A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith by Timothy Egan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
A devout, engaged, educated Irish Catholic woman has given up all her ambitions to stay home and raise a brood of seven. Active in the church her whole life, she lies on her deathbed from a brain tumor, and quietly says to her son: “I’m not feeling it, Timmy… I’m not sure anymore…I don’t know what to believe or what’s ahead…” It reminded me of my grandmother at the funeral of my grandfather (lifelong staunch Dutch Reformed, both of them) when they closed the lid of the casket. She sobbed and cried: “Now I’ll never see him again!” All those years of faith and belief, a promised afterlife… and when it came to the end, it faltered.
Egan, a thoughtful, brisk, and gifted writer of history and commentary, is shaken. His wife is Jewish, he is mostly lapsed, and they have raised their children as freethinkers. But that astonishing human quest (including his own) for meaning, for “spirituality,” for faith or belief or whatever it is, nags at him. So with a copy of Christopher Hitchens (!) in his pack, he sets off to make the pilgrimage from Canterbury, England to Rome. And it’s quite a journey.
Over 300+ pages, he ponders Thomas Becket, Augustine, two Francises (Il Poverello of Assisi and the current pope, whom he hopes to meet), Crusaders, saints obscure and famous, church architecture, the Roman and papal empires, Jewish persecution, the unspeakable savagery with which Christians have treated not just Jews and infidels but each other and children, and the courageous and humane clerics who aid the helpless, who illuminate beautiful books and till gardens. He considers the age-old question of theodicy: why would an all-powerful God permit the Holocaust? the Massacre of Wassy? The serial abuse of young boys by his own parish priest with harrowing results? How could the Catholic Church be responsible for both a furious estrangement and salvation in response to tragedies – just within Egan’s family?
To Egan’s credit, he examines the questions: carefully, deeply, humanely, and has no easy answers. He expertly interweaves history, the lives of emperors, monks and saints, stained glass, and vaulted naves. There’s a crash course in how theological bureaucracy politicized the simple gospels. He strides across the plains of northern France and contemplates the killing fields of the Great War, takes the occasional train to hilltop towns amid vineyards, the Great St Bernard Pass in the Alps, and down into the flinty sun of Italy where every meal seems to be an adventure of its own. He meets good-humored monks in pilgrim hostels, shares the road with other walkers with their own motivations, peers in amazement at an “incorruptible” lady saint, looking like Snow White in her glass casket after 300 years. Always thinking, always musing, always trying to unpack why we humans do this, why do we need this, in all its contradictions of glory and monstrous violence?
This atheist loved every page of this book. It’s the kind of trek I would like to take, and the kind of book I wish I could write. Having done a mini-pilgrimage of my own to the grave of St Francis in Assisi, there were many moments when I wanted to dash off an email to Egan, and tell him something or ask him something… or spend a day or two on the road with him, with a carafe of local wine in a little restaurant in the evenings. He comes to his own conclusions: the journey seems to have settled him a little. He will keep the joys, the comforts; he will reject the evils, and let the rest go to be thought over more, or by others. I am grateful he chose to share his travels with us.
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