A Pilgrimage to Eternity Read online

  Outside Saint Martin’s is a small welcoming sign: “We do not have all the answers. We are on a spiritual journey. We look to Scripture, reason and tradition to help us on our way. Whoever you are, we offer you a space to draw nearer to God and walk with us.” I’m impressed. Since when does the oldest church in the English-speaking world—or any church, for that matter—not have all the answers? The words appeal to my awakened pilgrim spirit.

  Inside, I’m shocked. There are no more than twenty people at midmorning Sunday service. Most are elderly, save for a child playing in the back. Christianity “has perhaps proved more influential in shaping human destiny than any other institutional philosophy,” wrote the historian Paul Johnson. If so, is this the end of the line of that influence, the whimper? A woman seizes me immediately, sensing a fresh soul.

  “Oh, good morning!” she exclaims. “Welcome, welcome, welcome!” She takes me forcefully by the arm and guides me to a tray of baked goods.

  “Would you like a cookie?”

  No cookie, thanks all the same. But perhaps some juice, I mumble.

  “Yes, juice. Of course! Is apple cider all right? The local cider is quite good.”

  “Well then—”

  “But this is not local, and nor are you. Do tell me your name and where you come from. We’re so excited you decided to join us.”

  Things have gotten stickier than I want them to be. No religion for me, please, I’m pretending to be British. Where is Anglo reserve when you need it? I had hoped to slip in quietly, find a place in the back, and observe a solemn service in an iconic setting. I thought I might reflect on the Romans who knelt here, on Augustine’s Italian monks newly cast into the gloom of an English November, on Becket’s road to defiance of his king, on the truths that have held Christianity together through the years. Instead, I feel like the blood donor in a roomful of hemophiliacs.

  “Oh, please, you must at least try the cookies.”

  The church is museum quality. But it has a pulse—and a humane one at that. There’s a little side table where pilgrims can get their passports stamped, and a collection box for donations to the Muslim refugees huddling in filthy camps just across the Channel. After juice and cookies, the service gets under way with a few songs and readings. It’s very moving. The same message from the outside is repeated in the Pilgrim Post, the stapled monthly journal of the parish. “We do not have all the answers. We are on a spiritual journey.” The newsletter promotes an upcoming talk: “The Bible: Can it still be read as the unique truth about God?”

  A parishioner recounts a recent trip to Auschwitz, ending with a moral paradox that has long troubled people of faith: “Where was God in the Holocaust?” Where, indeed? Is there any plausible explanation for why a just God would allow the murder of six million Jews, and six million other innocents—the disabled, gays, Soviet and Polish civilians, Roma? Or even a single random killing of a single fine person? The answer provided here is the hardy and frustrating perennial: God gave humans free will. It’s our choice. We blew it, we screwed up, and in the twentieth century we committed the most heinous crime of all time. The parishioner doesn’t quite phrase it that way, but close. “Maybe the question is not so much why did God allow the Holocaust to happen, but why did we?”

  Saint Martin’s is without a vicar on this Sunday. A part-time substitute, the Reverend Jo Richards, cannot be here either, but she has sent along one of her sermons to be read. Women make up the majority of new Anglican ministers. The faith has come full circle. Just as a woman, Bertha, was responsible for Christianity taking hold in a big part of England, it now looks like women will have to save it. Jo explains that in the Greek New Testament there are two words for time. Chronos refers to that which can be measured in seconds, hours, and days, the time by which most of us live our lives. Kairos tracks the quality moments “where time seems to stand still and there is awe and wonder all around.”

  Afterward, I’m surrounded again and peppered with questions. How did I like the service? Would I care to attend midweek prayer? And one last plea on behalf of the uneaten cookies. So dreadfully sorry, I say, trying my best at a British apology. I’m on chronos time, with miles ahead of me, though hoping to encounter kairos time along the way.

  A snow-haired man, perhaps sensing my unease, guides me to the front of the church, the original Roman-built section. He introduces himself as a lay minister, longtime parishioner, and amateur historian. I ask this gentleman about the archbishop of Canterbury: what he thinks of the Jewish heritage of the leader of the Church of England.

  “Oh, but he’s not Jewish. Haven’t you heard?”

  No, I hadn’t heard. I should have had the AOC on my Google news alert, otherwise I wouldn’t have missed the major twist in the Very Reverend Welby’s story.

  “He’s a bastard.”

  It turns out his father is not Gavin Welby, the bootlegger of Jewish descent, who married Lady Williams of Elvel and had a son nine months after they were betrothed. His biological father is Sir Anthony Montague Browne, deceased, a former Royal Air Force officer who was the last private secretary to Prime Minister Winston Churchill. When first informed of this preposterous claim, the archbishop went out and had a DNA test taken to disprove it, using hair samples from a brush kept by Sir Anthony’s widow. But the test confirmed the story: Archbishop Welby was indeed this other man’s child—illegitimate, in the official parlance of church and legal disrepute. Welby was stunned.

  Dogged by the predatory press—“Archbishop Conceived During Mum’s Drunken Romp with Churchill Secretary”—his mother issued a statement explaining the turn of events. Just days before her wedding, she had slept with Browne. “Although my recollection of events is patchy, I now recognize that during the days leading up to my very sudden marriage, and fueled by a large amount of alcohol on both sides, I went to bed with Anthony Montague Browne. It appeared that the precautions taken at the time didn’t work and my wonderful son was conceived as a result of this liaison.”

  I leave the time-dented little church trying to put the twist in this Canterbury tale in perspective. Not so long ago, Welby would have been forced to resign, shamed on the way out the door, through no fault of his own. Once a bastard, always a bastard—that was the authoritative view. It wasn’t until 1969 that the Church of England ended a nearly four-hundred-year-old ban on anyone born illegitimate from becoming archbishop of Canterbury. Burke’s Peerage, the keeper of titles held by inbred earls and viscounts, didn’t include illegitimate children until 2009. The whole notion of “illegitimacy” is a horrid concept, damning a child at birth with a special kind of original sin. Welby has tried to make peace with this latest revelation. Don’t laugh or feel sorry for him, he says—his life story is a redemptive one. “To find that one’s father is other than imagined is not unusual,” he said in a statement. “I know that I find who I am in Jesus Christ, not in genetics.”

  In the face of collapse, doom, and ridicule, I can’t help but think that a church that confesses to not having all the answers, guided by a man who once would have been shunned as mentally ill for his depression, persecuted for being a Jew, or scorned as a bastard, has a future in this messy world. The things Welby discovered about himself would have condemned him at any other time in the two millennia of Christianity. This is progress, though it may have come too late to matter.

  THREE

  AT THE CLIFF OF THE KINGDOM

  It is so much easier to leave Britain than to enter it. But standing atop the White Cliffs of Dover, I wonder: Why leave? A sun-fused mist lies over the Channel, enough haze to obscure the Continent just twenty-three miles away. On the other side are thousands of people from some of the most wretched places on earth, all hoping to cross over to this chunk of chalk. The spot where England falls to the sea was the envy of Napoleon and Hitler, though neither was able to breach the briny barrier, and Julius Caesar and William the Conqueror, who did. Here is a Roman li
ghthouse as well as a castle crowning the bluff, built for pilgrims by Henry II when he was still doing penance for the death of Thomas Becket. And in my own expansive mode, I’m trying to forgive the English for what they did to the Irish through eight hundred years of institutionalized cruelty. That same Henry invaded Waterford a year after his knights split Becket’s skull. For my ancestors, it was all misery from then on. Most of the horrors were committed in the name of religion, Christian on Christian. Oh that, the English say whenever I bring up the tangle of our tormented heritage. Let it go.

  Why leave, when your feet are swollen and you already miss your family not even one week into an uncertain journey? Why leave, when those closest to you think you’re daft; most of them don’t even believe in God. “This old guy with a beard in the clouds—what a fairy tale,” said a longtime friend, having made a gradual life transition from annoying born-again to annoying atheist. I’ve got The Confessions of St. Augustine on my Kindle. But I’m also traveling with Christopher Hitchens, the great, late polemicist. He’s a combustible companion for days when I might go wobbly, as I just did at Saint Martin’s in Canterbury. “To us atheists, no spot on earth is or could be ‘holier’ than another,” he writes. I won’t argue with him for now. I’ll let him state his case from a book subtitled How Religion Poisons Everything. As for my expedition, Hitchens is not encouraging. “To the ostentatious absurdity of the pilgrimage,” he writes, “we can counterpose a leisurely or urgent walk from one side of the library or gallery to another.”

  Well then, why ever leave the British Library—largest in the world by items catalogued? I find one answer in the blog of a pilgrim who just left, trundling down the Via Francigena to Rome a few days ahead of me. Carlo Laurenzi, London-born to Italian-immigrant parents, buttoned up his home, strapped on an overly stuffed backpack, and started hoofing it south from Canterbury. Laurenzi is sixty-three, and his trip may be nothing more than a break from “the sad reality of modern life,” as his prime minister put it. But he’s also trying to resolve a spiritual quandary. He is unable to explain a couple of events in his life—occasions when he should have been killed in freak accidents. It made him think he was spared for a reason, that perhaps a greater power intervened. He won’t call it miraculous, just something he’s unable to square with his atheism. Deep walking, a term modern pilgrims throw around, is a way to resolve his inner conflicts.

  “I cannot slot in those anecdotes and experiences into my intellectual framework,” he wrote of his motive for taking to the Via Francigena. “Am I going insane? I hope not, but I’m surprised to be having to revisit something that I thought I’d left behind for good.”

  Laurenzi, a nonbeliever, must feel encouraged by recent words from Pope Francis. One might be better off as an atheist, he suggested, than a bad Christian. By that, he meant a Christian who exploits other people. He also warned against excessive rigidity, saying that those who tell us “it’s this or nothing” are not Catholics, but heretics. These kinds of statements leave me rubber-faced in cartoonish astonishment. He said . . . what? The pope made this bad-Christian observation after a visit to Sweden, the center of European neo-heathenism, where eight out of ten people are atheists or have no belief in any religion. It’s easier to come out as gay in Sweden, as a story on that secular stronghold noted, than to be an out Christian.

  I’m trying to write a letter to this pope, after mulling it over for weeks, working up the nerve. Yeah, O.K., I might as well be writing to Santa Claus. I want a pony, and an interview with the Vicar of Christ on Earth. I could try the journalistic route, using my New York Times credential. But after checking with colleagues in Rome and Manhattan who are far better connected and knowledgeable about Vatican affairs than a spiritual stray from the American West, I’m discouraged. Francis moves in mysterious ways, dialing people out of the blue, no pattern to his access. He would probably think I expect him to answer for all the centuries of ecclesiastical malpractice—the execution of heretics, fostering of wars, suppression of science and sexuality, not to mention the modern criminal clergy. That’s not what I’m after.

  Francis is the first pope from the Jesuits, a nearly five-hundred-year-old religious order known to produce many a brilliant thinker among the ranks of its educators. So . . . what if I try to play the Jesuit card, with the help of a priest I know? Father Stephen Sundborg, S.J., now a much-loved university president and theologian, was a teacher of mine in high school, a fresh-faced novitiate at the time. He was one of the few Jesuits who didn’t send me down to the office of the chain-smoking, radish-nosed, 250-pound vice principal to drop my pants and get my adolescent butt whacked with a perforated hardwood paddle. Father Steve is a friend, a highly evolved human, and he just returned from his own audience with Il Papa. Here goes:

  To the Holy Father:

  One of the oldest forms of discovery, affirmation, and search for enlightenment is the pilgrimage. And one of the oldest of pilgrimages is the Via Francigena, from Canterbury to Rome.

  “Go, pilgrim, and take your place in the sun and your share in the dust—heart awakened, forget the ephemeral.”

  I’m trying to follow this advice from the Liturgy of Hours, traveling a thousand miles on the Via Francigena for a look at time and terrain.

  Does that sound too pretentious? Or maybe it’s condescending. Sure, the pope knows about the purpose of the V.F.—why state the obvious? He sees the church as a “people of pilgrims,” as he has said. Every day, a fresh river of those pilgrims pours into St. Peter’s Square for a wave and a smile from the Bishop of Rome. All right then: maybe a bit of sincere flattery:

  I am intrigued by the Pope’s advice on how “voracious consumerism” can kill the soul. I’m moved by his treatment of refugees. I’m fascinated by how he uses the echoes of history—from the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s Reformation, or in his outreach to Anglicans—to forge a fresh way.

  Should I continue to use the third person in referring to Francis, as people do in the presence of a monarch—And how is Her Majesty’s toast this morning? Or make a direct appeal? I stay in the remove, and try for a sweep of purpose to entice him.

  As I wander from the shrines of European Christianity, with many of the great cathedrals empty, I’m interested in the Big Questions. How do we live in an increasingly secular age? What is our duty to our fellow humans—the refugees of war and sectarian strife—in a time of rising nationalism and tribalism? And what can the Gospel say to someone who thinks he can get all the world’s knowledge from the internet?

  I close with a reference to the Jesuits in general, a prominent mention of Father Steve, and an acknowledgment that my request is a long shot. And this would have to mark my point of no return, moving out of the security of spiritual complacency and into the unknown. It feels more like a plunge from Dover’s cliff than a gentle first step. Faith is groping at air during the fall, hoping to find something to grab on to.

  * * *

  —

  THE WALK FROM CANTERBURY was eighteen miles, with little to slow a reasonably fit person trying to make three miles an hour, so long as you pack a big lunch, bring at least two liters of water, and take several long breaks. Out Monastery Street, down Pilgrims Way, past the villages of Patrixbourne and Womenswold, through cemeteries and farms, a stop at the inn at Shepherdswell, daydreaming through the tidy forest of Pidders Wood. There was an abandoned church, which another pilgrim, a graduate student named Julia Peters, had alerted me to after I contacted her following her own trip to Rome. Built in the twelfth century, this place served Christians from Becket’s day until the Beatles broke up. It’s now classified as “redundant,” the euphemism of Anglican euthanasia.

  Dover is slump-shouldered and sullen, still sulking after losing much of its European traffic to the Channel Tunnel in 1994. At a sidewalk kiosk on a pedestrianized street, I pick up a dog-eared book, The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire. Leafing through it, I
realize that many Brits have never known anything but decline their entire lives. Some resent the descendants of those once ruled by colonial masters, now shaping the UK of tomorrow. The response of people who mourn the demise of Rule, Britannia is to go small, to close the doors, to feel put upon. Yet the island is not at war or mired in economic depression. The crisis in Britain is somewhat psychological, maybe self-induced, with a hint of hypochondria. Perhaps it’s tied to the uncertainties of the kingdom’s newfound spiritual independence. Say what you will about faith, but it anchored a nation for centuries. “There’s never been a better time to be alive, yet we feel so glum,” said Ian Goldin, an Oxford professor, speaking before the assembled elites at Davos. “So many people feel anxious. So many people feel this is one of the most dangerous times.”

  Dover Castle looks good for its age. Guardian of the sea below, it’s part of a sprawling site run by English Heritage, the official custodian of more than four hundred places dear to the national story. Inside Henry’s Great Tower are people dressed in medieval clothes, performing medieval tasks, but they do not have medieval teeth. I ask a serf who’s grinding grain into flour about the miserable medieval diet. I assume, as the Thomas Hobbes line has it, that life in those days was nasty, brutish, and short. A simple cut on the finger might inflame to an infection, which could become gangrenous, and fatal. Plagues like the Black Death swept through the cities, wiping out two-thirds of England’s population between 1348 and 1350, and a third of France’s. Half the people in Europe died of disease before their thirtieth birthday. Anyone taller than five-foot-ten was a giant. Leeches were part of a medicinal kit that included a hot balm of pigeon turds for treating kidney stones. Soap was a lump of boiled mutton fat and wood ash. Men wore underpants. Women did not. And subsisting on leathered beef, in the pre-dentistry era, must have produced a surfeit of people with jack-o’-lantern smiles.