A Pilgrimage to Eternity: A tour through Christianity’s complex history
Monks along the Via Francigena in Tuscany, following in the footsteps of medieval pilgrims. Photo by Kinzica Sorrenti/Creative Commons.
(REVIEW) If you’ve ever made a religious pilgrimage, or even taken a long walk, then you understand. Time spent alone brings clarity to the mind and a light to the heart.
But nobody embarks on a thousand-mile pilgrimage unless they’re looking for something – whether it’s God, self, meaning or perhaps all three-in-one. Best-selling author and NY Times op-ed contributor Timothy Egan lets us tag along on his journey from Canterbury to Rome in his latest book, A Pilgrimage to Eternity. He’s on his camino – the Via Francigena, an ancient pilgrimage of over a thousand miles beginning from the English world’s oldest church and ending at St. Peter’s Square.
In a religiously faltering Europe, Egan sets forth to “find God in Europe before God is gone.” The author admits his Catholic faith is lapsed, but he is “listening.”. A skeptic at heart, he welcomes miracles and traditions with a raised eyebrow and a snarky punchline. Egan, however, can’t seem to dismiss the persistence of the faithful, and he’s no longer satisfied with dodging life’s deepest questions.
“It was too easy,” he said. “I’d come to believe that an agnostic, as the Catholic comedian Stephen Colbert put it, ‘is just an atheist without any balls.’”
Egan’s journey is an absorbing narrative through the sublime European countryside told with a spiritually expressive yet straight-forward language. His travel commentary of this region is reminiscent of Thomas Merton’s in Seven Storey Mountain.
Alongside his personal entries, the author offers revealing history lessons on the forgotten towns and villages that formed saints and sinners alike, shaping the course of church history for better or for worse.
Sprinkled throughout the book are Egan’s existential grapplings: He’s no longer comfortable with his lukewarm faith, his sister-in-law is dying from cancer, and he feels a tug from a humbly unconventional pope from Argentina – one who has sparked a glimmer of hope into a man’s soul. But man is complex, and Egan’s interior life appears increasingly dampened and exhausted by the Catholic church’s often plagued history of murderous authority and systemic clerical abuse.
Aside from “harnessing the gospel of Jesus into a vehicle for war,” Egan lays down his other qualms with the Church. His thoughts align mostly with a common view shared by many on the Catholic left, and he holds nothing back concerning what he views as the Church’s suppression of natural sexual expression and hierarchical oppression of women.
Certain ideas that Egan entertains may come as a shock to some. Afterall, a recurring intellectual companion on his journey is Christopher Hitchens, the defiant atheist author most known for his novel God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.
Egan refreshingly reflects Pope Francis’ concern over “excessive rigidity,” a hard pressed Christianity that damns other faiths without a blink. He even refrains from immediately scoffing at controversial theological perspectives, taking into consideration ideas from frameworks such as the “gnostic gospels” and Leo Tolstoy.
However, his overarching question: can one really find God by walking city to city? That’s what Egan asks himself as he tries to overcome the great challenge of our day: to view Christianity as a living, breathing, vibrant faith – not just a dead past.
“One of the reasons I’m on the Via Francigena,” Egan writes, “is to see whether I can maintain my wonder of what could be, while never forgetting what was.”
A Pilgrimage to Eternity is an attempt to unload the weight of Christianity’s troubled former leaders and ingest the faith and purity of the saints, the torch-bearers of the church.
It is a depiction of a journey that defines the lives of Judeo-Christians. We are all pilgrims. As the book manifests, what we view as a mere spiritual journey is sometimes more deeply connected to a long, laborious, physical journey.
But, as Egan concludes, no one can make the journey on our behalf.
“There is no way,” he said, quoting St. Francis, the patron saint of wanderers. “The way is made by walking.”
Matthew Hendley is a journalism student at the University of Mississippi.