Thursday, August 05, 2010

Another pilgrim

Well, I've been home over a week, and now my nieces are here visiting, so I expect to have more adventures to share, but there are some untold Italian adventures I want to post.

I realized that I failed to tell the story of Ann, the pilgrim I met in Assisi, who was walking from Rome to Jerusalem. Side note: this is one of the joys of the hostel experience. Ann and I (and others) had breakfast together in the hostel the morning I left Assisi. Just a little of her story: she had grown up Catholic (in the UK), but had outgrown the faith by the time she was 15. She lived the next 35 years or so of her life in what she now calls misery. She said she had everything she thought she wanted, but she was never happy. Then, as a total unbeliever, she got a sudden and certain sense that she was to make the Santiago pilgrimage. She did. She rediscovered her faith and has never been happier. But God keeps telling her where to walk. She walked from London to Rome, and now she is on her way to Jerusalem. I found her pretty inspiring.

She put my own pilgrim-ing in perspective. Though I tried (cautioned by a friend of mine) to always remember the holiness of the places I visited and be more pilgrim than tourist, I know that I was both, at best. And here was a true pilgrim, driven by vision and the need to answer a call. Still, I was very glad to have my pilgrimage put in perspective in this way.


1 comment:

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