Pilgrim's Road

easy. I hadn’t found an open church in days, and was beginning to wonder if France had turned its back on Christianity altogether. The plump curé whom I eventually tracked down was anything but welcoming, and only grudgingly unlocked the impressive Benedictine church for me to take a quick look while he searched for his rubber stamp. Having found it, he applied it to my card with such haughty carelessness that the blue cameo image of a haloed figure was only an indistinct blur, and the name La Réole had to be written in by hand. There was no friendly addition of a ‘Bon Voyage ’ or ‘Priez pour nous’.
    The only food I managed to find was a pizza, which proved as expensive as a more typically French provincial meal would have been, and far less satisfying. It seemed strange that a fast-food café could flourish in a country so gastronomically gifted; but since every table was taken, I was clearly in the minority with my preferences.
    It occurred to me as I sat there sipping my coffee (which at least was typically French) that for someone who was following a pilgrimage, I was perhaps giving altogether too much thought to food and comfort. Was this, I wondered, because of the absence of open churches to provide a different focus for my travels? It must surely have been easier to keep the mind on more spiritual matters in earlier ages, with a daily mass, the possibility of hearing any or all of the six monastic offices, as well as the presence of other pilgrims? Because Latin was used in church services throughout Western Christendom, it provided pilgrims with their most familiar reference point among all the foreign tongues and strange customs they encountered along the way.
    But then religion and spirituality are not necessarily the same. Maybe the very abundance of religious observance produced a kind of mental inertia, or a weariness of spirit that, together with the selling of indulgences and other abuses of the Catholic Church, would eventually lead to the ‘Protest’ and the Protestant faith. And necessary though it surely was to end the scandals and rekindle a less worldly spirit in the Church, the trouble with the Protestant split was that it went on protesting and splitting off into ever more separate churches and sects, as it is still doing to this very day in America. The glory of the single indivisible Church of Christ might still be a religious concept, but it is no longer a tangible reality as it was for the medieval pilgrim.
    Where the medieval pilgrim knew only one immutable faith with which he could walk in security, the modern pilgrim is aware of half a dozen great world religions, as well as their endless shades of meaning and problems of interpretation. Monasteries had been non-existent on my trail, and the only church I had entered in the past few days, apart from the few moments in the huge vaulted expanse at La Réole, was a small apsed chapel in the middle of nowhere, a lonely neglected little building, furnished with a font shaped like a mortar and suitably decorated with scallop shells. Far more rivetting than the emblem of St James, however, had been the filigree curtain of spider webs behind the altar. Alight in golden sunshine streaming through the narrow lancet windows, it had made nature seem infinitely more attractive than mouldering stone. Could it be that this pilgrimage was turning me into a pagan, a mere worshipper of nature?
    Mulling over these thoughts in La Reole’s brash plastic pizza house, while in the square outside couples strolled casually about in that lovely hour at the end of the day when time itself seems to have slowed down and taken on a more mellow pace, I remembered that in St Luke’s Gospel, where the story of the road to Emmaus is told, it was at this same hour, when they were sitting down to eat, that two disciples of Jesus had recognised their Risen Lord in the stranger at table with them. He had been walking and talking with them all day, comforting them in their distress about the Crucifixion, but it was only in the simple act of the breaking of the bread that they saw him for who he truly was. And the moment they recognised him, he vanished.
    I remembered too that most of my best moments so far on this trip had had nothing to do with churches, but had been at times like this, when relaxed and expecting nothing I had suddenly become aware of a wider reality than my own narrow concerns. There was nothing in these experiences that I could put a name