In ‘A Pilgrimage to Eternity’, A Lapsed Catholic Flees the Squishy Middle
A review of ‘A Pilgrimage to Eternity’, by Timothy Egan.
This review was first published in The Tablet.
‘Lapsed but listening’ is how Timothy Egan, the novelist and New York Times columnist, describes his peculiar brand of Irish Catholicism. He was educated by Jesuits outside Seattle, Washington, and though he has fallen away from the Church of his youth, he finds he is ‘no longer comfortable in the squishy middle’. And so he resolves to make the ancient 1,200-mile journey from Canterbury to Rome: this, he is sure, will ‘force the issue’. ‘Until atheism can tell a story,’ he adds, ‘it will always have trouble packing a house.’
This is the premise of A Pilgrimage to Eternity, a book that is part-memoir, part-travel guide, part-history of Christian Europe. Egan’s reflections on the current state of the Church are the drumbeat to his journey ‘on foot, on two wheels, four wheels, or train’, during which he explores an admirably rich array of subjects. Each stop on the Via Francigena furnishes Egan with a reason to summarise 1,000 years or more in local history, often to the extent that the book begins to feel formulaic. But this impression lasts only as long as the time between one striking anecdote and the next, which is rarely long.
Egan’s reflections on the current state of the Church are the drumbeat to his journey ‘on foot, on two wheels, four wheels, or train’.
Egan does all this in a mostly cheerful and conversational way, and punctuates his reflections with brief and amusing descriptions of his exchanges with those he encounters. In a scene that might have been dreamt up by Wes Anderson, Egan speaks with an abbot in Wisque:
‘How are things in America?’
‘Troubled.’
‘Why is that?’
‘Trump.’
‘What’s wrong with him?’
‘Everything.’
‘I’ll show you to your room,’ the abbot says, satisfied.
There is an engaging subplot which concerns Egan’s efforts to secure an audience with Pope Francis, for whom, it is clear, he has a great deal of admiration. Using his journalistic credentials and a Jesuit contact in the US, he manages to get a message to the pontiff, in which he commends him for his support for refugees and dislike of banal consumerism. ‘He washes the feet of prisoners and the poor, shares meals with the homeless and refugees,’ he writes. ‘He withdraws his hand when people try to kiss his ring.’
There is an engaging subplot which concerns Egan’s efforts to secure an audience with Pope Francis, for whom, it is clear, he has a great deal of admiration
But there is also a deeply unhappy element to Egan’s book, which concerns his family’s experience, his mother’s and brother’s especially, of what it means to be a Catholic in the modern era. Egan’s devout mother held on to her faith and took comfort from it through a series of intensely trying experiences; his youngest brother, by contrast, ‘was nearly destroyed’ by a ruthless and predacious priest. He has had his back turned to the Church ever since.
Egan’s even-handed and honest account of his experience on this ancient pilgrim route is a deeply human one. It is left to the reader to decide whether he succeeds in penetrating his ‘fortress of reason’, though Egan does acknowledge that this ‘trail of ideas’, on which he hoped to ‘experience layers of time on consecrated ground’, contains ‘breadcrumbs of epiphany’. You suspect, in the end — even if you can’t quite prove it — that Egan has a lot of sympathy for the position taken by the Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. ‘We are not human beings having a spiritual experience,’ Teilhard wrote. ‘We are spiritual beings having a human experience.’
