On a Monday morning last month, I woke up early, packed my bags, and my wife dropped me off at the airport. For the next two weeks, I was going to be on pilgrimage to Rome with the senior students from the Chesterton Academy. I arrived to the group collecting inside the terminal. We took roll call and headed over to the check-in for our flight. Flight canceled. No alternate options.
After half an hour at the service desk, we finally had an alternate plan routed ... eight hours later. I called my long-suffering wife and she returned to pick me up. Later in the afternoon, we returned for our second try. This time we needed to fly to Denver (opposite direction for us from Rome) and then catch a flight the next morning to Frankfurt and then on to Rome. Sleepless and exhausted, we made it to Frankfurt a full day later. There, we were told that we were never booked onto the Rome flight and could only re-book for a flight five hours later.
Five extra hours in an airport with a large group of sleep-deprived and yet strangely energetic teenagers. They handled the situation better than me, actually. They were champs. I felt and looked like a zombie. When we arrived in Rome, our pilgrimage leader asked on the bus ride into the city if I wanted to lead the group in prayer. I looked at her with incomprehension. That’s how tired I was.
After recovering a bit, I reflected on the exhaustion of being a pilgrim -- all the inconvenience and expense and tiredness. Before modern transportation, pilgrims walked on foot or took dangerous journeys by sea. I’m sure that by the time they arrived in Rome, footsore and hungry, to take in the glittering facade of St. Mary Major, it would have seemed like an enchanted, golden New Jerusalem. A study in contrasts, the sight must have been overwhelming.
Immensely tiring
These days, pilgrimages are much easier. Modern flight is a marvel, almost a miracle of convenience and speed. You get in a machine and emerge a handful of hours later on the other side of the world. But still, the experience of navigating airport drop-offs, luggage, getting through metal detectors and other security, delayed flights, canceled flights, lack of sleep ... it’s immensely tiring.
I once rode my bicycle hundreds of miles to the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Wisconsin. I loved the physical difficulty of the trip. I loved making one, final push up the hill to the shrine itself. After that, it felt like I had, somehow, engaged in an attitude of fasting before a feast. The tiredness of the journey made the joy of the destination so much stronger. It’s similar to how a mountain view is that much more beautiful if you hike up rather than drive.
To get to Rome, there’s no route by foot or bike for us in America, so the transatlantic leap is made in the comfort of an airplane seat. The inconveniences are nevertheless real. We got in almost two full days after our planned arrival, stressed out, exhausted, and surviving on a diet of airport food. I was silently lamenting the wasted time sitting around in airports that we had planned to be in Rome -- when it occurred to me that God was giving us an opportunity. We were being given the chance, in a small way, to suffer on our way to Rome.
A pilgrimage works best when there is inconvenience. Pilgrims benefit from weary feet and long days. Complaining about it would rob the journey of its value. Hilaire Belloc, who was known for going on long, difficult pilgrimages notes that the whole point is to unchain ourselves from the usual comforts of life in search of spiritual transformation, writing, “I will see all I can of men and things; for anything great and worthy is but an ordinary thing transfigured.”
For him, the whole experience was included. He valued not only the destination but the journey itself. “I will visit the grave of a saint,” he writes, “... but on my way I wish to do something a little difficult to show at what a price I hold communion with his resting-place.”
It’s a small price to pay, he says, and it allows us to participate in a way that changes the trip from mere tourism into a transformative experience. Through suffering, every part of the trip is changed, every part is to be valued. Even sitting in an airport terminal for 10 hours is spiritually illuminating.
Meant to jar us ... like life does
Belloc sought out the most troublesome, difficult path he could on his walking pilgrimages, saying that the experience is meant to “jar us in some way,” disrupting our illusions of strength, bringing us to some acknowledgment of weakness, and thus preparing us to receive grace. I almost think that, if the journey had been too easy and convenient, I would have missed out. I needed to be brought to the brink of boredom and complaint to realize just how fragile I am. I cannot put up with lack of sleep and boredom for even two days before I become grumpy, and now I know I still have a long way to travel and a lot of grace yet to be received. I need it all.
The revelation of my neediness was precisely what allowed me, once we finally made it, to drop to my knees in exhaustion in the holy places of Rome. Our Lord was a pilgrim to the Cross. Saints Peter and Paul were pilgrims to martyrdom. Perhaps I can be, in my humble and inadequate way, a pilgrim who has learned to die just a little bit more to his own pretensions, a tired and grateful man who will, from now on, rely more on God.
