A Pilgrimage to Eternity

by Timothy Egan

  I dodge his question with another of my own. “Do you believe in miracles?”

  Here this man of science, someone who knows more about the mechanics and biology of life than 95 percent of the general public, answers without hesitation.

  “Oh, yes. Absolutely.”

  “Incorruptibles? The bodies of saints that never decay?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “How can you believe these things? You’re a person steeped in logic, reason, the scientific method.”

  “That is exactly right. I wouldn’t believe in miracles if I hadn’t seen them happen. And I have. At Lourdes. It’s very well documented.”

  “Do you have doubts?”

  “About miracles? No. About my faith? Yes. Doubts are allowed by God. Reason can help you come to faith. It’s a bit like training for sports. If you only ride a bicycle with the wind at your back, that’s not going to help you. You need to ride your bike against the wind.”

  I ask him what it’s like to walk around secular Europe in the robe and collar of a Catholic priest.

  “That depends on where you are. I’m mostly well received. But even in Rome, some of the monks would only go to town in civilian clothes, because they were afraid. I’ve only had five or six people yell at me. It’s nothing. Will I see you at Mass?”

  “I can’t say.” He finishes his tea and stifles a yawn. I have one last question for Father John of Flavigny.

  “What’s the best way to make a pilgrimage? For someone on the Via Francigena, give me some advice.”

  “I don’t recommend the rosary.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Keep your ears open. You know what the first word of the holy rule of Saint Benedict is? Listen.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  MOUNTAIN MYTHS

  First light comes with music from within the old walls, a wonderful way to wake. When I pull back the blinds I’m nearly knocked down by the sun. The great glory that had been hidden by the storm reveals itself: diamond-cut peaks frosted in fresh snow, tufts of glazed grass, a bluebird day in the making. A small lake holds the color of the sky, and a light wind ripples the water like keys on a player piano. I take a quick breakfast of eggs and pastry, and pack for a long day. It’s just a degree or two above freezing, but already the snow is turning to slush on the road. I slip out quietly, relieved not to bump into Father John of Flavigny. His Mass is at ten-thirty, too late for my start, an excuse he would probably find lame.

  It’s all downhill from here—more than 6,000 vertical feet to Aosta. A few Saint Bernards are out, slobbering and sloshing. I’d love to be hiking with one today, a canine guide better than most humans. Less than five minutes into my walk past snow-glazed fireweed and thistle, I rejoice at a sign near the end of the lake: Italie, the French word coupled with that flag emblem the color of a pizza Margherita.

  My companion this morning is Oscar Wilde again. We parted company in Calais; it’s good to have him back, as witty a pilgrim who ever rambled his way to Rome. Wilde came to this country while a student at Oxford, twenty-three years old, his brilliance just starting to blossom, and returned in the last months of his short life, looking to resolve his questions about faith. Early on, he penned a sonnet to Italy, which I found in one of the guidebooks, that reads in part:

  I reached the Alps: the soul within me burned

  Italia, my Italia, at thy name:

  And when from out the mountain’s heart I came

  And saw the land for which my life had yearned

  I laughed as one who some great prize had earned.

  He went to Genoa, Brindisi, Ravenna, and Rome, where he couldn’t get enough of the pope and young Italian men, a not entirely unusual combination. He visited the grave of Keats, one of his heroes, writing a sonnet for him. Catholicism fascinated this Irishman, the ritual and mystery, the incalculable dimensions of the soul. His genius announced itself with the publication of his first volume of poems, in 1881, followed by his parable of vanity, The Picture of Dorian Gray, in 1891. He became the toast of London theater with The Importance of Being Earnest, in 1895.

  He came by his way with words, he always said, from his mother, the poet of Irish sedition: Lady Jane Francesca Wilde. She was lucky to escape a lifetime sentence in prison for her fiery call to arms against British occupation of her homeland during the Great Hunger.

  The soul of Oscar Wilde was the only thing not taken from him during the hard time of hard labor he spent behind bars, convicted of sodomy under section 11 of Britain’s Criminal Law Amendment Act. He spent many days in jail reading Saint Augustine, Dante, and the New Testament, forming a number of conclusions.

  “The only difference between a saint and a sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.”

  Out of prison, he was Europe’s best-known convict, a verse-loving vagabond, though unable to make a living speaking, or even to summon original thoughts to paper.

  He broke off with his longtime lover, and then took up with him again for a time in Paris. His health fell apart. He couldn’t scrape two francs together. His clothes, a source of his inimitable flamboyance, were threadbare; he even accepted hand-me-downs. In Rome in 1900, he lived a shambolic existence, sickly, pale, and destitute, having lost the paltry stipend he’d been getting from his ex-wife, who died that April. Still, he was enthralled to be in “the city of soul,” he wrote, and was determined to find some fresh air for a deflated life-force. On Easter Sunday morning, he went to St. Peter’s Square, jostling with the crowd to get a glimpse of the pope. He made it to “the front ranks of the pilgrims in the Vatican,” he wrote a friend, “and got the blessing of the Holy Father.” In the evening, he went to vespers for a round of prayer, followed by time spent with a Roman infatuation named Armando.

  Every day thereafter, he was back at St. Peter’s. “I do nothing but see the pope,” he wrote. “I have been blessed many times, once in the private chapel of the Vatican.” He was, adamantly, not a Catholic. “No one could be more ‘black’ than I am.” In May, he made his way back to Paris, his final home in exile. On his deathbed, he summoned an Irish priest, Father Cuthbert Dunne, and was baptized into the Catholic Church and received last rites. He died at the age of forty-six.

  Were he walking with me now down the switchbacks of the Italian Alps, Wilde would be gratified by how well he’s been treated over the last few years. Not only was he granted the general pardon by Queen Elizabeth II in 2017, but the Vatican has embraced him as well. Yes, the Vatican! The church’s head of protocol recently printed an anthology of Wilde’s sayings, including, curiously, this line: “The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.”

  Wilde was praised in L’Osservatore Romano for his “lucid analysis of the modern world,” and for being “a lover of the ephemeral.” It was mentioned only in passing that he was also a lover of other men, an act the church has long considered “intrinsically disordered” and “contrary to the natural law,” per the catechism. The law that he was convicted of breaking likely had its roots in Christian canon law. And just as likely, Wilde grasped the irony of his trying to share a faith that would have nothing of his kind. The Catholic stance was reaffirmed in a letter from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1986. Gay sex constitutes a “moral disorder,” the enforcers of dogma wrote. They did not cite any words from Christ to back this claim, for there are none. But now—what’s a thinking Catholic supposed to believe? Pope Francis seemed to let the whole thing drop with his famous “Who am I to judge?” shrug. And then he went even further, telling a gay victim of clerical abuse, after ministering with him for a week, “You have to be happy with who you are.” He added: “God made you this way and loves you this way, and the pope loves you this way.”

  * * *

  —

  IN THE VILLAGE OF SAINT-OYEN, I say goodbye to Wilde and take up with a young woman full o
f another kind of wit and wisdom, spiffy in hiking half pants and a not unfashionable floppy hat—Sophie Egan. I haven’t seen my daughter for months, and I almost squeeze the wind out of her. She had a rough time getting here, a canceled flight from the West Coast to the East, followed by a domino of delays, Euro trains, and buses of varying degrees of discomfort. But here she is now, looking crisp, and not complaining. She’s heavily sunscreened, loaded down with water from a two-liter container and lots of little boutique snacks, her hair in pigtails. We talk a manic streak in the shade of Saint-Oyen’s church, founded in the fifth century—a spurt of oh my gods, and can you believes, and wait, that’s not the best parts until we realize that we have many days to catch up and should start to move.

  I’m a bit slow to this pony’s pace, and happy for her to blaze the way. In the splendor of an alpine morning, with yesterday’s storm a mere vapor trail in the faraway sky, I behold the image of my child toddling off to play on the front lawn, her diaper swishing below her. Then I see a little girl in a kindergarten musical, playing a penguin while trying to hide her broken arm in a cast, an impression that fades to a fresh-minted college graduate, tassel flipped triumphantly to the side, black gown rippling in a breeze. You think you’re done then. You think you’ve lost all influence. You hope that the best of what you tried to give is imprinted for life and the worst long forgotten. But you’re not done—you’re a father and she’s the human you helped to bring into this world, always. Is there a parent who greets a child after a long absence and doesn’t see time compressed, your life and hers? I need only to catch a glimpse of the braid of her hair ahead of me on the Via Francigena to remember the two-foot girl giddy to climb Mount Daddy, me pulling her up from the knees to the chest and shoulders. We introduced our kids to the wild at an early age, bribing them with Skittles to get up the trail, promising to protect them from every horsefly and mosquito in the Cascade range. Lucky for us, and them, it took.

  For scenery, today is a sensory overload. We’re surrounded by the highest peaks of the Alps: Blanc, the apex of Western Europe at 15,777 feet; Rosa a close second, 15,203 feet; the pyramidal exclamation of the Matterhorn, which the Italians call Cervino, 14,692 feet, and Gran Paradiso, the 13,323-foot centerpiece of Italy’s first national park. The recent heavy rains have shocked the Val d’Aosta back into vibrant greenery, as if it got a high-voltage jolt of hydration from nature’s defibrillator. Here the V.F. parallels a canal system, narrow waterways built in the fourteenth century. These concrete veins bring life to all parts of the lower valley. The water runs clear and fast. Flowers, fronting homes on mountain perches, spill from hollowed logs cut lengthwise to hold garden soil. The trail zigs and zags between clusters of fir trees and the rock huts of shepherds and alpinists. Some of the oldest of these stone shelters are abandoned refuges for pilgrims.

  I love the roofs of storm-washed slate, glistening black with the water still on them, and nimble cows with bells on the way to giving up milk for cheese. The mountains are medicinal on days like this—head-clearing and lung-freshening. You can see why so many sanatoriums sprang up in the nineteenth century, offering sunlight and clean air for tubercular patients, and inspiration for Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. And you can see why, long before the Alps became a playground, before Mont Blanc was first climbed in 1786, those who lived at lower elevations thought that the highest ground was sacred, and only the gods could reside there. Most people don’t go to the mountains to find religion, but religion finds you there, in the storms, the clearings and ordering of nature.

  Sophie has an undergraduate degree in European history and a master’s in public health, so I expect her to answer the most arcane questions about distant monarchs, in addition to wonkish explanations for why the American health-care system is so bad when compared with Europeans’. For starters, I’m curious about the people whose territory we’re walking through—descendants of the House of Savoy. The signs in the Val d’Aosta are bilingual—French and Italian—and just as precise in detail as those on the Swiss side. V.F. postings give a time estimate to the next village. We’re striding along at better than five kilometers an hour. But it’s downhill, so hold your applause. The toes pound, the pack feels like part of me. We shed layers of clothing with every drop of a thousand feet or so. First to go is the raincoat. Then the fleece. Long pants are starting to irritate. Savoy?

  “The last royal family of Italy, I think.”

  I’ve been wandering within the historic boundaries of Savoy since Lake Geneva, a district that takes in parts of Switzerland, France, and Italy. It was the feudal territory of a family dynasty, established in 1003, that hung around long enough to become the oldest surviving royal house in Europe. Savoy managed to avoid the violent fevers of the Catholic Church and the pious excesses of the Reformation. It made peace and bought separation from the German kingdoms to the north, and even welcomed the Enlightenment imperialism of Napoleon. The puzzle pieces of Italy, emerging from city-states and the domains of European powers, did not combine into a single modern nation-state until 1861. The Savoy line was intact, and its head was enthroned as a largely ceremonial monarch. Italy’s last king, Victor Emmanuel III, reigned until 1946, when the war-ravaged Italians voted to end their connection to royalty, closing out the House of Savoy.

  The valley feels very different from other parts of old Savoy in one way: the exuberance of the people. Italy has embraced the Via Francigena as none of the other three nations have. This country never threw off its Catholicism; monarchs with their own religious agendas were scarce, and Protestants still are. The faith seems stitched to the land; no small space is without a roadside grotto or devotional statue in the courtyard behind gates. People go out of their way to wave, and wish a sincere-sounding buon giorno or buon cammino. We pause to chat with a woman who looks about sixty, her hair tied back, her face deeply tanned, walking with a Labrador. She cannot believe we are American because she sees so few Yanks on the trail. Her family has been in the Val d’Aosta for centuries. She’s rhapsodic, in almost musical Italian and equally fluid hand gestures, about the countryside we are walking through. She says we are blessed to be seeing it for the first time—the impression that makes many fall in love. When we ask if there is a place to get a late lunch nearby, she offers to lead us to her home. We can’t accept, because of the many miles still ahead. She switches to English.

  “Then you must do this for me. You walk another kilometer. You turn left at a little pond. You drop down. You go past—I don’t know for sure, three or five or maybe seven houses—and then drop down again. There’s a place there that has the best food in the valley. I am sure of this, and I’ve lived here all my life. And they are open today. Capito?”

  “Grazie mille.”

  She then gives each of us a prolonged hug. A hug! Not once in England, nor anywhere in the Pas-de-Calais, in the Marne or Champagne or the Jura Mountains, along Lake Geneva or in the Alps, has a stranger tried to hug me.

  “And then you must do one more thing for me,” she says. “You are pilgrims, so this won’t be difficult. When you get to Rome, if you get to Rome, say a prayer for me when you see the pope. I am not Catholic. Not for a long time. I like this pope. Will you promise me a prayer to the Holy Father?” I do, and she kisses me on the cheek. I’ve known her for maybe fifteen minutes. Benvenuto in Italia!

  We find the locanda just as she described—five houses after the little pond, folded into the mountainside. Though we arrive sweaty, stinky, and disheveled into a well-kept inn and eatery with stickers on the window showing off guidebook gushing, we are not disrespected. We ask for liters of acqua fredda, non gassata, and whatever is best to eat. A dish of tomato water—not a paste or a sauce, but the pure distillation of pomodori in high season—over handmade, saucer-shaped tortelli is regenerative. We follow that with a plate of steamed vegetables, down a couple of espressos with biscotti, and try to push away, back uphill, past the pond, to rejoin the Via Francigena.r />
  Our hike today is about twenty miles, with another two to three allocated for getting lost and diverted. For most of the way, it’s a gradual descent, on a path cushioned with alpine mulch, but then the drops get more precipitous, coming in gulps. We take gravity for granted until it’s dominant, holding us in its grip. The toes of my feet are starting to feel the effects of down-pounding, and I suspect I’ll have a blue nail or two by day’s end. Soph is carrying a pack that feels a bit heavier than mine, but she’s hoofing it like one of the ibexes of the Alps. She’s practically prancing.

  This is a walk through a fairy tale, in more ways than one. A curiosity of these mountains is a little man in a pointed hat and a wooden staff, holding the head of another man, bearded and bloodied where it has been severed at the neck. He looks like a Hobbit sneaking away from an execution. This is Saint Grat, the patron holy man of the Val d’Aosta. You see him in fresco form, in oil paintings, and most often as a wooden statuette in many of the churches and grottoes of the high country. Originally Gratus from Greece, he came to Rome in the fifth century, and while in the formerly pagan expanse of the Pantheon, he had a vision of God calling him to preach the Gospel to people of mountainous northern Italy. After working these meadows, he got another divine command: to retrieve the head of John the Baptist. Off to the Holy Land he went, finding the skull in Herod’s palace, smuggling it out of Jerusalem, and offering it up to the pope, as bells rang out. Thus, the depiction of Grat and the saint’s head. This story grosses out Sophie, and is somewhat incomprehensible as well.

  “You don’t believe this, do you, Dad?”

  “No, most of it is bullshit. There was a man named Grat who was bishop of Aosta in the fifth century. There’s a record of that.”

  The rest of little Grat’s tale is almost entirely made up. But why, then, is his feast day of September 7 still such a big deal in the Val d’Aosta, with many workers getting the day off? Why the ubiquitous iconography? Why the rituals around his relics, which reside in a gold encasement at the finest church in Aosta? Why celebrate the coming of spring with the invocation of his name, the wishing away of biting insects and predatory animals with the same? The lives of the saints seldom hold up to fact-checking. But the saints are approachable. They’re . . . just like us! Or they were, until they rose to meet an impossible challenge, or sacrificed profoundly on behalf of a fellow human. Only a pope can name a saint, through a lengthy trial process, though that wasn’t always the case. In the early days, as when Grat roamed the land, the acclaim of friends and family could be enough to get certification that said soul has crossed into heaven, joining those lesser-known folks who lived lives of anonymous virtue.