I went on pilgrimage during Lent in 2019, walking from Florence to Assisi to Rome on “The Way of St. Francis.” The walk was beautiful and holy and overwhelming and filled with big longings and sacred, weird moments. I loved so much about my pilgrimage. Then I landed in Rome, and it became discombobulating as all heck.
Rome at Easter is wild. It was one of the most disorienting weeks of my life. The noise was stifling. After five weeks of not really seeing anyone on the trails, suddenly there were so many people, streets jammed with people, and if you wanted to go in the opposite direction good luck because the people were a force of nature, a torrent of bodies you couldn’t walk against.
I had walked up lonely, moody mountains and through woods tense with magic, through towns of ivy covered dilapidated chapels and monasteries carved out of rock faces — right into Rome at Easter, crowded with tourists and very fancy buildings and paintings by incredibly famous people.
I was determined to do the important Rome things, so I got my ticket online to see Pope Francis on Easter Sunday. I waited patiently in the dark at the Vatican with thousands of other spiritual tourists. When the security guards finally let us in, and we all literally sprinted for the best seats, a flood of running assholes booking it to see the pope, and I wondered -
Is this why I prayed under the stars on top of Francis' mountain? To push little old ladies out of the way on Easter Sunday?? Will we crowd-surf up for Eucharist??? WHAT IS HAPPENING.
OK, yes, it was pretty cool to see Pope Francis on Easter Sunday. I have a very tender feeling towards this pope, despite the imperfections of the institution of the Catholic church that has kept me a reluctant Protestant.
But ending up in Rome at the end of this pilgrimage mostly felt awful. It felt not very Francisy, to walk into this huge city full of gorgeous people and do touristy things, after spending over a month in quiet, small places. Mostly, my expectations were outraged. I thought Rome would be a big culmination of faithfulness, an exclamation mark at the end of a long journey, the grand finale!
It felt like a tremendous loss instead.
I thought this would be like a spiritual ascent. I felt like I deserved it, after five weeks of walking up mountains, getting trapped in blizzards, tripping over my terrible Italian to reserve rooms, eating croissants and more croissants as my only breakfast nutrient to walk fifteen miles on. I had slept on cots, slipped on wet leaves, gotten caught in thunderstorms, gotten lost on mountains, been overcharged for pasta, taken icy cold showers, been yelled at by bed and breakfast ladies because I ate a pastry that was apparently not reserved for me. I watched the sun rise from the windows of a stone castle and drank wine while the sun set, outside restaurants while old Italian men yelled bella, bella! at me and I pretended not to hear them while the bar next store sang music and cigarette smoke and laughter.
And I saw storms roll in over wildflower fields. I took lazy shortcuts on mountains that paganism still haunted. I sat in stone stairwells and listened to monks praying in Italian, chanting the Psalms behind wooden doors. I took Eucharist even though I am not Catholic because I wanted the Body and the Blood of Christ so badly I would even break the rules for it, whispering prayers of thanks and apology. I touched the earth where St. Francis slept in the caves. I lay on the ground where he watched the stars. I prayed and prayed and listened and saw things and heard things.
Walking in to Rome that Good Friday felt less like coming to the natural culmination of a pilgrimage, and more like being startled back into the busy, driven world I had left on purpose to go hunting for the holy.
I thought of pilgrimage as an upward motion towards the holy. I thought I would just get more and more holy as I went, and then finally land in Holiness Central and be the most holy! That’s how life works, yeah? Onward and upward.
You kind of think that at the end of spiritual climbs, you get something, not lose something.
Probably I should have been more spiritually prepared for the shenanigans Francis had in store for me. Francis is a very downward kind of saint, and not interested in spiritually climbing at all.
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Francis never actually never went on a pilgrimage at all. "The Way of St. Francis” is just a set of trails and hikes connecting places he lived, places he stayed, and places where there are stories of him. Germans and Belgians and Italians and Americans have slowly cobbled The Way together over a few decades, as the global popularity of “pilgrimage” gained cultural traction. There are a handful of different "Pilgrimages of St Francis" because so many have happened organically over the years. It’s easy to get lost, because two signs will say St Francis' Way and they'll be pointing in different directions. (I guess you'd end up in the same place anyway, all roads leading to Rome and whatnot)
Francis did walk to Rome one time, but it wasn’t on pilgrimage. Unlike pilgrims who walked to Rome devotionally, Francis had to go to Rome because he got in trouble. The church leaders were concerned he was running a tiny cult in the woods without permission. The pope had heard about Francis' popularity, and demanded that Francis come and get officially permitted to continue his ministry. So Francis set off to convince the pope that he should be allowed to carry on helping the poor, tending the sick, and living in chosen poverty.
The pope was, by all accounts, planning to shut down Francis’ ministry. But he had a dream that night after he met with Francis. In his dream, he saw the basilica, the great church, crumbling and about to fall. In his dream, he saw Francis standing under the foundations of the church, holding it up.
The next day, he let Francis go back to the woods.
This is about Francis, but I also think a lot about that pope who was faithful to the vision God sent him. There was a lot of corruption in the church (as there is today, as there always is). It probably cost him something to be faithful to that dream, and he was faithful anyway.
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Francis had a vision, too — he received his call to ministry from a vision of Christ on the cross, telling him to “rebuild my church.” Francis responded to this vocation by selling everything he had (literally stripped naked in the middle of town to make a point to his wealthy father, Francis was so extra!), and moving in to the woods to care for the poor, and make star charts, and live with absolutely nothing, and talk to birds.
Francis rebuilt the Church just by doing something completely different than the Church was doing, going very small instead of going very big. He rejected violence, security, power, relevance, everything the Church was doing, and just — did something else. Did it completely! Did it all-consumingly! His life was a very firm, uncompromising “no” to what institutional Christianity was trying to sell him as the Gospel.
He didn’t have to say “no.” He just built a life that was, in itself, a whole, complete, faithful “no.”
It’s one type of prophetic act, to simply do another thing — fiercely and without compromise.
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I feel sometimes overwhelmed by how much there is to do, how much justice needs to happen, how many things need to be dismantled, to bring in shalom. I also feel overwhelmed by the ideas of “succeeding” or “winning”, in life and in religion, that get so loud. Lots of lies are coming at us fast, from the church and from the world, and church narratives can sound indistinguishable from world narratives. Institutional Christianity is not always selling us the Gospel. This isn’t historically new, but it’s always overwhelming when you notice it.
These big lies of the world and church feel like being caught in a blizzard. We can never be as strong or powerful or all-consuming as it. If we try to fight power with power, we're going to lose. It'll always be more powerful. But maybe if we drop low and burrow a little bit, get below the wind, get below where it will notice us, we can make a little hole and turn that hole into a tunnel. We can burrow along at our own pace, doing our own tiny thing, making this tiny corner of the world more safe and just and kind.
Fighting the wind is a lot of misery. But if we can get below it, and putter along one day at a time, very holy things can happen in the secret, carefully tended burrows of snow that are the secret, carefully tended places in our lives.
The church is always falling apart. She’s always crumbling right to her foundations — chasing prestige, chasing power disguised as political enforcement of holiness, chasing “relevance,” endorsing and celebrating violence, being all kinds of anti-Gospel in what she preaches and how she spends her money and what kinds of people she likes to be the figurehead. The church is crumbling daily, and has been crumbling daily for a long time.
And daily, the church is always being rebuilt. She is being rebuilt by hidden saints, people on the edges of the world that we’ll never know the names of, who have hunkered down in their corner of the earth and committed to serving that corner faithfully and well.
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I’d love to walk the Way of St Francis again. If I did, though, I think I’d do it topsy-turvy. I’d like to fly in to Rome, and then walk the trail in reverse, going from the city to all the hidden, cozy St. Francis sites. I think it’d be nice to do a backwards pilgrimage. It feels a bit more Francisy, and Jesusy, to flip it all on its head. Maybe one day I can try it again.