Pilgrim
by Alison Le Cornu
I’ve just returned from a week at a Convent in northern France. It’s a place I know well; I have been going there three or four times a year since 1998. Originally it was a place I went to study. I wrote a lot of my PhD there and three of the nuns allowed me to interview them as part of my research. Once that was finished, it continued to be an important place to write and reflect, and little by little also became an emotional and spiritual home as I gradually found my place in their wider community of guests.
The Convent lies on the Via Francigena, the pilgrimage route from Canterbury to Rome. Much less-well known than the Camino de Compostela, the Via is also far less hospitable. Pilgrims walking it report real challenges of knowing where they’ll next be able to get food and drink, and where they will be able to stay the night. Nonetheless, the past 5 years have seen a steadily increasing number arriving at the Convent door, appreciating this unlikely refuge and break from the austerity of walking the Via. I enjoy conversing with them around the meal table and discovering more about what has motivated them to undertake what, to me, would be a momentous challenge. And over the years I have become bold enough to ask what, to me, is an important question: Are you walking the Via for faith reasons?
Personally, I tread the line between ‘faith’ and ‘something else’ with difficulty. If I were walking the Via, I’m not sure what faith expectations or hopes I would walk with. Nor am I sure that I would recognise any realisation of them. It’s much easier to identify physical and practical challenges and to know when they’ve been accomplished. Getting to Rome, or to the next staging point, is a concrete goal that is easily ticked off the list, as is the purchase of an energy bar and refilling a bottle of water.
Pilgrimage and pilgrim have long been metaphors for the Christian life and those who walk it, and I’ve come home this time pondering my own walk of faith. I have more questions than answers. Yet the Convent itself offers me some important insights. The life of a monastic is a particular type of pilgrimage, one which over the centuries has fine-tuned the understanding of how the relationship between the spiritual and practical, the heavenly and earthly, inter-relate. Both are an important part of monastic life. The nuns each have their respective roles, but their days are punctuated by the times when they leave their duties and join together in worship. They study theology, but also live it in these daily Offices. The intellectual role of critiquing and evaluating is counter-balanced by that of affirming and worshipping. And all these things allow the nuns to bring together what might strictly speaking be categorised as ‘faith’ and ‘something else’.
Fine for monastics, we might think, but what about for the rest of us? On my own pilgrimage, I have found myself exploring more deeply the role of the weekly Eucharist, considering how I might better appreciate and affirm the truths it represents. Perhaps, in all the busyness of life, I could find moments to pause and turn my mind to God. And I need to accept that my pilgrimage is lifelong. Literally.
