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.”
