Turning Toward Montreal

When I first posted about my planned 425-mile walk from my home to St. Joseph’s Oratory in Montreal, it was with the enthusiasm that I usually bring to new things.

Beginning five months ago, I drew up a route and preliminary plans, to start on May 1, Feast of St. Joseph the Worker; I read some books on pilgrimage and St. André Bessette, who inspired the Oratory; then I let it all lie. The winter was too cold and icy to even think of such a long walk.

In the past several weeks the reality of my pilgrimage has been slapping me in the face—alone, on a path of my own devising, through Massachusetts, wild New Hampshire and Vermont, and the French-speaking eastern townships of Quebec. Without the preexisting infrastructure of hostels, restaurants, and cafés found all along the Camino de Santiago.

Did I mention alone? I will be alone.

No one else that I know of is planning to walk—or has walked—the Camino de Montreal. People ask if anyone is going with me, and I answer, “Are you volunteering?” So far, no one has said yes.

Medieval Catholic History Through a Glass Darkly

Pilgrimage may involve traveling from point A to point B, but it is hardly one-dimensional.

In The Age of Pilgrimage, Jonathan Sumption demonstrates that from the time of the desert Fathers until the Reformation, a period spanning about twelve hundred years, the nature of pilgrimage changed “from private austerity to popular enthusiasm and thence to abstract ritual.”

In another summary statement, the author notes that “Pilgrimage, like almsgiving, had begun as an accessory to the moral teaching of the Church, and ended as an alternative.”

These conclusions—and the four hundred pages of closely researched detail leading up to them—are challenging for a person like myself who has walked the Camino de Santiago and is planning another pilgrimage on foot to the Oratory of St. Joseph in Montreal.

But as a spiritual advisor told me recently, the Catholic Church and its history are “messy,” and being a happy Catholic, as I am, means learning to live with the mess.

A Biased History of Pilgrimage

I have been wishing this week that I could perform a Vulcan mind meld with Eric Metaxas and Jonathan Sumption. Metaxas’s new book Miracles is thrilling to the committed Christian like myself, but it takes a lot for granted, as the subtitle suggests: What They Are, How They Happen, and How They Can Change Your Life. 

Metaxas lays out the case for miracles in the first half of the book, then describes real-life miracles that have occurred to people he has known. While Miracles is inspirational and quite convincing to me, I wish Metaxas showed a touch of Jonathan Sumption’s skepticism and scholarship.

Sumption’s subtitle for a book on miracles probably would be They Don’t Happen, So Forget About It. 

I am reading Sumption because he wrote a definitive work on a subject I am intensely interested in—The Age of Pilgrimage: The Medieval Journey to God. Published in 1975, it was reissued in 2003, proof that it has held up to scrutiny. It has more than one hundred pages of end matter. Sixty-seven pages of footnotes cite sources mostly in Latin and French. This is real scholarship, but scholarship with a beef.

Sidney Heath on Pilgrimage: Don’t Expect Miracles

Sidney Heath was an Edwardian Anglican landscape artist and architectural illustrator (left). That is, he was neither a Catholic nor a historian. Nonetheless, something moved Heath to write Pilgrim Life in the Middle Ages. 

Heath’s book is largely dismissive of pilgrimage, and other medieval Catholic practices, as a lifeless relic of the dark ages. “To us the religious memorials of the past,” he writes, “the desecrated shrine and the dishonoured reliquary, are merely examples of ancient art, trinkets that supply a study for the jeweler, a subject for the lecturer, and most frequently of all, a specimen in the museum.”

And yet.

As an artist, Heath was confronted with the beauty of old Catholic churches and cathedrals in his native England; and at least once in Pilgrim Life he confesses to an appreciation of their beauty: “So many of our [English] mediaeval churches and cathedrals possess a plainly felt but indescribable atmosphere that permeates the material fabric, and which, by some mysterious and subtle influence, transforms the material house of man into the spiritual house of God, surely the highest and noblest ideal within the domain of architectural expression.”

An Open Letter to St. André Bessette

Dear Brother André,

I salute you across time, and from earth to heaven. I greet you on your feast day. You died on this date in 1937, fourteen years before I was born, and you were canonized in 2010, when I was nearing sixty and two years a Catholic.

Chances are I will not be canonized.

But we are separated by more than years and dimensions and holiness. Your life, which began in 1845 in the tiny Quebec village of Mont-St.-Grégoire, is almost unimaginable to me. Let me count the ways.

More on the Meaning of Pilgrimage

Attempting to plumb the meaning of pilgrimage, I came across an article in Crisis this week: “On Pilgrimage: The Analogy of Departure,” by Timothy J. Gordon and Joseph Polizzotto.

The article is good if a bit scattered. I mean, why lead off with a crime-movie dialog between Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro? You can judge its relevance for yourself. Maybe the authors thought a direct plunge into salvation history would be, well, too direct.

I was interested in sections on “Pilgrimage in the Bible,” beginning with Abram/Abraham’s; “Pilgrimage in Salvation History,” with a focus on the Desert Fathers; and “Pilgrimage and Analogy in the Anthropology of St. Thomas”—though, seriously, I didn’t understand much of that last section. The mere mention of Aquinas, with his towering intellect, massive gut, and impenetrable Summa, makes my intellectual berries shrivel up.

But the article revealed new meaning in the word pilgrimage for me. I already knew the basic etymology. In the Online Etymology Dictionary, you will find:

In Praise of Walking

I was a high-school athlete until I discovered that I did not like having my ass handed to me by older, bigger, tougher boys.

Then I was a runner in days when Jim Fixx’s Complete Book of Running was the talk of the town (1977–early 1980s). Fixx’s massive heart attack while running in 1984 wasn’t the gong that stopped me in my tracks. I stopped running in the early 1990s after marriage led to weight gain, and I had begun thinking I might want to have my own knees and hips when I turned 60.

I have been walking for twenty years, and I still have my own knees and hips. There are other benefits of walking too, some of which Kevin Paul Dupont hits on in his piece in the Sunday Globe. 

Dupont had me with his lead: “Not likely that Henry David Thoreau would have bought into today’s health clubs, with their high-tech equipment and steep monthly membership fees.” I’m no longer sure I buy into Thoreau, but I agree with Henry’s presumed opinion of health clubs.

Memoirs Unlimited: Starting Up Again

There are New Year’s resolutions, and I’ve made one. But there are also New Year’s priorities, and these I take even more seriously. I have three of these for 2015.

1. To finish posting excerpts from my memoir, The Long Walk Home, on this blog, and then to be done with it, for the foreseeable. Posting should be complete by the end of January, which will leave me only two priorities—

2. To plan, prepare, and walk a pilgrimage to Montreal. The preparation will include speaking to several school groups about pilgrimage in general and my own experience of pilgrimage, including the Camino de Santiago in 2012 and my projected walk to the Oratory of St. Joseph in May-June 2015.

3. To begin prospecting and promoting my original writing and editing business, Memoirs Unlimited. News about this can be found at my other blog, the name of which won’t surprise you: Memoirs Unlimited, Inc. That blog has lain fallow for three years, but I’m restarting it, effective today.

Meanwhile, on the Road to Montreal, Weeks 4 and 5

I’m now quite sure of my May-June walking route to the Oratory of St. Joseph in Montreal. Having previously posted maps for week 1, week 2, and week 3, I’ve developed the above map for weeks 4 and 5, north and west from St. Johnsbury, Vermont.

I hope to leave my home north of Boston on or about the first of May (feast of St. Joseph the Worker) and arrive at the Oratory on or about Sunday, June 7. 

The route for the final two weeks has a few virtues: (1) It allows me to attend daily mass at least two or three days during week 4, as I work my way to the Canadian border via Newport, Vermont (St. Mary’s Catholic Church on the map); (2) it permits me to spend my last weekend on the road at the Abbaye de St. Bénoît du Lac in southern Quebec; and (3) it takes me in week 5 through two small towns where Brother St. André Bessette once lived, Farnham and Saint-Césaire, Quebec.

Also, each week’s route is approximately 75 miles, which is about the average for all five weeks of my pilgrimage.

There is a notable pattern or progression in my overall route. Each week I will walk in less familiar, less citified, more rugged country.

Word for the Day: Walk

As I’ve already told you, I identify with the Apostle John, though originally for all the wrong reasons. When your guru thinks he’s Jesus Christ and hints that you are his “beloved,” it may be time to check the exits. That’s what happened to me in the early days with Gulliver.

I don’t know who’s crazier: me for sticking with Gulliver after that, or you for sticking with “Witness” after everything I’ve told you.

Today, forty-three years after my “you are John” moment and nearly seven after being received into the Catholic Church, I have a more authentic love for John. This is partly because I want to be as close as possible to the real Jesus Christ, as the Apostle John was. It’s partly because, like John, I want to write in old age about my love for Jesus in his Church. With this blog and my other writings I continue to try to explain why it made sense for a 57-year-old former Gurdjieffian to convert to the Catholic Church, and why and how that now-63-year-old Catholic is happier today than ever.

That’s how I understand witnessing. You don’t have to understand it that way. This is my blog. As Ronald Reagan said famously, I paid for this microphone.

It touches me that the Church chooses for its post-Nativity liturgy the letters of John. Who better than the boy Apostle (he was surely the youngest) to offer the backbeat during the octave of Christmas?

I Heart Pilgrimage

Evidence mounts that I really will be walking to Montreal in May. For the first seven weeks of planning, or since I restarted this blog November 1, most communications about my pilgrimage were outgoing, like bottled messages thrown into the surf. Return comments were few or none.

Now I’ve begun receiving word back. The omens are favorable. Three examples:

One. At a holiday gathering the other night, I eavesdropped on a college freshman telling her boyfriend that, You see that guy over there, the man talking with my mom? He is walking to Montreal! She might even have added, Can you believe it? As I glanced furtively in her direction, I saw that she was smiling at me kindly, the way you would if you were eighteen and some old codger across the room was going to do something as admirable as it was daft.

Meanwhile, on the Road to Montreal, Week 3

As explained in previous posts for week 1 and week 2, I am plotting my path to Montreal on foot next spring, hoping to attend mass every day possible.

The third week (map left) is pretty cut and dried, taking me from Plymouth NH on the weekend of May 16-17 to St. Johnsbury VT the following weekend.

On each of the four weekends so far (beginning May 2-3), I believe I have accommodations for two nights, which will allow me one complete day of rest each week, preferably Sunday.

Towns, churches and mass times for week 3 are shaping up as follows:

Word for the Day: Onceness

Writing about death, judgment, and hell in his book on the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, Karl Rahner S.J. says, “Our death is a culmination of the unrepeatable onceness of our personal human existence.”

That single, singular word onceness (in Greek hapax) brought me up short this morning. It snapped many things into focus. One word seemed all at once to distinguish Christianity from other so-called paths and to explain for me the meaning of pilgrimage, as well, as my pilgrimage on foot to Montreal grows near.

Onceness, as a distinctly Christian way of seeing the world, stands squarely, resolutely between the nothingness of the atheist and the everythingness of the Buddhist or Hindu—that Eastern sense blithely embraced by  so many of us Westerners that tells us “God is everywhere,” we are “spirit,” and our lives will somehow “repeat” themselves (get better probably) in this “spiritual” universe, as we turn in a cycle of reincarnation or eternal return or something or other.

This cyclic vision of life is buttressed by Joseph Campbell’s great, flawed work The Hero with a Thousand Faces, in which we’re all wannabe heroes on a sacred journey that will only bring us home again.

Christians don’t go home again. After death, we go to heaven or we go to hell.

Joseph’s Third Day

St. Joseph is honored by two official Catholic feast days, March 19 and May 1. That’s twice what most saints get, though still a fortnight or so short of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

St. Joseph’s first day, March 19, is his official feast, observed traditionally in the Roman Catholic Church for eleven hundred years and officially for nearly 450 years. In 1570, Pope St. Pius V made it standard for all churches celebrating the Roman Rite. It was on this day in 2008, four days before my confirmation as a Catholic, that, hearing the day’s liturgy, I decided to take the name Joseph when I was received into the Church.

From 1870 until 1955, the Church celebrated a feast honoring St. Joseph as Spouse of the Blessed Virgin Mary and Patron of the Universal Church, also known as the Solemnity of St. Joseph. In 1955, that observance ended and a new one replaced it: the Feast of St. Joseph the Worker. May 1 (May Day) was chosen because it was International Labor Day. This is St. Joseph’s second day. I have chosen it for the start of my pilgrimage to the Oratory of St. Joseph in Montreal.

Today’s Gospel chronicles St. Joseph’s big moment in salvation history. Thus it marks a sort of third day for the patron saint of the Universal Church. Joseph is also the patron of fathers, carpenters, social justice, and the dying.

Meanwhile, On the Road to Montreal, Week 2

I have worked out the second leg of my pilgrimage to Montreal. At least, I know where I’m going to mass each day May 11–17, 2015. I don’t yet know where I’m going to eat or sleep.

As I wrote in the first installment of “My Own Private Map Quest, Montreal Edition,” I want to attend mass each day I’m on the road and I am plotting my route accordingly.

I can’t be sure until I double-check, or until I scout my walking route via Google Earth, but it looks like the following churches and mass times in southern New Hampshire will work:

Meanwhile, On the Road to Montreal, Week 1

“Man proposes, God disposes.” That’s what Gulliver used to say, though he said it in his native language. He said it “suffered in translation,” too, but I got the idea.

With my pilgrimage to Montreal, I proposed and everyone else has disposed, God included, I presume. I had such a great plan: get letters of reference from my present and former pastors, send letters out to parishes along the route, receive generous offers of hospitality from one and all, and talk to or with anyone who cared to listen in exchange for said hospitality.

None of that is happening. Not yet anyway.

Instead, friends are appearing “out of nowhere”—those close to home with whom I have talked directly and others whom I seldom see, who saw posts on this blog. Hospitality is pouring in on me, just not from the places I expected it.

I am structuring my trip one week at a time. The map above shows the first week—or ten days actually. I will leave St. Mary Star of the Sea Church in Beverly, Massachusetts, on May 1, the feast of St. Joseph the Worker, and I hope to stop in the following parishes at the mass times shown in the ten-day period through May 10.

More on Sellner’s Pilgrimage

OK, so maybe I was a bit hard on Pilgrimage by Edward C. Sellner, Ph.D. There are many things to grumble about in a book that turns pilgrimage into a spiritual quest for your own personal star, gleam, bliss, whatever.

But there are two things to like.

First is the extensive bibliography, six pages in length, though admittedly we’re talking six little square pages in one of those little square books that publishers turn out to turn profits. But the bib contains at least thirty books I would do well to look at before my pilgrimage to Montreal in May.

Second thing to like is a one-page list of Five Pilgrimage Classics. This list is infinitely more satisfying than the list of Five Great Pilgrimage Movies, over which I kvetched yesterday.

Here’s the list of great books about pilgrimage:

Sellner’s Pilgrimage is Not Mine

I am reading a book on pilgrimage, and I am pissed off. That wasn’t supposed to happen.

I should have known. I should have been smarter.

Standing in the bookstore at the Campion Retreat Center in Weston, Massachusetts, this morning, and looking for a book on pilgrimage, for obvious reasons, I opened Pilgrimage by Edward C. Sellner, for obvious reasons.

As my dear Dad, a southpaw, used to do, I thumbed through the book with my left thumb from back to front, and I immediately came to this page, just before the bibliography:

Five Great Pilgrimage Movies

OK, that was interesting. I looked to see if “The Way” was on the list. It wasn’t but still I gave Sellner a pass. His book must have been published before the making of Emilio Estevez’s film about the Camino de Santiago.

Then I saw his list.

Personal Reflections on The Pilgrim's Progress from This World to That Which is to Come

The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) is the eccentric remnant of a perfervidly religious age, interesting only as a historical oddity.

Either that, or it is a timeless allegory which still has value to the Christian who sees his life as a pilgrimage.

That would be me.

I am going to launch into a series of occasional posts about John Bunyan’s challenging, outdated, comical classic, just to see what I can learn from it. My posts will not be scholarly or academic but personal.

With each post, I will try to remember to ask myself, What does any of this have to do with me? Or you?

The illustration (H/T Wikipedia) is the title page of the first edition. Written while Bunyan was in jail for refusing to follow the Church of England, The Pilgrim’s Progress is said to be the best-selling Christian devotional book ever published in English.

To read the next post on The Pilgrim’s Progress, click here.

Thoreau’s Catholic Moment

In September 1850, Henry David Thoreau spent a single afternoon in Montreal. Thoreau’s visit is striking both for its brevity and for the only activity he reports in any depth: He entered—and amazingly admired—a Catholic church.

He spent five hours in the city and wrote six paragraphs* about it. Four of the six paragraphs were about the church. And not just any church.