December '08/January '09

When the woman near Roncesvalles issuing credenciales to would-be pilgrims asked Kerry Egan why she wanted to walk to Santiago de Compostela, without forethought she blurted out “My father died last year.” In a way she had never anticipated, her father’s death became the overarching preoccupation of the next five weeks, a journey she describes in her book, Fumblings, as a little lifetime in itself, beginning with a new birth and ending in resurrection, but much of the in-between spent wrestling with death. In a church in Navar, her forehead on the back of a pew and her body wracked by sobbing, women who had been silently praying their rosaries moved closer and gently surrounded her in a field of prayer, staying with her until her breathing steadied and matched their own. She was washed by waves of grief and anger – at the sun and the heat, at her father, at herself, and most of all at God. “To be angry with God,” she wrote, “means to realize at the deepest level – a place that is both physical and emotional at the same time – that the world is broken and not as it should be. Anger at God is anger at suffering.”

The woman issuing the credenciales had earlier refused a man who wanted “a spiritual experience”- she was looking for real life crises and concrete intentions. And I understand as never before why some people, at least, undertake pilgrimages: as a way of doing something when you can’t do anything else. When you are consumed by grief and pain and worry, it’s a way of pushing and punishing your body, finishing a day exhausted and aching and too tired to think or talk or pray. It’s a walking meditation, set to the rhythm of your body’s breath and swing and stride, slowly unraveling the knots in the head and the heart. And initially at least, maybe it’s a way of waving all the effort in God’s face and demanding that now, surely, God has to do something. Medieval pilgrims trekked to Canterbury and Walsingham, to Rome and Compostela, but most of all to Jerusalem, to that place where God fully embraced our poor and broken humanity, and forever. Some went in penance, some in piety, but also some, perhaps, who just needed to do something difficult, challenging, draining, substantial, because in reality there was nothing else they could do.

Advent, our month-long pilgrimage to Bethlehem, touches the deepest longings of the human heart – for healing, restoration, patience, peace, safety, our world and our lives free of suffering. We all approach with needs and worries and questions. Yet God’s response is never to rush in and make it all better, but always to be with us, to walk with us and in us and around us, so that together we might find our way. The circumstances of Jesus’ birth – the cave, the binding cloths, the myrrh – presage that suffering will not be banished, but endured and overcome, that there is no length to which our God will not go, no extreme where God has not been before us, and may not still be found. May each of us find in the silent, sleeping child the answer we most need to hear.

TPG+

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