My Favorite Book So Far

#33.  A Pilgrimage to Eternity. From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith. - Timothy Egan 

I loved this book.  It's probably something more to appeal to people who have, or had, some religious leaning at some point in their lives: Catholic or mainstream Protestant.  Or perhaps anyone who has ever gone on pilgrimage.  The hero's journey.  The time out of time.  The search for miracles or clarity.  I know them well.  I see other people's stories daily.

I read "The Good Rain" in college, as part of my studies (Natural History/Ecology).  He's been writing a long time, has a journalists eye and sensibility, and has twenty pages of bibliography at the end of the book.  He winds his journey in the twines of church history, place history, stories of saints, stories from his personal life, the every day struggle of being a pilgrim in the present, and his encounters along the way to Rome into a whole that leads you, too, from Canterbury to Rome, and across 2000 years of history.  I've walked the same journey via different roads, other countries.

Are there ultimate answers that prove a faith?  I don't know.  I understood things when there was the space and simplicity of repetition allowed to clear the clutter of busy and shoulds from my every day. And he found this, too.  

A pilgrimage is in three parts: calling/beginning (physical), wrestling (mental), return/reintegration.  It was curious to me, the tradition on this route, too, that he carried a stone to leave behind on the third section of the journey.  There was also a reason why on the Camino Frances, through Spain, that the Cruz de Ferro, where millions of pilgrims have left behind a stone on a mountain, is between the "big empty", as I think of it, the Meseta, and entering Galicia, where one prepares to return back home.  You've had the Meseta to wrestling with yourself, and then it's time to let the burdens you've been carrying go (symbolically, with the stone.)  Then you learn how to be with people again, without that burden.  Is this a universal truth of a pilgrimage?

I trace my fingers through the pages as if a labyrinth.  When I find my way out, I'm ready to be in the world again.  I've changed, so the world I'm in has changed, too.