A most unusual Lenten pilgrimage with Hilaire Belloc

Chronically short of money, his feet swollen and angry, the sole of his boot flapping in the dust of the Tuscan backroads, Hilaire Belloc seems to have no concept whatsoever of how a pilgrimage is supposed to work. Granted, he managed to tramp some 700 miles from his childhood village in France all the way to Rome, but most of his recollections of his time on the road are about the wine he drank and eccentric countryfolk he met while fording unfordable rivers and climbing unclimbable mountains. It really is a most unusual pilgrimage.

All this is recorded in his travel memoir, The Path to Rome. Os Justi Press recently reprinted it, including a new introductory essay by Joseph Pearce and Belloc’s original sketches he made while traveling (a stone arch he liked, a field, hand-drawn maps, etc).

I was thrilled to see the reprint because I’ve always wanted to read The Path to Rome, which is widely considered one of Belloc’s best books. This is the perfect time since it’s a jubilee year during which we’re encouraged to place ourselves onto a pilgrimage of hope. What better time to make a literary a pilgrimage to Rome?

I’ve been writing recently on Lent as a pilgrimage of hope, so the first direction my mind took me with Belloc’s book was to read it as a Lenten journey. Seeing as how he explicitly sets his goal as making it to Rome on June 29 for the feast of Ss. Peter and Paul, which is well after Easter, it isn’t a Lenten memoir. But with its focus on physical penance and spiritual growth, it kind of is a Lenten memoir. Much in the same way, it isn’t exactly a travelogue, neither is it a sustained theological reflection, and it isn’t even quite a journal – it’s all of those.

The Path to Rome is a delightfully eccentric read.

The Path to Rome is a delightfully eccentric read. It all begins when he sees his old childhood church renovated and made new again. “One’s native place,” he writes, “is the shell of one’s soul, and one’s church is the kernel of that nut.”

If we think of ourselves as seeds of a great flowering tree, our native place is the container that protects and nourishes us in infancy, and our faith is the sustenance by which we grow. This is why we love the parishes of our youth so much, and why Belloc is so pleased to see his old parish doing well. He is reminded of how much that place has meant to him. He is inspired. He is suddenly struck with the desire to undertake a great pilgrimage. He desires to stretch his legs, to suffer and strive. His childhood home continues to nourish his growth.

So he goes into the church and there, before the statue of Our Lady, he makes a series of vows. He will walk unassisted, by the straightest path, to Rome for the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul. He will not cheat and ride on any wheeled thing – no trains, carts, or bicycles. He will eschew the big cities and comfortable beds.

Essentially, his vows make clear that he is not a tourist taking in the sights. He wants to feel his feet throbbing and the rain dripping through his hair. He wants to breathe the cold air of the Alps and endure heat on the plains of Italy. He has been inspired by his childhood parish to get to Rome. He goes from home to Home.

He sets out for his true Home because he knows that to love this world is to journey out of it.

As Pearce points out in the foreword, there’s a theology of place implicit in the way Belloc moves through his pilgrimage. He sets out for his true Home because he knows that to love this world is to journey out of it. We carry the weight of our past places and homes with us, so the journey is never easy, but as we make our way forward (or perhaps a better turn of phrase is to say that we “blunder forward”), we carry all that we love with us.

Personally, I would never want to put down the weight. The people and places that have made me who I am are precisely the ones I want along for the journey. This world is so lovely I want to drag it all up the sacred mountain with me and show my Savior everything I love and introduce to him everyone I love.

Isn’t this what it means to participate in Our Lord’s redemption of the world? To carry the weight with us?

I digress, though, because as Belloc finds out, the effort isn’t so easy. One by one he breaks all his vows save one. The main one, to make it to Rome for the feast, this one he keeps. This is the most important one. It doesn’t matter that a snowstorm turned him back from summiting a high pass in the Alps, or that he almost ran out of food several times with literally no plan for how to get more, or that he took shortcuts that ended up being terrible misadventures. He always kept going. This is what a pilgrimage is all about, especially a Lenten pilgrimage defined by hope. We never give up in the face of failure, rejection, or frailty.

The one secret trick to making a good pilgrimage is simply to begin.

The one secret trick to making a good pilgrimage is simply to begin. And once started, don’t stop. For Belloc, making a beginning is the most difficult part of the whole endeavor. He compares it to beginning to write his book, and how the ending is often contained already in the beginning. This is what makes the beginning so daunting; we know that we must end as we begin so we must begin well and in the right direction. Finally, though, the effort must be attempted or not at all. “In the name of all decent, common, and homely thing,” says an exasperated Belloc to himself, “why not begin and have done with it?”

Finally, after much delay, Belloc begins to tell the story of the pilgrimage. Only to immediately fall into a reminiscence of his youth. The reader is going backwards with him! This is a mystery, he muses, the way the places of our past retain a place within us. “The songs and landscapes and faces,” carried in our memory provide some of the highest pleasures of which Belloc can conceive. He’s well aware that many wiser than he preach the virtues of complete detachment of the soul from the physical world, but this doctrine, he says, “I cannot understand it at all.”

Perhaps the great mystics are able to move through the world in a different manner than you and I, but we are called to our specific pilgrimages. These pilgrimages are defined, in part, by those we carry with us, those for whom we intercede and suffer and pray.

A pilgrimage is hard, but Belloc, it turns out, knows exactly what he’s doing. So we find ourselves drawn into his journey, and every once in a while, we find ourselves on a scenic overlook with him outside some small village and the weight of life dissipates; “The fire-flies darted in the depths of vineyards and of trees below; then the noise of the grasshoppers brought back suddenly the gardens of home, and whatever benediction surrounds our childhood. Some promise of eternal pleasures and of rest deserved …”

Every pilgrimage faithfully begun is brought to a happy conclusion, and at the end all that is heavy shall be lifted.

Read more:Truth and life on the Way: We are all pilgrims, sometimes despite ourselves

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