by Timothy Egan
I wonder how many visitors will agree with Victor Hugo’s observation on the ruins of Christian France, from the centuries when religion advanced with books instead of armies. “What they contained of truth has remained and become greater.” If that sounds like the romantic casting of a man of faith, think again. Late in life, Hugo was asked by a census taker if he was a Catholic. “No,” he replied, “freethinker.”
SIX
A NIGHT AT THE MONASTERY
The walk to the Abbey of Saint Paul in Wisques should take no more than three hours—a pleasant urban stroll, then an empty countryside. That’s what my guidebook says. This will give me just enough time to unspool the twine cluttering my mind after a long breakfast at the splendid eighteenth-century home where I spent the night. My room was on the third floor, with large double windows overlooking a garden of fruit trees, climbing roses, and late-blooming lilacs. Last night, with twilight lingering well past ten o’clock, I filled the claw tub in the bathroom, opened the shutters to get a waft of flowery fragrance, and fell asleep. When I woke, the water was lukewarm, the sky had darkened, and I felt both renewed and ready for bed. My hosts had stuffed me with dark ale and sausages for dinner, and homemade jam on fresh bread with a fruit plate for breakfast. All of it—the huge room (with a marble fireplace), two meals, and a family that tolerated my high school French—was 55 euros. A pilgrim doesn’t have to suffer.
My breakfast-mate was a troubled man from a troubled part of France who was working as a delivery driver, part-time, to get him through a retirement that was anything but leisurely. He told me his country had failed him. The elites in Paris, the Eurocrats in Brussels—they cut their deals, traded away the factories of northern France, and left behind hollowed-out villages of desperation. He had a chronic cough and was very pale, and he smoked. I asked him if he’d been inside the Cathedral of Miracles here in Saint-Omer—not because I thought he might find a cure, but just to move the conversation along. No, he shook his head. For most of his life, he was a Catholic, but he will never set foot in a church again. “Pedophiles,” he said. He spit out the word. “What they did to all those little boys—it sickens me.” I did not have the heart to tell a man betrayed by the two main institutions of his country that France—so far—had not failed me.
Because of the late start, I’m hiking in midday heat, temperatures in the upper 80s. This is crazy, and shows a lack of discipline on my part. A mix of sweat and sunscreen streaks my face and stings my eyes. I’m somewhat embarrassed to put on the floppy hat I got at REI, because it makes me look like one of those earnest German hikers you see all over Europe. Screw it—I need the protection. I had stuffed the guidebook deep inside my twenty-two-pound pack. I also forgot to charge my phone. Now I can’t get out of Saint-Omer. I take the wrong way off a roundabout, get caught up in heavy traffic on a busy street with no sidewalk. I follow one road to a dead end, another that comes to a stop in the vast parking lot of a closed factory. All of that takes two hours, and still I’m only at the periphery of Saint-Omer. Dogs startle me and snarl. The straps of my pack are starting to cut into my shoulders. People honk and flip me off. Kids roll down their windows and shout. The French are no longer charming; they’re assholes.
By the three-hour mark, I’m finally in the countryside. I can see the round towers of the monastery through the haze of a still day, another hour away, at least. There’s no shoulder on this single-lane road. When a car comes at me I have to step aside into a drainage ditch. No one slows to wave or veers to give me room. So much for the meditative value of deep walking.
Wisques is a village of fewer than two hundred people, and nobody is stirring when I arrive in late afternoon. Not a soul. Not a car. Not a dog. It looks eerily prosperous, as if run by the affluent dead. There is no restaurant, no bakery, no small store, no place to fill water bottles. But here, for the first time since Canterbury, is a big detailed sign of the Via Francigena. It places me in the early stages of the pilgrimage, miles of flatland farms all around. Vous êtes ici! Good to know. The cartoon pilgrim here is a sly-looking fellow in pressed shorts with a requisite silly hat tilted to one side. At least he doesn’t have a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. While studying the billboard, I hear voices and look up the road. I’m soon joined by a young couple from Wales. They also got lost, though they’re taking it better than me. Their plan is to stay at the convent run by the sisters, up a steep hill. I had considered that, but, still haunted by memories of thick-knuckled nuns boxing my ears in grade school, I opted for the brothers at the monastery. “Every pilgrim has to walk their own camino,” said the woman, as this pair bid me adieu.
Although I’m now on the Via-signed trail, I miss the turnoff. This costs me another hour. Not paying attention, I brush against a patch of nettles. The pain is low and constant, a junior-grade bee sting. When I arrive at the Abbey of Saint Paul after a gruesome march of perhaps twelve miles—most of it on pavement—I slow to take in this Benedictine refuge. It’s still and sylvan, shadowed by its own forest. Round towers and spires rise from the gates of a closed-off, rectangular setting of brick, stone, and stucco. There are greenhouses, raised gardens, and plowed land; it looks like a good-sized working farm. Using hand tools, a couple of monks are tilling rows of vegetables. I announce myself, and mention the name of someone I’d spoken to on the phone. The man at the entrance looks askance at me, then disappears. When he returns after ten minutes, he tells me to wait in the cloister. He leads me down a long portico, locking two thick-oaked doors behind us as he goes. This is strange. But I’m fairly certain they’ll put me up; the 53rd rule of Saint Benedict obliges monks to have a place for pilgrims.
The elderly abbot in charge of Saint Paul appears after another twenty minutes. He moves in closer and sniffs, sizing me up with what appears to be disgust. He looks crisp in his light cotton black cassock, short-cropped gray hair, rimless glasses. I’m sweaty, stinking, sunburned, my shirt stained, hair mussed, a patch of my leg inflamed with nettle burn. Without any niceties or small talk, without giving me his name or shaking my hand, he starts in with some questions.
“Are you a Christian?”
“Je suis un pèlerin.”
“We get lots of pilgrims here, but are you a Christian?” His English is better than my French, so that will be the language of this interrogation.
“I was raised Catholic.”
“Yes?”
“And educated by Jesuits.”
“Where?”
“High school, Gonzaga. In the Pacific Northwest. Spokane, Washington. Do you know where that is?”
“We have maps here at the monastery.”
“I’m sure you do.”
“Are you married?”
“Yes. Two kids—”
“Divorced?”
“Never.”
“How are things in America?”
“Troubled.”
“Why is that?”
“Trump.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“Everything.”
“I’ll show you to your room.”
“Is there Wi-Fi?” The abbot stops dead in his tracks and glares at me.
“I’m kidding.”
In truth, I’m trying to go on a digital cleanse. One of my goals of this trip is to cut down on the amount of useless information I consume. Easy access to a world of tempting crap has clearly not been good for me. My attention span has shrunk. Sustained, deep reading and thinking are more difficult. I’m punch-drunk from the unrelenting present, the news alerts and flashes, all the chaos without context. I’m enslaved to a dopamine-induced loop, craving the brain chemical release that comes with every new text or tweet. I get lured into too much low-grade clickbait and tweets from somebody’s dog. Do I have to respond to email instantly, lest some friend or colleague think me too distant, too high-and-mighty out here in an ancient slow lane? In that regard, the time differe
nce—nine hours between Seattle and France—gives me a built-in cushion. While I wander about in spiritual befuddlement during the day, friends and family are asleep.
We walk down one more long corridor, up a flight of stairs to a second story.
The abbot opens an unlocked door. The room is no bigger than a prison cell, with a small single bed low to the ground, a sheet, a blanket, one pillow, a window overlooking the cloister. There’s a thin towel barely larger than a handkerchief. He says I can use the bathroom down the hall to clean up. A shower? Kind of. There’s water coming from a faucet in a stall. Sometimes it’s hot. Sometimes not. The abbot is in a hurry to be done with me. I’m surprised, after our initial interview, that he doesn’t seem the least bit interested in spreading the Word that Benedictines pray on all day, every day.
“There’s no preaching here,” he says. “That’s not what we do. People come here to get away from things. You are on your own.”
I try to talk a little politics, wondering how his fresh-faced president, Emmanuel Macron, the youngest head of state in France since Napoleon, will react to the latest terrorist attack. This startles the abbot.
“A terror attack?” He hadn’t heard. “Where?” I tell him about the Manchester bombing—twenty-two people murdered by a fanatic in a worn-down part of England. He looks perplexed, then shakes his head. There is something reassuring in his insularity.
“I’ll come get you for supper. You’re free to look around, but don’t disturb anyone.”
* * *
—
I TAKE A BRISK SHOWER, change into fresh clothes, and slip down the stairway, as light-footed as a spirit. I want to see the layout. The monks tend beehives, vines, and greenhouses. Their vegetable rows look terrific—clean lines of beets, carrots, spinach, lettuce, rhubarb, potatoes. I wave to a man who is sweating through his ankle-length cassock while pushing a wheelbarrow. He doesn’t acknowledge me; I assume he’s deep in thought, or prayer, or contempt for strangers who wave to monks. There are no power tools that I can see, no motorized tractors. After leaving the empty ruins of Saint Bertin, it’s great to see a living abbey, people who’ve given up all their possessions for a higher purpose. What did Pope Francis say when asked how to renew wonder? Live lean. “The more I have, the more I want,” he said. “It kills the soul.” Today’s tableau at Saint Paul is truly timeless; it could be lifted from any of the fifteen hundred years since Benedict set down his rules, establishing the monastic order to which these brothers belong.
We know from the biblical Acts of the Apostles that early Christians lived spartan lives, taking the Gospel admonition of Christ to heart. “If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven,” he says in Matthew. They got rid of their worldly goods, cut family ties, and held everything in common. Later, the austerity could be unhealthy: flagellation, starvation diets, chaining oneself to a stone or column under a blistering sun. It took Benedict, a man of wealth from the Umbrian hill town of Norcia, to establish guidelines that would satisfy body and spirit—without the extremes. Born in 480, he moved to Rome to study. The church then was growing in two directions—one an organization intent on expanding its power, property, and control over the lives of Christians in a concentrated area around Rome and a few other Mediterranean cities; the other, individuals dedicated to spreading a simple gospel to largely illiterate people, pushing the frontier of faith. In the fourth century, a bishop named Ulfilas had moved among tribes north of the Danube in what is now Germany. The message of a glorious afterlife for the virtuous was a powerful selling point. As with the Irish monks, Ulfilas brought both religion and culture. He invented a Gothic alphabet that allowed people to read Scripture in their language, among other things. At the same time, a missionary named Martin founded one of the first monasteries in Gaul, a center for sharing the Christian word with peasants throughout today’s France.
In Rome, the corruption, the accumulation of property, the political plays of an imperious church newly empowered by the rulers of a crumbling empire appalled Benedict. Taking refuge in the woods, he lived in a cave for three years. His asceticism was inspiring and drew followers to the monastery he founded at Montecassino in 529. By the time he died in 547—a year after Rome was sacked a second time—the Rule of Benedict proved to be a blueprint for how to live a healthy life of meaning, creating thriving communities while much of Europe fell into decay and plunder. It was built around humility, fraternity, and love.
The brothers cleared forests, worked elaborate farms, tanned leather, made wine, ale, cheese, and bread, and produced those majestic manuscripts I saw in Saint-Omer, storing much of society’s knowledge and its sacred treasures inside cold, thick-walled compounds. They took vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience. Many lived contemplative lives, while others were prominent leaders of their communities. Cluny Abbey in Burgundy and Mont-Saint-Michel off the coast of Normandy were some of the most alluring of these homes for busy men. Though they were nominally without sex, silver, or free speech, the more powerful abbots eventually had servants and large bedrooms, and maintained close ties to royalty. They became more like the people Benedict had rebelled against. After a tour of monasteries in France, one church official found many a fornicating celibate, “living the life of Bacchanals.” And while the labors of brothers who had taken holy orders brought prosperity to major abbeys and well-connected merchants, the average men of the faith did not share in the bounty. A daily ration could be a pound of bread and a pint of wine, no more. The able-bodied worked until they fell from exhaustion.
Individual monasteries had their peculiarities, bordering on pathologies. Monks slept on the ground or had separate beds of straw, except for younger ones, who were sometimes doubled up with older men. This raises several obvious questions. Silence for much of the day was a general rule. The idea was to clear the mind of distractions. A monk was not allowed to raise his eyebrows or roll his eyes. He was required to listen with his mouth open. He could not grin. “For us, bodily delights are nothing but dung!” said Bernard of Clairvaux. And yet, people who were free to go did not go. Life was simple and had meaning, so long as you followed the model of ora et labora—pray and work. Scripture was a living word, not a text. Divine Reading, Lectio Divina, was a four-step way to comprehend God’s revelations. In the silence, in the community, in the shared sacrifices, the brothers found a measure of happiness.
Nordic invaders in the ninth and tenth centuries found something else: defenseless abbeys ripe for plunder. Raiders emptied monastic pantries of food, and cellars of precious goods. In response, some orders erected round towers—places to hide themselves and their treasures. The Norsemen used fire to smoke out the Christians, who were then put to the sword. But it’s telling that in at least one place, the lonely rock isle of Skellig Michael off the Irish coast, a surprising transition took place—with the same selling point used to convert the Goths. In the year 993, Olaf Tryggvason set his sights on that raw, sharp-edged dollop of stone, rising to 714 feet from the turbulent chop of the Atlantic. There, monks lived on bird eggs and fish, climbing up and down the 670 steps to their beehive habitation in the most unlikely monastery in the world. Olaf was fresh off a successful coercion campaign that persuaded Ethelred the Unready to pay a fat bounty to avoid slaughter.
You can imagine the exchange at Skellig Michael: Gold crosses and silver chalices, they’re ours now. Illuminated manuscripts, give ’em over. Dried fish, fermented drink, part of the Norse haul. And finally, from the invaders: What else you got? The monks offered eternal life. Intriguing. At a time when life expectancy was—what? Nearly a third of all people died before the age of five. Childbirth itself was often fatal for the mother. If you made it to your teens, you might see age forty-five. Olaf converted—according to Irish tradition—and he became the first Christian king of Norway.
By 1400, there were more than three thousand monasteries, with almost fift
y thousand monks throughout western Europe. In the long sweep of this history, the Abbey of Saint Paul is a newcomer. But it has been through several near-death experiences. Within ten years of its founding in 1889, the monastery came up against the latest wave of anticlerical fever to sweep through France. The monks fled to the Netherlands rather than comply with laws that allowed state control over them. They returned in 1920, invited back after World War I. But fifty years later, they faced an existential crisis afflicting the greater church: the crash in religious vocations. Benedictines did no better at attracting new members to their ancient ways than other Catholic orders. By 2013, when Francis became pope, the average age here was seventy-five, and the monastery was prepared to close its doors. A few dying brothers would go down with the abbey. At the last minute, four monks from another monastery moved in, giving Saint Paul fresh life, such as it is.
These old men wake at five a.m. to the chime of a bell. After a splash of cold water on the face, they walk through the cloister to a chapel for matins, thanking God for bringing light to a dark world. At six-thirty, a piece of bread and jam is taken with a cup of coffee. This is followed by the second service of the day, lauds. Then, back to the cell for private prayer, the Lectio Divina. Mass in the traditional Latin is at ten o’clock. A fourth service comes just after noon, with a small meal following. It’s off to work after that, in the farm, in the yard, in the laundry room, plastering walls, chopping wood, or pulling weeds. Afternoons allow for some socializing, taking care of personal things, writing. This leads up to vespers at six p.m., followed by dinner. A final service, compline, begins at 8:35. It’s eat, pray, love, in the purest sense.
