The pilgrim’s road

On this very day, Easter Sunday last year, the late Pope Francis rose from his sick bed to bless the faithful from the loggia of St. Peter’s Square. They had been praying for him throughout his five-week hospital stay, and they rejoiced when they saw him. He had been suffering from double pneumonia and had missed all the liturgical celebrations of Holy Week.

The crowd became ecstatic when, a short time later, the beloved Pope unexpectedly came out for one last popemobile loop around the piazza. Battered by disease and still frail, Francis seemed to summon enough will to be with the faithful—in full awareness, one felt, that he was marking the end of his papacy. He died the following day, Easter Monday, exactly a year ago.

I kept thinking of that final gesture as perhaps his way of reliving Christ’s passion as he stood before Pilate. Ecce homo—Behold the man, the Roman governor told the crowd (John 19:5). Judge for yourselves. Francis had begun his papacy with a plea for the Church to leave its secure precincts and reach out to the peripheries.

This earned him fierce critics throughout his tenure. Many conservatives felt he was dangerously unraveling doctrines and traditions the Church had taken centuries to consolidate. He remained unfazed until the end. In a sense, his whole papacy was a refusal to let the institutional Church mistake its earthly achievements for the destination to which it was called.

At some point in our individual lives, we are similarly offered a chance to revisit how we have lived and the kind of person we have turned out to be. Perhaps no philosopher has framed this question in secular terms more strikingly than Nietzsche, who chose the same biblical phrase as the title of his last book: “Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is.” It is a short, arresting semi-autobiographical work—boastful and arrogant at first glance, but self-mocking and ironic in substance. The question it poses is not so different from Augustine’s: how much of one’s life is spent mistaking the way stations for the destination?

One need not be a philosopher to ask questions like this. Such moments of introspection come around one’s birthday, at the end of another year, in the solitude of a hospital room, or at Lenten retreats. When you are young, revisiting the past is secondary to a search for a better future. But past retirement, like I am, you look back primarily to connect the dots—to see what they mean in their totality, in the hope of finally encountering the self that did all of this.

Embarking on a 10-day pilgrimage walk along a portion of the Camino de Santiago two years ago, I had hoped to use the trip as an opportunity to behold my life as I might if writing a memoir. I don’t think I succeeded. I was constantly distracted: half of me playing tourist, always on the lookout for a good eating place or a picture-worthy scene, while the other half was enacting the ancient role of the Christian pilgrim. These, I realized, are two very different dispositions. The tourist seeks satisfaction at each stop; the pilgrim knows that every stop, however pleasant, is provisional. Augustine precisely warned against the earthly city’s most seductive offer: rest here, you have arrived.

At the end of the walk, I made a silent promise to return, better prepared for a “proper” pilgrimage, whatever that might mean. I made plans to walk the Portuguese stretch of the Camino in late spring this year—from Porto to Compostela, 225 kilometers in 11 days. I have been preparing with daily walks, rehearsing the pace and silence of that first experience.

But now the trip hangs in the balance. The flights I booked with my daughters require a stopover in Dubai, and Dubai now sits at the edge of a war nobody expected and nobody seems able to stop. I find myself in the odd position of a would-be pilgrim whose journey may be blocked—not by doubt, nor by an aging body, but by the geopolitical convulsions of the Middle East. The earthly city reasserts itself, as it always does, in both its modes: sometimes as disruption and sometimes as distraction.

The Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman once wrote that the pilgrim is the defining identity of the modern age. The pilgrim sacrifices the comfort of the present for the promise of arrival. Yet there is no assurance that the road chosen leads somewhere worth going, or that the sacrifices made will be redeemed at the end. Like Augustine before him, Bauman understood that the deeper danger for the modern pilgrim is not the blocked road but the ceaseless provision of substitute destinations that feel like fulfillment but are not.

At life’s end, I am coming to feel the full weight of Augustine’s quiet insistence: “We are pilgrims through time.” The earthly city will always do what it has always done: block some roads, or seduce the pilgrim with the comfortable illusion that they have already arrived.