Timothy Egan writes a column for the New York Times, which I avidly read, and is the author of eight award-winning books I haven't read, including The Worst Hard Time. He is a Seattle resident and native, one of seven siblings, a graduate of Gonzaga Prep in Spokane and the University of Washington.
I've always enjoyed Egan's columns, because he discusses politics without simply repeating the same old sound bites. His columns -- although liberal in slant and, certainly, opposed to the Trump presidency -- have a balanced, thoughtful approach that I like to think represents the Seattle approach to life.
Hiking the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route across the north of Spain has become an item on a bucket list for many adventurers. Egan, instead, as a youthful 62-year-old, chose to hike an older but less well known route, the Via Francigena, from Canterbury to Rome. The route crosses the English Channel, passes across northern France into Switzerland, crosses the Alps over the Saint Bernard Pass, descends into Italy's Val d'Aosta and into the Po Valley, crosses the Apennines almost to the Ligurian coast, and then south through Tuscany and Umbria to Rome.
Why would a guy in his sixties do this? I suppose, for one thing, Egan and his family have done a lot of hiking in the Pacific Northwest; they enjoy walking.
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.
And his book is a travelogue of his walking, through European towns and villages, some famous, some known only to pilgrims following his route. More seriously, Egan -- raised in a Catholic family but himself a lapsed but curious Catholic -- wanted to experience this route followed by centuries of religious pilgrims to Rome, hoping to find a reason to stop straddling the line between atheism and belief.
I'm no longer comfortable in the squishy middle; it's too easy. I've come to believe that an agnostic, as the Catholic comedian Stephen Colbert put it, "is just an atheist without balls."
Less sublimely, he wanted to detach himself from the digital world.
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.
Egan is strongly affected by the fact that a sister-in-law is dying of cancer. He is also strongly affected by the fact that the best friend of one of his brothers committed suicide as an adult as the result of having been sexually molested at the age of 12 by their young, popular parish priest, a priest who had run into serious problems for years before being sent to their parish. Egan himself was traumatized by a priest's furious response, funny only in retrospect, to his eleven-year-old confession that he had trampled on the priest's prize flower bed.
As he walks from one religious site to another, reflecting on horrors of the past, from the cruelty of the Crusades to the Nazi Holocaust to the painful events he's seen in his own family, he asks himself the question that every believer from St. Augustine to the woman next door confronts -- where was God when all this happened?
As he walks the Via Francigena, Egan gradually sheds his exclusively rational approach to religion -- a rationality that is limited by our own human experiences and, in itself, can neither prove nor disprove the existence of a transcendent God. Belief comes from living life, he concludes, not from sitting in a library thinking. He recalls St. Francis's admonition to his Order: "Preach the Gospel at all times. When necessary, use words."
Egan encounters stories and shrines and memorials of famous miracles in the past, and politely rolls his eyes. Until, near the end of his trek, he witnesses, alone in a shrine, an event that he himself believes to be a miracle. It's not an event that he uses to convince his reader. He could not even convince his wife who, at the time, was hiking with him. The "miracle" is presented as something that persuaded him to believe something that he had always suspected, but doubted -- that there is something going on in reality beyond science. Then he reminds us of St. Augustine's observation: "Miracles are not contrary to nature, but only contrary to what we know about nature."
Pope Francis is something of a hero in Egan's eyes, a pope who understands Christianity in ways that his more medieval predecessors did not. President Trump is not a hero. In one funny scene, a grouchy abbott at a Benedictine refuge where he seeks lodging grills him about his background. Finally, the abbott asks:
"How are things in America?"
"Troubled."
"Why is that?"
"Trump."
"What's wrong with him?"
"Everything."
"I'll show you to your room."
Egan has no theological training, although he has done reading on his own. He discusses St. Augustine at length throughout the book, and attempts to wrestle with St. Anselm's "ontological argument" for the existence of God -- with more insight than I could bring to it.
Not a theologian, Egan is merely a very bright, very human, and very "good" man, a man walking the some 1,100 miles of the pilgrimage (assisted at times by trains, offered rides, and a rental car) while thinking about his life and his place in the Universe.
We learn not only about his religious contemplations, but also about his blisters and torn ligaments. We learn about making a wrong turn and adding miles to a day's hike. We learn about having to climb a final hill at the end of the day, when you're at the end of your rope, to reach your hostel.
We also learn about his family -- and about Egan's life as a family member -- as first his son, then his daughter, and then his wife join him for various short stages of his odyssey. After several days of hiking with his son, Egan is movingly depressed and bereft when his son has to leave as planned. Hiking alone for weeks on end sounds more fun in advance than it proves in reality.
As his pilgrimage nears its end -- yes, he makes it to Rome -- Egan decides he has made some progress. He has edged back toward the Church, but not all the way. He believes there is something we call God out there. He remains skeptical -- wisely -- of many claimed miracles, despite his own perceived experience with one. He concludes that he believes in the Resurrection -- too many eyewitnesses had been willing to suffer death rather than deny their observations.
But what cinched it for me was something the young Lutheran minister in Geneva said about the message of Easter from Jesus, something that echoes Jewish sentiment on what happens after death: "Nothing can keep my love in a grave."
And, therefore, death is not final: "The Via Francigena has taught me otherwise."
Nothing in his conclusions is offered as an argument, designed to persuade, anymore than he tries to persuade the reader to imitate him by climbing over the Alps. His approach to faith is highly personal, determined by his own unique experiences and by his own subjective interpretation of those experiences. But, unless your mind is closed on the subject, his path part way back to his childhood faith is as interesting as his path through the heart of Europe. .
He concludes by summing up his experience trodding the indistinct parallel pathways that make up the Via Francigega, as well as his path toward God:
There is no way. The way is made by walking."
No comments:
Post a Comment