by Timothy Egan
Hadrian’s ashes are in a vault with his wife. Having reigned for twenty-one years, building the wall in his name that straddled the northern edge of the Empire in Britain, remaking the Pantheon after it was nearly destroyed by fire, he hoped to live on in the most fortified mausoleum in the Mediterranean. To live on—who doesn’t want that? Hadrian’s fear was that the afterlife would be “bare and ghastly and without grace.” As he lay dying, he wrote a touching bit of verse, a send-off to the realm of the unknown:
Little lost and gentle soul,
Companion and guest of this body,
Get ready now to go down into
Colorless, arduous and bare places
Where you will no longer have the usual entertainments.
The emperor’s tomb is cold and final, matching his fear of where he would end up, that sad place devoid of “the usual entertainments.” He died at age sixty-two. The number glares back at me—sixty-two, this look in the mirror of my own death. Hadrian stayed in the grave. But this finality doesn’t have to be a portent. Death is not an eternal sleep. The Via Francigena has taught me otherwise.
* * *
—
IN OUR LAST DAYS, the light is soft and forgiving of Rome’s age, a gauze on the great monuments. We are still without schedule or pressure, but I feel a pull nonetheless, moving toward St. Peter’s Square several times, and then backing off. This afternoon we lean against the sun-warmed exterior of the Gesù, the massive mother church of the Jesuits. We wait until a small side door opens at four p.m., the entrance to the last home of Saint Ignatius of Loyola. His apartment is upstairs. Up the steps we go to the living quarters of the founder of the Jesuits.
Like Francis of Assisi, Ignatius lived a turbulent life. One of thirteen children born into a Spanish Basque family, he dreamed of conquest, wealth, and women. He killed people in war and relished the blood he shed. In 1521, he was badly wounded when a cannonball from the French crushed his legs. After he was put back together—the legs broken and reassembled in primitive surgery—he would always walk with a limp, one leg shorter than the other. While in recovery, he read philosophy and history and felt drawn to another kind of quest. His pilgrimage lasted a lifetime. As a mystic, Ignatius attracted the attention of the Inquisition, and he may have been executed but for his rhetorical dexterity. The vision he experienced in La Storta, where I stopped before dinner on my last night on the Via Francigena, led him to Rome. There, he founded an order designed as an intellectual counter to the Reformation—the Society of Jesus, eventually producing the first Jesuit pope, Francis, in 2013. Ignatius wrote a manual, Spiritual Exercises, still widely used, though it’s a rigorous triathlon for the soul.
I do not feel the presence of Ignatius in this darkened apartment until we turn a corner and find his shoes on a display ledge—worn and shapeless slippers of five-hundred-year-old leather, the heels collapsed, frayed at the front where toes would rub. There’s no ankle support and very little left of the soles. I take a picture for my Jesuit friend, Father Steve. For years, popes paraded around in red shoes of status, and it was customary for a pilgrim greeting the pontiff to kneel and kiss the scarlet feet in submission. Pope Francis eschewed the gleaming leather for simple loafers. He would kiss the feet of the homeless, criminals, and nonbelievers; no one was expected to do the same for him. Footwear always tells a small part of a story, as I learned in my own walk to Rome. In this coda to the Jesuit shadings of the Via Francigena, Ignatius is unlocked from his own grave.
At dusk we’re at the Spanish Steps, the best staircase in Italy. The fountain of the half-sinking boat is at the base, the church at the top, and in between is a rise of seats where you can sense the labored pulse of a tired city. We sit until the sky darkens and the mood of Rome pivots, and then move toward music in the piazza nearby. We are enchanted now by a beautiful woman in a black dress with an open umbrella at her feet. She is seated at a piano near a café. She has rolled the piano out from somewhere and started to play. Her music fills the square and rivets the crowd, stopping strollers in their tracks; she’s that good. People dining al fresco put aside their conversations to listen. We are spellbound as her fingers glide over keys of ebony and ivory. I shiver, for I know now, though I don’t say anything, that Margie will soon depart from this earth. She would love the moment; in her world, music was the highest form of prayer. The miracle I’d begged for in Laon, and dropped into the current of continuous pleading in Saint-Maurice, and attached to my experience with the incorruptible corpse of Saint Lucia, is not to be. I know the cancer will kill her. I feel her passing. But she will never be stuck like Hadrian, her love in a grave. She is with us now.
In midmorning the next day, we walk on a little path of crushed rock to a Renaissance villa, built for Pope Julius III in 1555. It’s a fine house, mustard-colored on the outside, with perfect proportions throughout. It went from the hands of the church to the city in the nineteenth century. They smartly dedicated this home to the original Italians, a museum for the Etruscans. We glide past the funerary objects to a room that holds a married couple behind glass, a masterpiece from 2,600 years ago. It’s the only thing I want to see. I first heard about this man and woman years ago, when we lived in the Chianti country. The winemaker who lived below us had kicked up a small, chipped artifact of some sort from the Etruscan era; it had been buried in the hard dirt where he grew his sangiovese grapes. To me, the object was full of mystery. To the Chianti farmer, it was a trifle. If you want to know something about these ancients, he said, go to Rome and see the Sarcophagus of the Spouses.
So here we are before a bride and groom in their prime, full-figured and life-sized in painted terra-cotta, reclining affectionately in the afterlife. Of all the monuments to the dead along the Via Francigena, all the reliquaries and raised tombs and glass crypts, this one is the most exuberant. It represents the Etruscan view of the hereafter. The man embraces his wife. This is what Diderot wanted with his lover, what he could not square with his atheism—“to combine myself with you when we are no longer here.” The hair is braided, the eyes are almond-shaped. They’re radiant, presiding over a banquet, in keeping with the Etruscan idea of what follows this life. In a way, it’s very much the story of the Resurrection. They’re both smiling, like the angel in the cathedral of Reims. Here is more of the small proof I need, another affirmation of the joyful defiance of linear time: their love is free of the grave, passed on every time someone like us returns the smile.
* * *
—
AT LAST—TIME WITH THE POPE. I got tickets the night before, but was uncertain, until this morning, whether I would go. Joni pushed me. I will not get my chance to ask Francis questions I’ve been thinking about since Canterbury. And yet, I don’t feel slighted or incomplete, my pilgrimage stunted. Just the opposite. The day is cloudless and warm as we cross into the world’s smallest sovereign state, a mere two-tenths of a square mile. Vatican City has its own post office, long the most efficient in Italy, and an ATM machine with instructions in Latin, and a labyrinth of boxwood hedges where the pontiff can lose himself in thought. We check into a small room just off the main square. I unfold a frayed pilgrim passport, four stapled pages inked with stamps from the stops of the Via Francigena. The medieval pilgrimage from Canterbury was made in the spring and usually took ten weeks. I also started in the blush of the year’s seasonal renewal, and it took me about the same time, discounting days of deliberate diversion. After looking briefly at marks of my destinations, a clerk presents me with a certificate with my name, signed by a Vatican official, Testimonium Peregrinationis Peractae ad Limina Petri. It’s official. I know how the Scarecrow felt when he got his brain.
We pass through metal detectors, walk by frowning and brow-furrowed Swiss Guards in frilly uniforms and black berets. In the pool of people in the piazza outside St. Peter’s, there’s a buzz, a shared sense of anticipation. Nobody pushes or shoves. Some of those who are lucky to ha
ve seats offer them to the elderly or the frail. I’m happy to be here, my selfish concerns subsumed by the hopes of the whole. For the most part, it’s a surprisingly young crowd, with many people of color, and more women than men—the future of the church, if it can keep from betraying them. Some Catholics want a museum for a religion, the centuries-old still life of sanctity, doctrine mortared to the statues. What I see today is very much a vibrant faith, people moved not so much by grandeur—though that’s certainly a part of it—but by something else.
The pope arrives by a vehicle just larger than a golf cart, doing a couple of laps as the crowd rushes forward. I can’t help thinking of the first time I saw the Rolling Stones, or Bruuuuuce. I get within ten yards or so for a good view of an octogenarian with a glow and a lovely smile, a whirl of billowy white. I shout out a salutation—the prayer message I said I would deliver for the woman from the mountains near Aosta. It feels good to keep that promise, which I’d nearly forgotten about. Bernini’s masterpiece—the colonnades, the piazza in the form of an ellipse—is civic architecture with a beating heart, not unlike the church that presents itself with this crowd. In the portico are statues of Constantine and Charlemagne, fronting the basilica built with riches from the sales of indulgences. Inside is the tomb holding the rest of Saint Peter, the man who disowned Christ before the rooster crowed on the day of his crucifixion. Also inside, crowded into the last available niche in the basilica’s nave, is a relatively recent statue of my friend Saint Lucia Filippini. Though I can’t see her from our position in the piazza, I return her wink from two weeks ago.
The Holy Father settles into a chair and offers a greeting to pilgrims in many languages. The wind nearly knocks off his skullcap. He speaks softly, mostly in comfortable Italian cadence, occasionally using his hands. My mind drifts, for the day is so glorious, but a few of his words land on me as a tap on the shoulder. “Never yield to negativity.” And “Keep your eyes open to the beauty all around you.” And “If you are sitting, get up and go. If boredom paralyzes you, fill your life with good works.” And finally, this, repeating something he has said many times: “You must always forgive.” Forgive? He’s been meeting regularly with victims of sexual abuse, asking us to judge him by his actions, as his church works its way through reconciliation with “the greatest desolation,” as he calls it. On impulse, I offer up my absolution to the faith for the crimes against my family, riding a Roman breeze. I’m swayed by the words of someone I’d read about one night on the V.F., that man who chose to forgive as a way to free himself from the chain that bound him to his tormentor. I can’t speak for my brother.
The Via Francigena is a trail of ideas, and it helps to walk with eyes open—otherwise you miss the bread crumbs of epiphany along the way. There’s no Testimonium for the memories I’m loaded down with here at the pathway’s end, but my passport is full. I will not soon forget dawn at the mountain monastery at Great Saint Bernard, still turning over the words of Father John of Flavigny. I will remember French children singing in a square where Christians were once hectored into going to war. And I will go to my grave trying to find a place within my fortress of reason for the living face of a long-dead saint in the crypt at Montefiascone. I will not look at a thunderstorm in the same way after watching the many moods of the sky over the Marne. Nor will I belittle a given day, no matter how boring or wasted. I will never hike without blister medication or take another shortcut. These are aspirations, mind you, so I expect to come up short. Beyond that is a conviction, this pilgrim’s progress: There is no way. The way is made by walking. I first heard that in Calais, words attributed to a homeless man, the patron saint of wanderers. I didn’t understand it until Rome.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A journey of a thousand miles began, and was sustained by many a writer’s friend. In Seattle, I’m indebted to Father Stephen Sundborg, S.J., the president of Seattle University, a brilliant Jesuit theologian whom I’ve been lucky to know since high school. He used his mysterious influence to open doors in the mysterious Vatican; more important, he was a friend and encouraging voice along the way. Another theologian, a half century younger than Father Steve, Sam Rennebohm, was kind enough to read an early draft and help me with my thinking, all while pursuing his PhD in psychology and raising a baby boy with his wife, Annie.
On the trail, I’m grateful to Julia Peters of Canterbury, for sharing insights from her own camino to Rome earlier, and to Carlo Laurenzi of London, a gifted Italian-Brit. In France, Rémy Cordonnier opened the magnificent library of Saint-Omer to me on short notice, and the Franciscan brother Alexis Mensah offered his time in a town obsessed with time. Father John of Flavigny took a break from his retreat in the Alps to share thoughts that guided me through the Italian part of the trail. Thanks to my son, Casey, and my daughter, Sophie, for joining me along parts of the Via Francigena, and challenging some of my comfortable conclusions on matters of the soul, while finding memorable places to end a long day. My wife, Joni Balter, was a hill-charging companion at the end of the camino, and kept me from foolishness in the writing. We mourn the loss of her sister, Margie.
Every writer should have as good a vetting circle as I have. Combing through the manuscript were Vashon Island friends John McCoy and his wife, Karen Chesledon. John is a world-class editor, writer, and Roman Catholic bon vivant; Karen is a spiritual seeker more dutiful than I. Another couple, my friends Sam Howe Verhovek and his wife, Lisa, were honest, unsparing, and right in their remarks. The great ally of authors Steven Barclay was encouraging on the French part of the pilgrimage and gave wind to my sails afterward. If America were a better country, or had a better president, he would be ambassador to France now.
In New York, my friend Carol Mann put me together once again with perfect publishing partners, and read the draft as well. At Viking, my new home, thanks to Trent Duffy and Anna Jardine for extraordinary copyediting and fact-checking, to Carolyn Coleburn for getting this book out the door, and to Emily Neuberger for handling all the messy details. I’m deeply grateful to be working again with Andrea Schulz, who was flat-out brilliant with suggestions that this writer, by reflex, usually rejects. Thanks to all. If I’m lucky, you’ll be called on again.
SOURCES
1. London Falling
Sigeric the Serious, brief history, from Confraternity of Pilgrims to Rome, www.pilgrimstorome.org.uk.
Total number of Catholics as 1.3 billion, from Vatican, http://www.fides.org/en/news/64944-VATICAN_CATHOLIC_CHURCH_STATISTICS_2018.
Pancras, www.catholic.org/saints, though they stress the biography is less than reliable.
Shakespeare quote, from King Richard II, Act II, Scene 1.
Loss of religion. The numbers are from the British Social Attitudes Survey, updated to the most recent, http://www.bsa.natcen.ac.uk/latest-report/british-social-attitudes-28/religion.aspx.
Loss of religion fallout, The Spectator, June 13, 2015.
Rise of the “Nones” in the United States, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/04/25/key-findings-about-americans-belief-in-god.
Number of churches closed since 1980, The Economist, https://www.economist.com/news/britain/21704836-britain-unusually-irreligious-and-becoming-more-so-calls-national-debate.
Worldwide religious growth: http://www.pewforum.org/2012/12/18/global-religious-landscape-exec.
Church of England criticism, from the bishop of Buckingham’s blog, http://bishopalan.blogspot.com/2012/03/time-for-reboot-not-bailout.html.
Half of American Catholics lapsed, from Pew survey, as reported in a story at https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/half-american-catholics-have-lapsed-180956662/.
Quote by Saint Augustine, from Confessions, Penguin Books, 1961.
200 million pilgrims a year, from information about the PBS series Sacred Journeys with Bruce Feiler, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/sacredjourneys/content/about/.
Reasons to walk the V.F., https://www.viefrancigene.org/en/resour
ce/news/chi-si-mette-cammino-sulla-francigena-analisi-e-ri.
2. A Canterbury Tale
Cathedral details from a tour by author, and from website, www.canterbury-cathedral.org.
Story of the killing, from Saint Thomas Becket, by Christopher Harper-Bill, Scala Publishing, the official version sold at Canterbury Cathedral, no publication date.
Becket’s place, from A History of Christianity, by Paul Johnson, Atheneum, 1976.
“What is the point,” from Daily Mail, October 12, 2017.
Archbishop’s power and monarch, from New York Times, January 15, 2018.
Welby childhood, early atheism, from a profile of him in The Telegraph, July 12, 2013.
Death of Welby child, from The Telegraph, December 21, 2014.
