, the many people who swore they had seen the risen Christ, and chose death rather than recanting, is a compelling argument.  Other encounters along the way, including a Lutheran pastor in Geneva (a graduate of St. Olaf College), helped him move toward some closure on this, the central tenet of the Christian faith. 

There is no epilogue to this book, where the pilgrim writes about how the pilgrimage changed his life, though he met many people along the route who told him of the changes it had made for them.  I have a number of friends who had walked the Camino de Santiago, starting in France and going through Spain, and they testify to the meaning of the pilgrimage for them.  I have let the years go by and now no longer would have the stamina for a long walk, but I do enjoy short walks in nature with time to reflect and commune with God. 

Tim didn’t have the one-on-one meeting with Francis that he hoped for, but he did attend an audience with others in St Peter’s Square.  Several words land on him like a tap on the shoulder:

“Never yield to negativity. Keep your eyes on the beauty all around you…. And you must always forgive.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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