A Pilgrimage to Eternity

by Timothy Egan

  My original plan was to walk from Wisques to Arras, with an overnight in the rebuilt village of Thérouanne. But after a day hoofing it from the abbey, the heat got to me. A morning that had started out perfect morphed into an afternoon of pain. The temperature was in the upper 80s when I stumbled back to the Saint-Omer train station. Water stops are scarce on the northern Via. Scarcer still, at least on the next leg, were places to sleep and eat. The train to Arras, with a transfer, took an hour and a half. Ten minutes from the station, I found the Hôtel de l’Univers. They had me at bonsoir.

  There’s news on my outreach to the pope. After Father Sundborg had a chance to look over my request, he suggested translating the letter into Spanish, the pope’s native language. He had someone at his university do it for me, and then made sure it got into the Vatican pouch, as he called it, via the Jesuit back door. The Vatican pouch! A glimmer of hope.

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  THE NEXT DAY, I follow the sound of bagpipes to a ceremony. The Scots lost 46,000, killed or wounded, in the Battle of Arras—a terrible toll for a tiny nation in a single clash in a spring offensive on the western front. Descendants of the dead, their rosy cheeks puffed in making mournful music on a cloudless morning, are here to remember what most of us have forgotten. World War I was a senseless grind of human flesh. Its origins are still baffling, its ending cataclysmic and still felt. Civilized Europe, enlightened Europe, Christian Europe showed that it could be at its most creative when fashioning new ways to kill. These nations gave the world poison gas and bomb-dropping biplanes, flamethrowers and rapid-firing tanks. After a month, the Allies suffered 159,000 casualties in the Battle of Arras—heads crushed, limbs severed, lungs collapsed in trenches fetid with misery.

  As the twentieth century dawned, the intermarried monarchs of Europe would seem to have had no reason to destroy one another’s nations. The Kaiser of Germany, the Tsarina of Russia, and the King of England were all grandchildren of Queen Victoria. With the 1910 funeral of Edward VII in London, a prescient time-traveler saw a pivot. The British Empire covered a population of 400 million. “On history’s clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting on a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again,” wrote the historian Barbara Tuchman. The assassination of an obscure and vainglorious archduke in the Balkans set off a domino of chest puffing, saber rattling, and troop moving. It would all be over by summer’s end, the generals said. But by the close of 1914, that first year of the war, almost a million Frenchmen had been killed or wounded. By war’s end, there were 630,000 young widows in France.

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  I GET A LIFT from a man at the hotel, taking me farther inland, through more Flemish-flavored lowlands. My destination is Péronne, on the Somme. The river is wide and slow-moving today, lazy in its retirement from industry. Too bad the Somme is saddled with infamy. In the third year of the War to End All Wars, the Allies lost 600,000 men and the Germans almost 500,000 in the four-month Battle of the Somme. In the first day alone, Britain suffered 56,000 casualties. It resulted in no breakthroughs, only a vast harvesting of young men in the scythe of advanced human destruction.

  Having survived pillaging from many a medieval marauder, Péronne could not live through the Great War. The town was completely destroyed by the Germans in 1917. When it tried to come back one more time, the Luftwaffe finished it off in 1940. What is left today is a huddle of seven thousand people, and two of the best tributes to the worst impulses of man. One is a carving of a woman leaning over the dead body of a loved one, shaking her fist in defiance: The Monument to the Dead. One life taken. One life bereft. In a single casualty, this sculpture says as much about war as a graveyard stretching to the horizon’s edge.

  The other site is the Museum of the Great War, inside the walls of a crumbling château. War evolved quickly in the twentieth century. Poisonous gas could leave a boy blind, lame, psychotic, or quivering for the rest of his life—that is, when it didn’t kill by toxic asphyxiation. Wooden prosthetics were mass-produced for the legless legions of the Lost Generation. Men without faces returned home and found that their loved ones didn’t recognize them, in body or soul. Among the displays here are fake noses and fake eyes for the faces scraped of their features. It’s dizzying, this mass destruction.

  On my way out of town, I come upon a final reminder of the crude evil that civilized people can do to each other: Péronne’s main church, Saint John the Baptist. It was destroyed, just like the cathedral of Arras, by hellfire rained down on one Christian nation from another. So where was God? It’s the same question asked by the earnest woman in the oldest church in the English-speaking world, regarding the Holocaust—the same question any sentient human should insist be answered, no matter how many times it’s posed, no matter how basic the query, no matter how much ridicule it prompts from eminent theologians who’ve moved on to more arcane subjects. God is nowhere in this former no-man’s-land. And if God was here—why allow it? A test of free will? At the price of unfathomable cruelty, that explanation cannot hold up. Why not “interfere” with this fatal folly, and answer a million prayers? Why not?

  Solace comes in a thimble, from a well-known poem the Jesuits made us memorize in ninth grade. It’s from John McCrae, a Canadian soldier and medical doctor who had just buried a dear friend in this ground, and would soon follow him to an early grave. One stanza stays with me at the end of the day:

  We are the Dead. Short days ago

  We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

  Loved and were loved, and now we lie,

  In Flanders fields.

  EIGHT

  THE MIRACLES OF LAON

  I arrive late in Laon, deposited at the pedestal of a city of shimmering stone three hundred feet above the plains of Picardy. It’s an illusion in the sky, a fortress of wedding cake white. The eighty miles between Arras and Laon held little in the way of scenery or inspiration. And what had been a spell of unusual weather is now a certified heat wave and cause of concern among the vignerons as I inch toward Champagne country. I did the sensible thing and took two local trains to get here. Laon—settled since the time of Julius Caesar, a principal town in the kingdom of the Germanic Franks who gave their name to this nation, occupied by the English during the Hundred Years War—was clearly not going anywhere. Nor was I. My hope was that the Laon lift, said to be the world’s oldest automated cable car, would carry me to the top. But upon arrival I find that the transport has been retired, leaving no option but to hike more than a mile uphill.

  Beyond the ramparts is a plateau crowned by the Seven Wonders of Laon—part of an intact medieval city that instantly enchants. Within the four-mile enclosure of the town walls is the story of a country tied to the heavens and the densest clot of historic monuments in France. In my sweaty stupor, I come across the first of many explanations for Laon’s miracles. In the twelfth century, another exhausted man was trying to coax oxen carrying a load of cathedral stone to crest the hill. The beasts would not budge. Then, out of nowhere appeared a large bull, strong enough to deliver the blocks on the cart to the holy construction site. The astonishment is commemorated in giant carved oxen perched along the corners of each of the cloud-busting towers of Laon’s Cathedral of Notre-Dame, which dominate the skyline. As animal legends go, Paul Bunyan and his blue ox Babe is a better tale. Still, the supernatural runs deep here, making Laon the perfect place to delve into two millennia of miracles. Why did the finger of God so often touch this promontory, and not the ghastly fields I had just left behind?

  Off the Rue Franklin Roosevelt is a small hotel owned by a family of immigrants. The street is a rare New World name in this part of the Old World, a tribute to a liberator. My room is up two flights of creaky steps, with a view out toward the plains. There is no air-conditioning. But I’m assured that I can catch a night breeze with the windows open. I catch the noise instead, the sound of Europe’s ubiquitous s
cooters. For a ration of time—maybe three a.m. to six—all is quiet on this part of the western front.

  After coffee and croissant at the hotel, I’m off for the day. It’s a thrill to watch Laon rouse itself. While walking along the storefronts, I feel drips. I look up: as if on cue in a musical, shutters open and people lean out to water happy-looking flowers in hanging baskets. At the top of the hour comes a chorus of unclamping of metal grates and opening of shop doors. Merchants take to the sidewalk with whisk brooms. Huge, battery-powered municipal vacuums inhale crumbs on the street, like boars on a truffle hunt. Now, every window at sidewalk level has something enticing for the eye—fresh-cut rabbit loins in the charcuterie, adorable matching shirt and pants in the shop for the well-dressed toddler, an artful spread of strawberry tarts and chocolate éclairs at the pâtisserie. You can imagine chucking it all in the U.S.A. and taking up a new life here.

  The artistry of the everyday is enough to delight. But what sets Laon apart is an urban plan that dates to Charlemagne, more than twelve hundred years ago. The center of the old city is medieval without the dark corners and damp interiors where so much superstition was allowed to fester. All is luminescent. If you wrapped the whole of Laon in Costco plastic and dropped it anywhere in North America, people would be lining up at its doors, year-round. They would have much to marvel at: a sundial held aloft by Saint Michael the Archangel. A commandery built by those ass-kicking, treasury-hoarding, secrecy-loving monks the Knights Templar, in 1134. A hospital for recuperative mental care, constructed about the same time—the oldest such building in France, twice the age of anything built by human hands in the United States.

  These little oddities of place are not even among the Seven Wonders. The city was long a stop on the Via Francigena—both fortified and heavily consecrated, the ideal combination for a pilgrim restorative. A book about Laon’s miracles published in the 1700s brought even more seekers to town, and Laon today still welcomes the spiritual straggler. The half-dozen-plus-one major miracles are a bit of a disappointment, though a few of them stand out. One is the pond belonging to the monks of Saint Vincent; the waters in the abbey never go down. The second is the Leaning Tower of Lady Eve, which slipped off its foundation eight hundred years ago but is still standing, precariously. The other is a rock from the year 1338, studded with nails driven into it by a mother who was protesting the hanging of her three innocent sons.

  There are explanations for each of them. Perhaps the water is spring-fed, an eternal flow having more to do with geology than Jesus. The tower has yet to tumble over, thanks to superior construction; gravity will ultimately win. The rock—well, a good nail can penetrate sandstone. So why not let it go at that? Are lifelong Christians going to lose faith when the tower finally falls, when Saint Vincent’s pond shrinks, when the nail crumbles to rust, as it must? Miracles are for doubters. They’re faith converters and skeptic convincers. Saint Augustine, a hedonist for much of his life in fourth-century North Africa, said he might not have become a Christian without the wizardry of the faith. After converting, he explained the supernatural as short-term inducements: “Miracles were necessary before the world believed, in order that it might believe.” I can also believe most miracles are fraudulent, as Hitchens says in his argument for atheism. As a journalist, fact-based reason is my crutch. But as a pilgrim, I have to dampen down my skepticism, to try to see things in another dimension. I cannot easily dismiss the children who leave their shoes atop the tomb of Saint Erkembode.

  Why do more than 5 million people a year make the pilgrimage to Lourdes, in the French Pyrenees, where the apparition of the Virgin appeared to a fourteen-year-old girl in 1858? Because something, somehow, some way, does happen to a handful of lucky supplicants. Since 1883, the Lourdes Medical Bureau has documented sixty-eight cures at the site, the same number recognized by the church as certifiably divine interventions. The doctors will not pronounce them miraculous—they use the term “medically inexplicable,” as well as the placebo effect. More recently, after taking a deep dive into these cases, a prestigious Oxford medical journal came up flummoxed. “The Lourdes phenomenon,” the authors wrote, “still awaits scientific explanation.” The best they could conclude is the cures “concern science as well as religion.”

  Christianity was born in the realm of the supernatural: the virgin birth and incarnation. And it took flight on the resurrection of a man killed by the Roman Empire for political sedition. If you doubt that Mary conceived without a human sperm donor, that God became man, or that Jesus rose from the dead, you doubt the foundation of the faith. The four major Gospels record a total of thirty-seven miracles by Jesus, beginning with that water-to-wine conversion at the wedding party in Cana, just north of Nazareth. He was hesitant, at first, saying that his time had not yet come. “But they have no wine,” pleaded Mary, ever the Jewish mother. Water in six large stone jars was then converted to 150 gallons of wine that the steward pronounced the best he’d ever had. Oh, for a taste of vin de Jésus! After that, his powers moved doubters all over Judea. And unlike the many charlatans working the supernatural circuit, he didn’t charge money for cures. He gave sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, health to lepers. He raised the dead. He cast out demons, walked on water, calmed a storm when waves turned the lowest freshwater lake in the world, the inland Sea of Galilee, to white-capped fury. Only a single miracle, the transformation of five loaves of bread and two fish into enough food to feed five thousand people, is recorded in each of the four major Gospels. The others are specific to the narrator. And therein lies the conflict: the accounts of these celebrated deeds, written decades after the death of Christ, are unreliable and full of contradictions. Would the lone miracle that the books of Matthew, Mark, John, and Luke agree on have been enough? How about none? Can we take the philosophy of Jesus without the miraculous?

  Certainly, the early church did not believe so. Saul of Tarsus became the most influential of first-century promoters of an underground faith only after he was temporarily struck blind, while on his way to harass the Jesus cult in Damascus. A small, Greek-speaking Pharisee, Saul had been complicit in the stoning of the first Christian martyr, Saint Stephen—“and Saul approved of his murder,” the Bible says. The killing had its intended effect, scattering the followers of Christ away from Judea and neighboring Samaria. Saul was a violent, hate-filled zealot. He claimed that the voice of Jesus asked him why he was attacking Christians. Skeptics have a different take on the conversion. The blinding light could have been an epileptic seizure or acute dehydration. Maybe it was sunstroke.

  What we know for sure is that Saul became Paul, persecutor to proselytizer—abandoning an ancient, monotheistic religion for a struggling spiritual start-up—because of a life-altering event. No conversion was more significant, no miracle more influential. Almost half of the New Testament was written by Paul or his followers. His letters are among the earliest surviving documents of Christianity, predating the Gospels—though still written two decades after the crucifixion. And we know that a religion that sprouted from a small provincial sect, a religion that should have died with the killing of its leader, took hold throughout the Mediterranean—an area already rich in its own gods and backed by the mightiest army on earth. The odds were not good for the survival of this faith. Thirty years after the death of Jesus, Christians numbered fewer than two thousand, by several estimates—total, in a Roman Empire of more than 50 million. Few would have predicted that this obscure, marginalized movement would become the world’s most popular religion.

  Thereafter, miracles converted monarchs and military leaders. Constantine, the first Roman emperor to embrace Christianity, did so only after giving the new deity a try as he went into battle in the year 312. He saw the image of a cross in the sky, the IHS Christogram, with a message, “By this conquer,” according to church tradition. One year later, he issued the Edict of Milan, decriminalizing Christianity. In time, Constantine established a new seven-day calendar, with Sun
day as the Day of the Lord, and built a new form of temple for the new god—the Christian basilica. But let’s not forget that the emperor also had his wife boiled to death in a bath, and a son assassinated—an un-Christian reaction to a twisted round of family treachery. Another military-miracle convert was Clovis, the fifth-century king of the Franks, who reigned over what is now northern France, Belgium, and western Germany. While slaying members of a rival Germanic tribe, Clovis fell behind, and looked to the heavens for help. “If thou shalt grant me victory over these enemies,” he said, “I will believe in thee and be baptized in thy name.”

  Over the centuries, miracles have been institutionalized, requiring scrutiny from a slow-moving Vatican bureaucracy. In 2016, Pope Francis introduced tough new guidelines, banning cash payments to doctors who examine cures attributed to Christ. The new process is designed to be more transparent, with a group of medical detectives applying the ecclesiastical equivalent of peer review. Most of the saints—those who were not martyred directly into heaven—had to have at least two miracles attributed to them. This is still the case, though there are exceptions. It can take several lifetimes for the Congregation for the Causes of Saints to verify the miraculous. But those who passed the sanctification test had some amazing superpowers. One saint could fly! Another walked around Paris while holding his severed head!

  And many a saint, in death, became an ongoing miracle: a body that does not decompose, a condition defined as incorruptible. These corpses are not “natural mummies,” wrote Joan Carroll Cruz in a study of the phenomenon. “The bodies are quite moist and flexible, even after the passage of centuries.” Other corpses smell of roses, known as the odor of sanctity. In the modern era, a Stanford University graduate in engineering, Michael O’Neill, keeps a running tab of apparitions, cures, and other mystifying things through his website, miraclehunter.com. He is in high demand, for 80 percent of Americans believe in miracles. O’Neill does not pass judgment on the veracity of extraordinary events. But he doesn’t strike me as a skeptic either. He notes the words of Saint Augustine parsing the supernatural, which seems about right: “Miracles are not contrary to nature, but only contrary to what we know about nature.”