A Pilgrimage to Eternity Read online

  “Actually, most of them had pretty decent teeth,” says the costumed guide in the castle. That is, until great quantities of sugar were brought to Europe from the New World. Sugar changed everything. A sweet tooth could quickly lead to no teeth. But distant-past Brits didn’t just gnaw on gristle and slurp gruel while farting around the fire, he explains. (Or, if they were lucky, listening to Roland the Farter, a twelfth-century flatulist.) They boiled up big cauldrons of soups and stews, which were highly nutritious, and baked fat loaves of bread from what we would now call ancient grains.

  They ate with their hands. Forks didn’t become common until well after Henry VIII had died, though I doubt if modern cutlery would have reduced his portion sizes. At harvesttime, tables were heavy with fresh produce—fresh, that is, up until supper. Vegetables were always cooked to excess, or brined and pickled for storage. To eat a raw plant was considered a bad thing. The food was washed down by mead—a fermented honey concoction—ale, or wine from France. “The English drink no water,” one medieval chronicler observed, “unless at certain times upon religious score.” The bristled end of a reed served as a toothbrush.

  Wandering upstairs, I duck under short entrances and explore the quarters for pilgrims from eight hundred years ago. Like me, they would have had a hesitant moment before leaving their tight little world for a Via Francigena of rumor, danger, and uncertainty. They would have questioned their motives: Could walking toward a distant city really bring a person closer to God? And what about all the feral thoughts arising after prayer went unanswered? Some may have left Dover as believers, only to arrive in Rome as atheists. A medieval pilgrimage was a rough test of faith, the most unpredictable and independent thing a person could do in a short life.

  In the castle, the larger rooms were dormitories for the masses walking to Rome, where people slept on the floor, assured of protection inside this heavily insulated fortress. Other rooms, for the elites, are high-ceilinged, the floors polished. The bed boards on display are at a distinct angle at the head, which I imagine would make it difficult to slip into a decent slumber. It was common to sleep somewhat upright, another heritage docent explains, as a way to keep evil spirits from entering the body at night. To lie flat was similar to a dead body in repose—inviting the devil to enter.

  Outside, the mist has lifted. The view is stunning. From a perch above the castle walls, I take in the gentle chop of the Channel, leading away to the near beyond, where the tribes of Europe have long assembled for conquest. After crossing, the Romans built a landing named Dubris, and connected it by road and bridge over the River Thames, to another establishment, Londinium. Napoleon thought he could follow in their footsteps. “We have six centuries of insults to avenge,” he said. But his Grande Armée, unlike the javelin-bearing Romans who landed fifteen miles north of Dover, or the papal-sanctioned Normans who beached to the south, never made it across the water. It was another time in May when the bedraggled scraps of French and British forces were cornered for slaughter by the Nazi war machine in 1940, at the beach in Dunkirk. Would England fall, the Swastika soon to fly over the Palace of Westminster? Home, as the soldiers who queued up in the sand while the Germans strafed them, was almost close enough to touch—home, these white cliffs below me. You’re followed out of the castle compound by a renewed sense of debt to the last members of a dying generation. If you look away, you can see those shivering boys at water’s edge, ordinary people who saved the world.

  * * *

  —

  IT’S TIME TO PUT my doubts in a pocket, and the UK behind me. I’m ready to see the Via, the Pas-de-Calais, the Champagne country, a village built on miracles, the city that Joan of Arc liberated, Napoleon’s boarding school, the Alps, and the most glorious Italian hill towns. Now that I’ve written my letter, Pope Francis is an even stronger pull—that goofy smile of his, the lightness of being, a surprise a day. He jolted the world from his first hour on the stage, when the immigrant’s son Jorge Mario Bergoglio took the name of a half-starved mystic from Assisi, the saint who didn’t own money, property, or shoes. The twelfth-century Francis was known as Il Poverello, the Little Poor Man. The twenty-first-century Francis, the first non-European pope in a thousand years, started his papacy as the most popular person on earth, gracing the covers of National Geographic, Time, and Rolling Stone. Of late, he’s been overwhelmed by fresh reports of cover-ups of sexual abuse of children. The tragic stories repeat themselves, from every corner of Catholicism, and reach deep into the institutional keepers of the faith. It makes you wonder if there is some fatal flaw, some poison in the water of the so-called One True Church. This paradox—how a belief founded on a gospel of love could cause so much pain—is a big reason why people are leaving the pews in droves. And it’s no small part of my struggle as I step into the pilgrim realm.

  Still, it’s hard not to like a pope who is honest about his imperfections, a long way from infallible, a pope who withdraws his hand when people try to kiss his ring. His life experiences go well beyond the cloister. He was a bouncer at a nightclub. He fell in love with a woman before he entered the priesthood. He worked in a chemistry lab, a budding scientist. As pope, he washes the feet of prisoners and the poor, shares meals with the homeless and refugees. He dials up complete strangers on the phone, just to say hello. He hasn’t watched television since 1990. When reminded that his church has long considered homosexuality “an objective disorder,” Francis shrugged it off with the most memorable line by a pope in a century: “Who am I to judge?” No longer would the church be known mainly by what it’s against, but what it’s for.

  A schoolgirl from Sweden said that none of her friends believed in God. What was her obligation to them? “It’s not that you have to convince them of your faith,” he told her. He said a similar thing not long after the whiff of white smoke rose from the chimney above the Sistine Chapel, announcing the Francis era in 2013. “Proselytism is solemn nonsense, it makes no sense,” he said. “I believe in God, not in a Catholic God. There is no Catholic God. There is God and I believe in Jesus Christ, his incarnation.”

  Think of all the centuries when the message was convert or be killed. Think of all the people who were put to death because they believed in science over dogma. Think of all the murders committed in the name of Christian orthodoxy. Think of the edict of Pope Boniface VIII in the year 1300: “We declare, state, define and pronounce that it is altogether necessary to the salvation of every human creature to be subject to the Roman pontiff.” Or the decree of Pope Alexander VI, father of ten through multiple mistresses: he divided the New World between Portugal and Spain in 1494, natives be damned (they were). Think of the Inquisition, initiated by a later pope who said he would gather the wood to burn his own father. Think of the nineteenth-century invention of papal infallibility, of papal condemnation of freedom of speech and freedom of worship. Think of the twentieth-century pope Pius XII, who sent Hitler a friendly letter in 1939 and was silent on the Holocaust.

  Think of that history, and you come to the conclusion that there’s only one thing wrong with Pope Francis: too bad he isn’t twenty years younger. He rises at four-thirty every morning and powers through a brutal schedule driven by the urgency of his dwindling time left on earth. But he has trouble breathing, with just that one good lung, and a heart condition as well. After he turned eighty, he thought he might last only a few more years. “At my age we are preparing to go,” he told an audience at World Youth Day. When the kids gasped, he tried to reassure them. “Who can guarantee life? No one.”

  Off I go then, hoping to find at the end of the trail a vigorous old man with the free-spirited joy of a young man. But first, I pluck a small stone from the beach and put it in my pack—a little chip of England for the road. When the pope was asked about his secret to happiness, he said: Slow down. Take time off. Live and let live. Work for peace. Don’t keep negative feelings bottled up. Enjoy art. Enjoy books. Play. And one more suggestion, another reason to join
the queue of travelers getting ready to leave Britain in the harbor at Dover: “Please don’t see life from afar.”

  FOUR

  BESIEGED AT CALAIS

  The canals of Calais enclose an island made by man, in a city flattened because of a madman, in a part of the country where no one can say with certainty what it is to be French anymore. I bob along in a small stream of pilgrims fanning out from the harbor, blinking into a late-afternoon sun that seems stuck in the sky. It’s too hot for May. And too bright and shiny for all the misery that presents itself around one of the busiest ferry ports in the world. I immediately bump into Charles de Gaulle and his wife, Yvonne, holding hands on a stroll through the town where they were married in 1921. The statue of the first couple of the Resistance is a personal touch in a drab square just off the waterfront, the Place d’Armes, in the old town. Old being a relative term. Calais has been razed and rebuilt with regularity, as conquerors come and go. I pass a pair of bomb-sniffing dogs leashed to a pair of assault-rifle-toting gendarmes. The police wear bulletproof vests and talk grimly into their shoulders. Here comes another pair, and another, and a fourth. This is occupied Calais.

  My fellow pilgrims are trying to find religion. The authorities pay no attention to us. Silly walkers with their floppy hats and overpocketed cargo pants. Which way to the Monty Python skit? But thousands of others are trying to flee religion. The police are all over them. For a time, the refugees lived in the Jungle, forty acres of squalor on a wind-scraped sandlot at the edge of Calais, until it was bulldozed under orders of the government. They were asylum seekers, these foreigners, a fifth of them children without adults, some from Aleppo and Mosul—towns dating to the biblical era, now gutted because of the latest iteration of a fight over the legitimate successor to the Prophet Muhammad, who died in 632. In this case, ISIS was formed as a Sunni reaction to Shiite overreaching in Iraq. In Syria, what began as a rebellion against a murderous dictator turned into a sectarian bloodbath between the two major branches of Islam, with regional and global powers taking sides. Calais is living with the consequences.

  The goal of the refugees is to latch on to a truck bound for Britain through the nearby Channel Tunnel, or to hide in the hold of a train or ferry. Although most of the former Jungle residents were supposed to be relocated around France, many scattered to the shadows of Calais. They sleep in the woods. They hunker down in parks or abandoned warehouses. Some have drowned or been hit by trains or run over by cars. Some have been teargassed, beaten with clubs. Others will continue to walk until they drop, or get arrested, or smuggle aboard a skiff, or catch that lorry to the magical godless kingdom across the Channel.

  * * *

  —

  I’M HAPPY TO BE on the mainland, odd as it is to be a wanderer of privilege among wanderers of sorrow. Just being in France is a mood changer. Asking for something basic, say, Où sont les toilettes, makes you feel more sophisticated. When Oscar Wilde was released from prison in 1897, having served two years of hard labor for the crime of being gay, he fled to France on his own road to Rome. A broken man, legally deprived of the right to see his children, denied a visit from his dying mother—his spirits lifted the moment his feet touched French soil. I was thinking of Wilde because he had just been pardoned. The British government announced that thousands of men, living and dead, would have their gay criminal past purged under a new law named for Alan Turing, the World War II code breaker who was convicted of homosexuality in 1952. Wilde, the greatest wit and brightest playwright of the late Victorian age, was a pauper when released, and sickly. He described himself as “ruined, disgraced—a leper, a pariah to men.” He would never put his old life back together, not even close; he would seldom even laugh again. “All pity, or the sense of its beauty, seems to me dead,” he wrote. But being so low, so humiliated, brought him closer to something bigger than himself. He would spend the next three years of his life, up until his death at the age of forty-six, trying to answer the rumblings in his soul—a side he seldom showed in his plays or many witticisms. In prison, he noted, “I found myself in the company of the same sort of people Christ liked, outcasts and beggars.”

  The best-known monument in Calais depicts other kinds of beggars, the ones who nearly starved to death in their homes. In Calais, geography has always been destiny. As the closest landing point in France, it was much coveted by the English. They laid siege to it in 1346, early in the Hundred Years War, which actually lasted longer than a century. Calais had canals, which formed a moat around the old town, and walls inside that. The English had patience and food. Facing death by starvation after a year, a few of the trapped inhabitants emerged. Among them were six leading citizens, who offered to give up their lives if King Edward III would spare the remaining residents. Rodin’s sculpture The Burghers of Calais depicts the moment when the shackled and emaciated six came forth to face the English king. I’d seen a cast of the figures at Stanford University, where they lack context in a palm-shaded and flip-flop-trodden courtyard.

  Here, Rodin’s masterpiece fronts the Flemish Renaissance–style town hall, the hôtel de ville. The burghers’ bones poke through their skin, and sackcloth clings to their skeletal frames. The faces are full of dread, as they await executions. The king’s wife took pity on them and persuaded her husband to let them live. Still, they could not stay in their homes. Edward proceeded to ethnically cleanse Calais of its own people, who lost everything, and replace them with those from the other side of the Channel. The English stayed for more than two hundred years, their last toehold in France, until they were driven out by a siege against them. Many of the people who repopulated the city were French Protestants, on the run from Catholic persecution in other parts of their country. And then the Germans invaded in the last century.

  That’s the Calais story, a very moving civic narrative of defiance and dispossession. But it doesn’t apply to the latest refugees from religion. Calais has been down on its luck for some time. Population is falling, and the lace factories that spun wedding garments and gloves for the world have dwindled to a few. One in five adults is without a job. In this part of France, economic despair has left many people looking for scapegoats. And in Calais, they don’t have to look far.

  “We don’t want them!” a man shouted outside the refugee-processing center. Protesters hissed when mention of Aleppo and Mosul came up. Allowing exiles from those ruined cities into France is seen as treason to a culture, a threat to the Christian heritage. The migrants are paying for the crimes of a few, while fleeing the larger crimes of the many. The day I arrived, a terrorist in Manchester set off a bomb at a concert, killing twenty-two people, including children as young as eight.

  It would be wrong to expect the residents of Calais to remember ancient times. But history does boomerang. In the twelfth century, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux barnstormed around France, working Christians into a fever over the infidels who held Aleppo and Mosul. It was the duty of every follower of Jesus in France to reverse the journey taken by today’s migrants—to purge those biblical cities of their Muslim overlords. “Cursed be he who does not stain his sword with blood!” said Brother Bernard. This powerful monk, an adviser to popes and kings, almost single-handedly started the Second Crusade, a grisly and pointless expedition in the two centuries of war between Christians and Muslims.

  “We’re not racist,” a man at the refugee center explained in a television report. “We’re here to support French identity.”

  French identity—do tell where I can find it. I’m meandering about in search of the embodiment of that identity, the church of Notre-Dame, where de Gaulle was married. It is the oldest monument in Calais, dating to the thirteenth century; it holds a place in this city as the Notre-Dame of Paris does for all of France—“the epicenter of our lives,” as President Macron said after fire gutted the roof of the iconic cathedral. I’m coiled and ready to spring my pathetic French on an unsuspecting public, but no targets appear. It’s after fou
r o’clock, the sun is still merciless, and I’m starting to crave the cool interior of an ancient holy space. In a neighborhood that is ghostly at this hour, I behold l’église Notre-Dame. Wind-borne weeds grow out of the sides of the upper reaches of the church, like untrimmed hair in the ears of an old man. If nothing else, I’m hoping to get my pilgrim passport stamped. The main entrance door is locked, which is strange. And today, May 22, is de Gaulle’s birthday, so you’d think there would be somebody here to note the occasion. I walk around the side, knocking on different doors.

  Disappointed, I head toward the heavily guarded train station. I have a couple of options for the first continental leg of the Via Francigena. I’d heard that the French do a terrible job of signing this route. What I heard is correct. The V.F. was designated a European Cultural Itinerary in 1994, recognizing it as a vital vein in the long history of these Christian nations, and also as an effort to lure tourists to less-traveled regions. But I see more signs for the nearest McDonald’s, an imperial interloper.

  I can strictly follow Sigeric, whose next stopping place was tiny Guînes, seven miles away on a route that promises to be boring, hot, and flat. Another slightly more distant destination, Amettes, is the intriguing birthplace of Saint Benoît Labre, known as the Vagabond of God. He was homeless for the entirety of his adult life, living on the streets of eighteenth-century Europe, clothed in rags, his skin covered with scabs and bug bites. His last years were spent in the ruins of Rome’s Colosseum. This life of pure vagrancy made him a saint after his death at the age of thirty-five. That, and more than 130 miracle cures attributed to him. His hometown holds a big festival in his honor, and thousands of people come to see the little house where he lived with fourteen siblings, the straw mattress where he slept, and a few of his body parts in the church. Today, they would cashier this repulsive bum out of Calais.