A Pilgrimage to Eternity

by Timothy Egan

  I have just enough time to get a V.F. stamp at the fantastically frescoed church of San Frediano, named for the Irish monk who ended his years of roaming around Europe here. “Wandering is an ineradicable habit of the Irish race,” wrote a fellow monk. Well, that explains it. Frediano tried to live a hermit’s life nearby. He was lured out of seclusion by a flood that threatened to destroy Lucca. On his command, the Serchio jumped its channel and spared the city, something no Irishman has done since. He lived to nearly ninety, an almost impossible feat in the sixth century, and a tribute to the healthful air of Lucca. The breath of the sea blows in one way, another breeze comes down from the mountains. They used to call Lucca the city of a hundred churches, but the count is now down to barely a dozen that are open for worship. The one I have to see is the Cathedral of San Martino—not for the building, but for its legendary labyrinth. I get there just as the light is starting to fade. I’ll be back.

  * * *

  —

  IN THE EVENING, streets that were empty upon our arrival are full, shops doing a lively business, young and old, well dressed in a city compact enough that word would soon get around if you ever made less than a bella figura. We’re lucky to have friends, Paolo and Paola Pacini, who invite us to their apartment in a Renaissance tower for drinks, and then make sure we eat at La Buca di Sant’Antonio. We have the full attention of their friend the chef. It’s one of those nights when you wish you had multiple stomachs, like the ruminants we saw wandering the Alps. The restaurant is in the basement of an old horse stable, and has been serving food longer than the United States has been a country. The red wine is from the hills outside the walls, made of grapes we never see beyond Tuscany. For starters, we try little pies of leeks and ricotta, a liver pâté, and trout carpaccio. Then chestnut gnocchi. They serve baby goat from a spit, guinea fowl smothered in muscat grapes, and other dishes that I will replay slowly in my mind next time I’m stuck in a TSA line at the airport. Dessert is the house cannoli. Can we get it to go?

  This is Sophie’s last night, and it saddens me. There’s an improving chance that my wife, Joni, will join me for the last hundred miles to Rome. Margie lives from scan to scan, the Groundhog Day loop through chemo, hope, and test results. If Joni can get away in the brief recovery period after Margie takes her latest dose of poison, it would do her good. I don’t use the word “miracle” because it seems too facile, but Margie has asked me to pray for her. She also wondered about the religion of our children. Joni told her it was complicated. “It is complicated,” Margie replied. “Until you need it.”

  I’m curious if being on the Via Francigena has changed Sophie.

  “I wish I could go all the way to Rome with you.”

  “But has it changed your thinking in any way?”

  “It’s helped my thinking.”

  “How so?”

  “The process of elimination. I’m definitely not an atheist. It feels too extreme. And also because it sets it all up so negatively, like casting doubt on everyone I know and love who does have God as the central organizing feature of their belief system.”

  “So you believe in God?”

  “Sorry, Dad. I can’t tell you honestly that I do believe.”

  “Agnostic? Like your brother?”

  “I know agnostic is also a little lazy, since it spares you the trouble of really thinking hard about the bigger ‘it’—the question of how we got here, the origins of life.”

  “What do you believe?”

  “I believe in molecules in motion, in the Big Bang, in evolutionary biology.”

  “So do I. So does Pope Francis. The Vatican held that poor wretch Galileo under house arrest for staring into the cosmos and stating the obvious. But this pope says the more science the better.”

  “And certainly there are things that can’t be explained by science. But I guess I’m wired by reason and logic.”

  “The Jesuits would love you.”

  “I don’t like labels. I don’t have a text or Bible I consult. But I know what I believe in. I value family, friends, love, community, lifelong learning, continuous self-improvement, reflection, creative expression, empathy, care of the natural world and all the creatures who inhabit it.”

  “You’re going to be fine.”

  * * *

  —

  TO THE WALLS, to walk off the feast. Of course we take the cannoli, if only to be able to say the line. This is a passeggiata to remember. The night air is settled and warm enough for us to be coatless. The city is aglow; to the north, you can discern the outline of the mountains with a half-moon on the rise. We’re forty feet above Lucca’s floor, on a foundation that is a hundred feet wide at the base. The Guinigi Tower, with its trees growing from the top, stands out. I don’t recognize any other landmarks. I did not keep track of where we started, nor am I sure where we will end. It’s impossible to get lost. Wherever we drop down we are in Lucca, inside the embrace of the walls, and that is more than enough for happiness.

  * * *

  —

  SOPHIE LEAVES BEFORE DAWN, off to Pisa in the dark, several flights and home to the West Coast. She also leaves a hole in my days, and it hits me quickly—I’m alone. What helps is this city, quick to come to life, a balm to strangers. Most of Lucca is the color of Tuscany, that sunflower yellow that looks so warm in the first and last hours of the day. I’m easily distracted on my slow walk to the Cathedral of San Martino. The labyrinth is at the western end, cut into a single stone on a prominent pillar.

  Christian labyrinths came out of Greek mythology. A Latin inscription on the pillar explains that the design originated in Crete, a multichambered dungeon where King Minos disposed of his victims. It was overseen by his daughter, Ariadne, Goddess of the Labyrinth. No one who entered was ever able to get out; they were lost forever or mauled at the center by the Minotaur, a half-man, half-bull. Every year, this king demanded fresh human sacrifices. Theseus volunteered. He was determined to kill the beast, even if it meant he would never be able to exit. Ariadne fell in love with the selfless boy. She offered him a spool of thick string, told him to unravel it as he went deep into the puzzle. He slayed the Minotaur, freed those locked at the center, and found his way out by following the thread. He married Ariadne and sailed away to Athens.

  This labyrinth once had an image of Theseus and the Minotaur, but it grew faint with the rubbing of many fingers, until it disappeared entirely. While the mythic Greeks are gone, their message remains. You don’t solve a labyrinth. You sacrifice for others. When you run your fingers over the grooves of pilgrims past, you’re humbled by the not-knowing, the lack of direction. You need courage to enter and help to exit, though most Catholics would say once you’re in, you never get out.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  IN THE PATH OF THE LITTLE POOR MAN

  The Franciscans opened the doors of their home on the rise above San Miniato some eight hundred years ago, a place of refuge and reflection through the centuries, no questions asked. You can see why someone would want to spend a life here, glazed by the Tuscan sun, high enough to catch the breeze in the afternoon and provide an unobstructed view of the fraternal luminaries of moon and stars at night. The lights of Florence, Pisa, and Lucca flicker in the distance. The monastery is redbrick and simple with a Romanesque façade, vaulted timbers inside, a lovely cloister. Saint Francis himself, Il Poverello, founded this abbey a decade or so before he died in rags and emaciation in the year 1226. But you won’t get the lone priest who still greets Via Francigena pilgrims here to brag on this provenance. The staying power of Francis the mystic, Francis the lover of all living things, is humility. He and his followers were inferior to all, superior to none. He was the original holy fool. He danced. He sang. He laughed at his inadequacies. Shoeless and gaunt, he impressed the pope in Rome, won over the sultan in Egypt, gave comfort to the homeless in hovels. “Start by doing what is necessary,” he said, “then do what
is possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible.”

  The impossible here is finding enough brothers to keep the monastery going through a ninth century. “We have only five friars left,” said Father Alessandro Pretini, in announcing the end of Franciscan domain over this place, another sad mark in a church that cannot replenish the ranks of those who take holy orders. Worldwide, the number of Catholics has doubled in the last fifty years, yet there are fewer priests than in 1970. This place is run now by a group dedicated “to bringing joy to those who have lost hope,” a lay charity, with a sole priest in residence.

  The bones of Saint Francis are in Assisi, his hometown, in the basilica with the frescoes attributed to Giotto. The most dramatic scene shows him renouncing all material goods at the age of twenty-five. It’s a moment that has never lost its hold on the world. Francis could have had it so easy: father a merchant laying out a path for the boy, business trips abroad, a villa with a view, his bride the best-looking woman around. He’s beloved in his youth, a charming cutup, one of the town troubadours. He parties all night, sleeps until noon, commits “every kind of debauchery,” his first biographer writes. His ambition is to be a knight, and for that he has to prove himself. He goes to war against the neighboring town of Perugia. He’s knocked from his horse, cut and beaten, captured, cast into a rat-filled dungeon, released only because his father could afford the ransom. Back home, he’s still determined to be a warrior with honor, but he’s a wreck. War changes him. He’s deeply depressed. Reluctantly, he outfits himself in armor, rides off to join crusading Christians sailing for the Holy Land. The pope has promised absolution for waging the latest in a century of intermittent war.

  But during his first night on the road, he has a dream. It’s stark and convincing, a call to a different life. In the morning, he can’t shake it. He heads for a cave to think about what’s happening to him. On the way home, he meets a leper, one of the castoffs living in the shadows of Umbria. He leaps from his horse and takes the man’s hand, the skin mottled with scales and horrid black boils, soothes him. He kisses the leper on the lips. The touch changes his life. “What had seemed bitter to me was turned into sweetness of body and soul,” he writes. In seclusion, he fasts and prays. And now another dream: Christ tells him to “repair my church.” It’s broken, corrupt, run by charlatans and hypocrites. The poor live shunned lives in sodden squalor, while bishops and other clerics reside in the opulent splendor of sun-washed hill towns. But what is he? Soon, just a half-starved man in a loincloth.

  At home, he reveals his new life to his father. The patriarch is apoplectic. In public, Francis sheds his clothes, this at a time when the silks of nobles projected authority and status, and renounces any claim to family wealth. That moment. He wants to serve the poor, the passed over, beggars and sinners. His depression lifts. Into the wild he goes, singing. He seems . . . happy! What kind of lunatic is this prominent son of Assisi? He visits a priest living with a woman, an open scandal. Surely he’ll scold the cleric or tell him to break it off and repent. Instead, he kisses the wayward father’s hands. Soon, Francis is the talk of Umbria: they say he’s crazy, wrong in the head. Robbers will get him if disease doesn’t. He’s mocked, taunted. But here’s the thing his former friends don’t understand: poverty is the ultimate freedom. You can’t rob someone who has no possessions. You can’t insult a person without pride.

  He preaches to birds, tames a wolf, performs miracles, so they say. His philosophy is simple: all living things share a spirit. He’s not a priest, has no standing in the church. He’s not even an evangelist, for he says the only way to convince another of your faith is by wordless example. He begs for his meals, sleeps on a dirt floor. Still, he has the troubadour spirit. He likes to joke, to dance, to sing. “It is not fitting, when one is in God’s service, to have a gloomy face or a chilling look,” he says. His days of musical poetry serve him well when he writes his “Canticle of Brother Sun,” said to be the first verse in the Italian language. When he goes to see the pope in Rome, the mighty Innocent III turns him away. He finds Francis repulsive, a wretch in a filthy tunic. The pope is busy ginning up fresh war with Islam, creating punishments for heretics, persecuting Jews, tightening his grip over the Papal States, those territories in Italy under his direct sovereign rule. Innocent wants to conquer Jerusalem, to kill the Muslim infidels. His executions extend to Europe as well. In one day, on his watch, twenty thousand Christians of a different sort are slaughtered in southern France—murdered for heresy, three hundred years before the first Protestants were killed. “Go, brother,” the most powerful pope of medieval times tells Francis. “Go to the pigs, to whom you are more fit to be compared than men, and roll with them.”

  When Francis returns from the sty, the pope relents, granting the persistent pauper a few minutes of his time. Francis proposes something bold. Instead of sending new armies to the Holy Land to fight and die, why not send him—a war veteran? It’s an absurd idea. It takes seven years, and several aborted attempts, including a shipwreck, to pull it off. Francis walks much of the way through Egypt, at the cost of his health. He goes behind battle lines, which will surely get him killed. But nothing touches the man who has nothing. The mystic arrives bedraggled at the headquarters of the enemy. He’s captured, but still gets his audience with the Sultan of Egypt, Malik al-Kamil. The holy man of Islam has grown tired of armed conflict. Francis himself is scarred by war, he explains.

  “May the Lord give you peace,” he says.

  They argue about their respective Gods, built around two of the three religions connected to Abraham the patriarch and prophet, but move on, an attempt at ending further Crusades. The sultan admires some things about Christianity, and Francis is open to tenets of Islam. After he leaves, and for the rest of his life, Francis urges his followers to open their hearts to those that his pope wants to hate and kill.

  Among the followers is Clare of Assisi, who enlists women to take up the way of Francis, to find redemption in helping the lowest among humans. For the last fourteen years of his life, she’s a partner in poverty. But she is no supplicant. Born into one of the most important families in Umbria, her father owned a palace in Assisi and a castle on the mountain above town. After hearing Francis speak, she leaves home as a teenager, exchanges her jewels and dresses for a rough robe and veil. She gives up all property, severs family ties, and lives in a shared community. She is the first woman to found a monastic order in Italy, known as the Poor Clares. The name is similar to the one Francis gives to his followers, Friars Minor.

  Francis makes regular visits to a mountain outside Arezzo, La Verna, more than three thousand feet above the valley floor of the Arno. To get there, he hacks through woods and scrambles over rock to a knob of land donated to the Franciscans by a rich man. His health is failing. He contracted malaria while in North Africa. He also suffers from trachoma, an eye infection that makes him appear to be crying. He looks terrible. He seems to be withering before people’s eyes, and yet, with each physical diminishment, his power grows. He sleeps in an open-air cave on the mountain, trying to get closer to God. Then it happens—a vision, an appearance, a jolt of transformation. He feels it instantly. The palms of his hands take on blood-hardened scars, as do his feet—as if a nail had been embedded in his skin. In his side is an open gash, similar to the one a Roman soldier delivered to Christ on the cross. He has the stigmata, the first person ever to claim the wounds of Jesus.

  As he deteriorates over the last years of his life, he retreats to ever more austere conditions. Clare is with him, their souls fused in defiance of material comfort. Fire is a brother. So is the moon. So are the stars. So, in the end, is death. He still sleeps on a dirt floor, not unlike the dungeon in Perugia. When given a gift of food or a blanket, he passes it on to the poor. He has reached the state that he prayed for, when he asked God to “grant me the treasure of sublime poverty.” He shows symptoms of leprosy, which he may have picked up from the sick that he would nev
er turn away. What food he eats he can barely hold down. He dies in 1226 at the age of forty-five. Within ten years, there are five thousand Franciscans. His followers could have broken off, as did those inspired by Martin Luther three hundred years later. But they chose to stay with Rome, a counter to the overindulgent tendencies of other men of the cloth. Today, it’s the largest religious order within the Catholic Church, still trying to live by the words of the mystic from Assisi. “Preach the Gospel at all times,” he said. “When necessary use words.”

  * * *

  —

  I’M WELCOMED at the monastery with the traditional Franciscan greeting “Pace e bene a tutti,” and asked if I plan to stay the night. No, probably not. The road from Lucca was a mere twenty-five-mile drive. The day is young. My toes are healing nicely. I’ll be back on the ground soon, ditching the car. A picture of Pope Francis is prominent here, as you would expect of the only pontiff to take the saint’s name. He must know that he leads a church on the brink, in need of the kind of reawakening—or shove—that the Little Poor Man gave it eight hundred years ago.

  Up north at La Verna, buses deliver thousands of people daily at the shrine where Francis received his stigmata. When I visited a few years ago, there was a long queue to see the rock where he knelt when given the wounds of the Lord. I hiked through a forest in the clouds above the parking lot, entered a monastery and church complex, where a placard warned: “Dear Pilgrim, do not write crosses on the wall. God bless you.” The sanctuary was mobbed with all nationalities. The saint is a rock star. Long-robed and sandaled Franciscans roamed the byways, under Silenzio signs. I passed through a portico frescoed with the story of his life, opened a spiked metal door, and descended to a slab where Francis slept and was physically transformed, the open-air cave. The saint’s relics—a bowl and drinking glass, his walking stick, a stain of his blood from a cloth he used to dab his stigmata—were inside a small chapel. In a huge, high-ceilinged dining hall, pilgrims ate pasta Bolognese and roasted chicken and drank wine crafted from vineyards below. It reminded me of a national park lodge.