A Pilgrimage to Eternity

by Timothy Egan

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  THE ABBOT SUMMONS ME shortly before seven. He seems reluctant to answer my questions. I’m trying to be minimally intrusive, just a couple of queries to quell my curiosity. I ask him about a recent earthquake in Norcia, the birthplace of Benedict, which destroyed the monastery and disturbed the soul of Italy. “We will rebuild,” he says curtly. “We always do.” He has questions of his own. I’m wary of giving up too much about myself, especially after reading the latest blog entry from Carlo Laurenzi, the British pilgrim who was here a few nights before me. As Carlo explained, the abbot “took my credenziale and gave me the third degree. He seemed more displeased about me being divorced. I didn’t have the courage to add . . . twice!”

  We descend a flight of stairs, walk down a long corridor, go up another rise. A monk holds a bowl of water outside the cavernous room where the main meal of the day is served. Another man dips a cloth into the bowl and insists on washing my hands—a very kind gesture. Now, inside the timbered, high-ceilinged dining hall, I gape at the soaring interior. It’s very Harry Potter, drafty and vast, echoing with plates being set, chairs scraping, utensils clanking. The meal will be shared by a dozen monks, all looking at least seventy or older, save for one young man—young in comparison to the others. The abbot had warned me that dinner must be eaten in absolute silence. The only person who is allowed to speak is a designated talker who ascends to a lectern.

  At my table are the two other pilgrims of the night, whom I met in the hallway. One is a highly educated man from Nepal, who is nearing the end of a reverse Via Francigena, going to Canterbury. His walk is dedicated to raising money for medical clinics at home. The other man is French, about sixty years old, a father of two, with short, toothbrush-bristle hair, a squat nose on a square face. He looks like Shrek. He had told me before dinner that this was his fourth visit to the monastery. He’s wealthy enough to give a large amount of money every year to the Benedictines to help them pay the bills, and he enjoys these retreats. We are seated with two monks at a wooden table.

  The first course is pea soup, watery and flavorless, self-served from a large communal pot that is passed around. It’s accompanied by dry bread, no butter. The silence brings out the slurps. As we finish up, the monk at the podium starts in with the evening’s readings. He tells of the saints who will be commemorated tomorrow, outlines part of the Benedictine Rule, and then reads an essay from L’Osservatore Romano, the official newspaper of the Vatican. When I’m done with the soup, I try to catch the eye of the one youngish brother across the way, to no avail. He looks sad, and I imagine that he has come here for solace from some tragic life event. The next course—the main one—is cooked carrots. Two big serving bowls are passed around. One of them has a piece of chicken in it, a leg. Shrek takes the wine and fills our glasses. After ten minutes or so, he fills them up again. It’s an excellent red—a respectable vin de pays. But what did I expect? I’m in France, among an order of monastics who’ve been making wine for fifteen hundred years. Our table of five quickly consumes two bottles.

  The chicken leg is never taken. The Frenchman motions with his eyes for me to have it. I motion for him to eat it. Then I shake my head in the direction of the monk to my left—he should take it. The brother waves his hand over his plate; he’s had enough, thank you. In the end, I eat the drumstick in shame.

  This austere meal among brothers of the cloth sends me back to my days at the Jesuit House of Gonzaga. The contrast could not be greater. The only way I could afford Catholic high school was to work off my tuition. My family had no money. Every day, after the last class and sports, I’d hustle over to the large residence of the priests, where I was the main dishwasher in an industrial kitchen. The Jesuits, founded in the sixteenth century, were no recluses. They actively engaged with the world, and tried to influence it through politics and the reach of their educators. My toils in their kitchen came just before the big crash in vocations, coinciding with the final years of the Vietnam War, when young people became novitiates as a way to avoid the draft. The Jesuit House was packed with men in black. They began their evening with a raucous cocktail hour—Irish whiskey, mixed drinks, beer, and wine. Dinners were fantastic, particularly the Italian fare: lasagna, spaghetti and meatballs, cannelloni—and nobody scrimped on desserts. One priest, an ex-Marine who taught tenth-grade physics, had his own dietary restriction: he required a sixteen-ounce steak, well-done, with a pile of onions atop it, always served with his bottle of A.1. sauce. Every night, same thing. I never thought the Jesuits were hypocrites for eating and drinking well despite taking a vow of poverty. What I remember is the joy from that dining room. The place roared with laughter, good cheer, and lively, argumentative conversation.

  Where is the joy at Saint Paul’s dinner hour? Hard to find. I want to linger, but the last dish is cleared quickly, and the place empties out in a hurry. The entire meal, from hand washing to dessert, takes barely thirty minutes.

  Outside the dining room, I thank the abbot for allowing me to join the Benedictines. I want to compliment him on the wine, but I’m not sure if that’s appropriate. He dashes off, saying he may not see me in the morning. I’m left alone with the Frenchman in the hallway. Our conversational dam, backed up during the silent supper, bursts quickly. He knows a lot about the Saint Paul monastery, and every one of the brothers here. They don’t mind being forgotten, hidden at the northern edge of France in a village of a couple of hundred people, or being thought of as archaic, he says. But they do feel like they are under relentless persecution.

  “If you’re a Catholic in France, you have to be very careful.”

  How so?

  “Hundreds of anti-Catholic incidents. It’s far worse than the anti-Semitism of the past.”

  This strikes me as an exaggeration, and an insult to history. When I ask him for examples, he cites the murder in 2016 of a parish priest in Normandy. Father Jacques Hamel, a much-loved eighty-five-year-old, was saying Mass one morning near Rouen. Two men burst into the church and grabbed a nun and a pair of worshippers as hostages. One of the men forced Father Hamel to kneel, and then slit his throat at the altar. The killers shouted “Allahu Akbar” and filmed the carnage. On their way out, they were shot dead by police.

  God is certainly not great if he accepts praise from people who would butcher a kindly old man in a church. And those killers would not have taken the life of Father Hamel had they not believed they were serving God. The logic is as twisted as it is ancient. What did God ask of Abraham? To kill his only son, Isaac. It was a test of his faith, as it turned out—and the boy’s life was saved at the last minute. But today, we would rightly lock up Abraham after he tied his son to a wood bundle and raised a knife over his throat.

  We talk about my fellow pilgrim’s experience at Saint Paul. He likes this refuge from modernity. He enjoys the silence, the Latin Mass, the Gregorian chants, the rituals, the fraternity.

  I tell him a story about my mother, frayed and exhausted while trying to raise seven kinetic kids, each barely one year apart. At age nineteen, she was a fashion model for a department store, studying art, her life full of promise. I saw a picture of her in a bathing suit posing in front of a cedar tree; a gorgeous and confident young woman. She loved books. She loved music. She loved the outdoors. She loved history. When my grandmother took her to school for the first time, she handed her off to the nuns with these words: “She’s all yours. She’s too smart for me.” But not long after her twenty-first birthday, she fell in love with a soldier from Chicago, dropped out of college, married. A surfeit of kids soon followed. To us, she was a whir of diaper changing, clothes washing, and dinner preparing, all on her own. Often she broke down, lashing out at the kids, saying she couldn’t take it anymore. I would find her crying, alone in her room, and when I asked her what was wrong she said, Nothing, don’t bother, honey. Her only relief came at the end of the day, when she poured herself a glass of wine and opened
her book.

  But once a year she would disappear, away to a former seminary in Spokane, now used as a retreat house. For a couple of days, she would pray and read and walk and sleep—but mostly sleep. They didn’t charge her anything. She had minutes, hours, entire mornings to herself. In her absence, my dad cooked meatballs and loaded a stack of Frank Sinatra records on the turntable until he fell asleep on the living room floor. . . . Fly me to the moon. When she came home, she was a new mom. She looked pretty and youthful, and she hugged us all and said how much she missed us and loved us. I always thought that was one of the better things the Catholic Church did for her.

  I bid my companion good night and retire to my room. It’s still light outside, too early for sleep. I start another book, a story of intrigue and backstabbing among cardinals selecting the next pope—Conclave, a fictional thriller.

  In the middle of the night, I’m startled awake. A door slams. And now . . . footsteps. I’m sure of that; it’s not my imagination. This gives me the chills. My door has no lock, so I tighten defensively. Logically, there’s no reason to be afraid. But I’m alone in a big monastery, surrounded by strange men. As I’d dozed off, the book left me with the impression that anyone in a cassock has a creepy motive. The footsteps get closer, closer, louder, louder in approach. Now, the intruder is just outside my door. And then, just as quickly, the steps move on, the midnight walker passes by, the sound fades, another door opens and closes, and I’m left with my scramble of nighttime thoughts.

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  I RISE WITH THE BELLS of Saint Paul’s, sometime around five a.m. Outside, there’s enough light to watch the dawn unfold, birds fluttering from tree to tree, streaks of pink and salmon coloring the horizon. Another hot day is ahead. For breakfast, in an empty room one floor below me, I boil water in a kettle and make a cup of instant coffee. I nibble on some tough bread. Back in my room, I pack, fold my sheets, and leave money on the pillow. Walking through the monastery, fully saddled for the day, I pass a small side chapel, barely larger than a bathroom, with statuettes, candles, and pictures of saints. One of them is the Vagabond of God—Benoît Labre. If I go inside, what will I find? And why should I need a closed space for a spiritual lift? Better to keep moving, to get out into the world that presents itself along the Via Francigena. I’ll take the advice of Labre, the patron saint of wandering souls, who grew up not far from here: “There is no way. The way is made by walking.”

  The morning is exhilarating. As much as I hated this trail coming in, I love it going out. The countryside is just coming to life, doves cooing, bees buzzing off to their labors, a light breeze carrying the fragrance of fresh-cut hay. Yesterday, I never noticed the row crops of the farms along the road. But now, everything stands out. Ahead, I can see Saint-Omer on a rise above the thinnest veil of dew, and beyond—I can see for miles and miles. Off in the immediate forever, the days have no past, no future, only present, only the moment.

  SEVEN

  WAR AND PEACE ON THE WESTERN FRONT

  The great powers of Europe had been talking about a way to end all wars well before the actual War to End All Wars. Killing for tribe and state was intuitive. Christianity changed nothing. No sooner had the kingdoms converted to a God known as the Prince of Peace than they took up nearly nonstop war for a thousand years. Most of the bloodletting was blessed. The biblical Jesus who never lifted a hand in violence was unrecognizable among the armies who murdered thousands while summoning his name. Romans killed Goths. Goths attacked Byzantines. Normans conquered English. Franks butchered other Franks. And the Holy Roman Empire—a loose confederation of mostly Germanic people, neither Holy nor Roman, as the old joke has it—killed fellow Christians east and west, north and south, all under the banner of heaven.

  But after another drawn-out war was followed by even more intra-Christian killing, the nations of Europe finally tried to do something about it. All the kings’ men put their swords down and assembled in peace to sign the Treaty of London in 1518. Under the terms, the countries that pledged fealty to Christ would no longer go to war with one another. Their archers, their cannons, their cauldrons of oil and chambers of torture, their fireballs, their lances and knives, their catapults, concussion hammers, and cat-o’-nine-tails would be put aside in a part of the world whose people worshipped Jesus. Spain, England, France, Burgundy, the Habsburg Netherlands, the Holy Roman Empire, the Papal States of Italy, and others signed. War between Christians was outlawed. Forever.

  I came upon this grain of historical sand while researching the best route to take on the northern Via Francigena. Midway between Calais and Saint-Omer, on French road D231, is a small plaque commemorating a showy summit between the royal families of England and France in 1520. For several weeks, they outdid each other with gift giving and feast hosting, a Renaissance-era version of a Northwest Indian potlatch. The meeting was supposed to further along friendship between two nations that hated each other—an attempt to shore up the brotherly sentiment of the fledgling Treaty of London.

  I hadn’t given the Christian peace pact a second thought until my visit to Arras. I’m here on a warm evening, in a part of France known for its sodden, postindustrial gloom. Everyone is out, coatless and carefree, in this masterfully reconstructed city. Arras has a distinctly Flemish look, gabled houses and ornamentally carved buildings shoulder by shoulder around the Grand’Place. Despite the happy pantomime of people eating their moules-frites and children kicking a soccer ball, it’s a springtime to be solemn. For the square is packed, also, with those who are here to commemorate the young men who never got a chance to be old men taking in the awful gravity of the fields around Arras. A hundred years have passed since a spring when nations that shared a Christian heritage annihilated one another over a few miles of mud.

  This pilgrim path that I’m on goes directly through one of the heaviest concentrations of organized killing in the world. Arras sits on a rise above infinite rows of graveyards from the Great War—mass burial grounds of English boys, Scottish boys, Australian boys, Canadian boys, German boys, American boys, and French boys. Between the craters and white crosses, signs warn of the occasional unexploded shell. The fields are a churn of rust from carnage that killed more than 17 million worldwide, led to the collapse of four empires, and set the stage for Hitler’s rise and the unleashing of Nazi genocide—“the great seminal catastrophe” of the twentieth century, as George Kennan called World War I.

  The numbers are too enormous. What hits me on this otherwise sublime evening is a series of photographs mounted outside the Arras cathedral. The exhibition shows how Germans leveled one of the premier houses of worship a century ago—space devoted to the same God the destroyers worshipped. Shelling reduced that prodigious space to rubble in 1917. It has since been reconstructed. An obvious question is why Germany, which produced many a brilliant Christian philosopher and legions of reasonable Lutherans and Catholics, would pulverize the cathedral to dust. This, mind you, was not Hitler’s war. He was a corporal at the time in the trenches not far from Arras, his stew of pathologies at a low simmer.

  A larger question, then: How can you join a faith whose nation-state followers have spent most of their years killing others of that same creed? How can you believe in a savior whose message was peace and passive humility, when the professional promoters of that message were complicit in so much systematic horror? As for that pact to end all Christian-on-Christian killing, it lasted barely two years. In 1521, the nations that signed the Treaty of London commenced a quarter century of new and more awful wars, unleashing terror against civilians and their sacred places.

  My fellow pilgrim at the Wisques monastery was horrified by the killing of a priest, as we all should be. He would be horrified at what a devout Catholic, Charles V, did to the cathedral of Thérouanne, a few miles from here on the Via Francigena—just to name one random bit of religious fratricide. This Holy Roman Emperor—though crowned by a pope, he wa
s a nominally secular ruler of a cluster of fiefdoms in central Europe—burned the cathedral of his faith to the ground and ordered the town razed in 1553. In the same century, mutinous Catholics who’d been under Charles’s command sacked Catholic Rome, drunkenly pillaging for eight days while the pope cowered inside the Castel Sant’Angelo. The entire Swiss Guard was wiped out defending St. Peter’s Basilica.

  European Christians would make war with one another for the next four centuries, expanding the savagery and brutality, the loss of innocent life, with each new conflict, culminating in the high crimes of the twentieth century, the bloodiest in the history of humanity. Nationalism, a scourge that has made a comeback of late, and cancerous ideology were at the root of the two world wars. But even then, and for most of European history, faith in Christ didn’t stop Christians from trying to destroy one another. “The truth is that the greatest enemies of the doctrine of Jesus are those calling themselves the expositors of them,” said Thomas Jefferson, who struggled with this incongruence all his life. Only now, with Europe at its most secular, is the Continent experiencing one of the longest epochs of peace.

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  I DECIDE TO USE Arras as a base for a few days of exploring. I like the city. The people are welcoming and easygoing, the food is hearty and lovingly prepared, the place full of UNESCO World Heritage sites ignored by most visitors to France. I’m currently occupying a corner room on an upper floor of the Hôtel de l’Univers, a former Jesuit home dating to the sixteenth century. It’s a startling change from the abbey at Wisques. Breakfast of cheese, berries, and pastries is served outside, in a cobbled inner courtyard where priests once clustered for theological debate. I could spend a morning in the arcaded squares of Arras, afternoon in the airy reaches of the town belfry, evening sampling Belgian beers in the Grand’Place. But I’m not here for pleasure, tempting as it is. I’m here for war, and Arras is a place where no stone is without a military scar.