Baptism of our Lord

Baptism of our Lord (c)1981 Lance Lovelette 

 

A Pilgrimage to Eternity

 

 A Pilgrimage to Eternity

By Timothy Egan

 

“And men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty waves of the sea, the broad tides of rivers, the compass of the ocean, and the circuits of the stars, yet pass over the mystery of themselves without a thought.”

–St. Augustine

 

“I was told I could find the saint’s relics at the comparatively small Catholic church of St. Thomas of Canterbury. The sacred scraps are behind glass about the altar in the Martyr’s Chapel. One object is a piece of cloth from his clerical vestment. The other is a bone chip, wrapped in jewels, though there is no explanation of what part of Becket’s frame this came from. The skeletal nugget could be anyone’s, and the cloth could be a fraud as well. In this dark and lonely chapel in Canterbury’s old town, you have to accept on faith that the two holiest items did indeed belong to Thomas Becket. I sit and take in what aura there is, the years and hopes imbued in these average looking objects. I think of all the people with tumorous bellies or sightless eyes, pleading, Sadly, I am not feeling anything. But then, I didn't ask for anything. Not just yet…” Tim Egan APTE p. 18

 

We do not have all the answers. We are on a spiritual journey. We look to Scriptures, reason and tradition to help us on our way. Whoever you are, we offer you a space to draw nearer to God and with us. –Sign in St. Martins, Canterbury. APTE p. 19

 

To enter the Kingdom of Heaven, one must allow himself to be amazed. In our relationship with God, in prayer, do we allow ourselves to be amazed or do we think that prayer is talking to God like a parrot? Do we let ourselves be surprised? Because the encounter with the Lord is always a living encounter, not an encounter at a museum.

–Pope Francis

 

The greatest danger is not that we aim too high and miss it, but that we aim too low and reach it.

 –Michelangelo

 

Hope guides me.

–Petrarch

 

“I believe in the Resurrection, and I owe this sentiment to the Via Francigena. I’d been moving in this direction for a month or so, even as I grew more and more disgusted with the powerful custodian of this life-affirming event. The evidence from the first century, the many people who shower they had seen the risen Christ and chose death rather than recanting, is a compelling argument–for who would die for a fraud? But what cinched it for me was something the young Lutheran minister in Geneva, Andy Willis, said about the message of Easter from Jesus, some that echoes Jewish sentiment on what happens after death: “Nothing can keep my love in a grave.” Tim Egan APTE p. 319.

 

Years ago when the desire to walk the Camino to Santiago was but a tiny seed, I came upon Timothy Egan’s A Pilgrimage to Eternity at a bookstore. I had noticed it was of the Via Francigena, the ancient pilgrimage route from Canterbury to Rome.  its subtitle is what caught my attention: from Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith. I didn’t purchase the book (my work schedule made it hard to read recreationally) but I was left with the desire to read it.

 

As I leave for Rome in less than two weeks, where I plan to walk the Via Francigena from Siena to Rome, I recently read the book. It is an engaging and intelligent adventure as Egan recounts his physical and interior pilgrimage on the VF, as he calls the Via Francigena. As a “lapsed” Irish Catholic, he slowly reveals his reasons for the pilgrimage: his desire to reassess the faith in which he was raised and its relevance for a contemporary man. As he walks, he jostles the evidence for the opposing positions: how the Catholic church has brought value and benefits to the world versus the scandals and inhumanities it has committed in the name of Christ. He acknowledges the great achievements of the Church (the salvaging of knowledge and culture by the monasteries at the fall of Rome, the hospices for travelers, the fomentation of culture), while countering them with the failings of the Church (the Crusades, the Catholic-Protestant religious wars, the African slave trade, the Inquisition, the burning of heretics, the Holocaust, the genocide in Rwanda). In the cases of the great horrors, he lingers, as we also want to do, on where God was in the face of such suffering and evil. As a journalist educated in Jesuit schools, he understands the free will of humans, but it provides little comfort in the great horrors of the 20th century and how God could allow this to happen. Egan also calls to mind the Church’s reluctance to accept the advances of science, as when Galileo postulates contradicted the Church’s understanding of how the universe functioned. 

 

Egan also shares his family’s challenges with the Church as when his mother was asked by her parish priest and local bishop not to have a hysterectomy even though her doctor recommended it for her health. He also recounts his family's horrific experience with a pedophile priest and the lack of accountability by Church authorities to keep children and minors safe, and the lasting trauma it left in the lives of victims. 

 

As Egan travels, he fleshes out the lives of saints–Thomas Beckett, Augustine, Francis + Clare, Ignatius, and many other saints who are remembered along the VF–and their acts of love and altruism and generosity. He points out the popular piety and faith of many present Christians to continue to bring their pleas to God and his holy ones. Egan is not without his petition–his sister-in-law has cancer and his wife is moving heaven and earth to find a cure. But ultimately, Egan’s primary question is around the role of faith in God.

 

In the end he affirms his faith. He cites how early Christians were witnesses to Jesus’ resurrection and were willing to die for their faith. Certainly, there was something there. He also appreciates how present Christians live out the Gospel in helping their fellow man in contradiction to the prevailing culture and attitude, e.g., those to feed and shelter migrants who are presently unwanted in Western countries. He has a fond appreciation of the late Pope Francis, whose openness to migrants, scientists, agnostics, atheists, queer folk and those on the margins stand in stark contrast to the present science-skeptism and anti-immigration of the present US administration. Ultimately, he recognizes the need to forgive the many sins those in the Church have committed to his family and those through the ages. 

 

I appreciate the book as it describes well those Catholics whose parents were devout Catholics, who had an unwavering trust and faith in the Church and its teachings. While the following generation of Catholics desired to keep the faith of their forebears they were more educated, and more skeptical of the Church’s pronouncements and less defensive in regards to the failings and scandals of the Church. In some cases, these Catholics became more selective of the Church's teaching, “cafeteria Catholics” is a common derisive term. But I would venture to say that these Catholics are using their conscience (reason, current knowledge, and the rationale for the teaching) to come to discern whether a tenet should be followed. We are called to choose that which brings us life and leave what does not.  

 

As a life-long Catholic who is grateful for the faith given me by my parents, I have sought ot articulate and live the Gospel in a manner and in a language comprehensible to the contemporary person. One can see the Pascal Mystery in the cycle of life, from the clear example of the metamorphosis of the butterfly to all organisms who live out their life cycle giving life to the next generation of organisms. Life after death is present in the many memorial services of individuals whose love and actions continue to live out in the hearts and minds of those who remain. But ultimately, the belief in the Resurrection, perhaps the most difficult and the most central part of the Christian creed, is a mystery, a tenet based on faith. Fr. James Martin S.J. has stated, “One of the best explanations is that the Jesuits explain the Church to the world and the world to the Church.” I would say that explaining the Catholic beliefs to the contemporary person is an ongoing personal vocation; it starts in the interior reflection with God and is evangelized in word and action.

The Key To Making A Resolution Stick

 The Key To Making A Resolution Stick

True healing requires integration, not rejection

Sweet Community,

Throughout the past years, I have written extensively about the vast changes I experienced in myself immediately after my cancer diagnosis. Even amidst what I formerly imagined might be the most turbulent experience I’d ever face, life began to flow freely. A new sense of peace found me—not in the absence of hardship, but in ceasing to resist it, in learning to meet life as it is.

The change was so profound that, after a lifetime of thinking of myself as the most nostalgic person in the world, I stopped experiencing nostalgia. Where I once pined for the “good old days,” I found myself almost never reaching backward in time. I couldn’t long for something better because I had never experienced anything better than living with a wide open, unguarded heart.

It was such an enormous shift that even during the hardest days of cancer, I would walk around thinking, Thank goodness. Thank goodness for this healing. It sounds strange, I’m sure, but I was wildly more joyful. Opening my eyes every morning felt like opening a gift. In that place, a negative social media comment couldn’t impact me. I wasn’t even bothered when my dentist removed the wrong tooth! I became a more loving partner and a far more compassionate friend to myself. Even on the hardest days after chemo, I turned my kitchen into a dance floor. For the first time, I befriended the birds and squirrels in my yard. I felt at home in the world.

When I spoke to my friend Ethel about how grateful I was for this healing, she was happy of course, but cautioned me not to think of cancer as the well from which my wishes came true—lest I unconsciously send a message to my body that illness was welcome in my life. I was grateful for Ethel’s insight, and her words reminded me of something the poet Franny Choi once wrote: “I want the clarity of catastrophe but not the catastrophe. Like everyone else, I want a storm I can dance in. I want an excuse to change my life.”

As the new year approaches, many people are considering how to change their lives. How to change themselves. While the world lists its many resolutions to be “better” than the year before, I want to share one of the most important lessons I’ve learned from changing a lot in a very brief amount of time:

The more we change, the more we must commit to loving the people we were before we changed. The most transformative moment in my journey these past years was realizing that New Me wasn’t extending love to Old Me. This realization hit me in the middle of the night. I woke up and saw that I didn’t just dislike Old Me—I was terrified of Old Me. I feared returning to being anxious, blaming, defensive, and closed off. I hated the idea of returning to a life filled with chronic dissatisfaction, bending to the weight of others’ judgments, and chasing the approval of the world.

That night, I began to understand something profoundly powerful: in rejecting who I had been, in pushing that person away, I was caught in a resistance that would do nothing but recreate Old Me. The harder I tried to sever ties with the person I had been, the more I found myself embodying that self. Only when I began to offer Old Me compassion, kindness, and love did a more permeating sense of freedom begin to emerge. When we hate ourselves, we suck all of the air and light out of the room of our being. And nothing can grow without air and light. My therapist says that shame is the least energized, least alive state we will ever experience. But love and acceptance are accelerants for growth.

As I reflect on this journey, I see that true healing requires integration, not rejection. The path to becoming more open doesn’t lie in casting aside the versions of ourselves we no longer wish to be. It lies in honoring them, thanking them, and embracing them with tenderness. Each version of us is a stepping stone, a necessary chapter in the unfolding story of who we are.

So, as we stand on the brink of a new year, let us resolve to love who we have been. In loving those people, I trust we will all root ourselves more gracefully in who we are becoming.

See ya next year!

Love, 

Andrea Gibson

A List of Things I Love

"Dog" by www.metaphoricalplatypus.com is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

A List of Things I Love

I love. That could be the end of the sentence, but I love sentences. I love words huddled together like strangers trying to survive a frigid night. I love rock sculptures built in windstorms. I love sandcastles crafted inches from the waves.

I love the drama of an 80’s ballad. I love grandparents holding hands in rocking chairs on the porches of old houses in northern Maine. I love penguins, though I’ve never met one. I love how shocked I was when I realized my Superman cape couldn’t lift me into the sky. I love that all these decades later, I can still be that exact same kind of surprised.

I love cucumbers straight from the garden. I love old typewriters even if they don’t work. I love imagining I am a bird who is imagining what it’s like to be human in the dead of winter, wearing an upside-down nest made of yarn atop the head. I love wishing wells and the dreams that fill them.

I love scared rescue dogs who can’t live in homes with small children. I love the kids in junior high talent contests who always forget their lines. I love the nervous love in their parents’ chests. I love mother starlings racing home to their babies’ open and rowdy beaks. I love the perfect smiles of people with crooked teeth.

I love daydreaming about the pep talks butterflies give to depressed caterpillars. I love that bumblebees taste with their feet. I love when it’s so cold out I can walk atop the sparkling snow. I love tiny libraries. I love stained glass windows in people’s homes.

I love how my partner takes karaoke far too seriously. I love my very first crush in the 4th grade, wherever he is, whoever he became. I love phone booths in London. I love ketchup chips from Canada. I love Titan, Saturn’s largest moon.

I love the six perfect holes in my most worn pair of boots. I love that pigeons can recognize themselves in photographs. I love that laughter is more contagious than the flu. I love thank-you letters mailed to teachers twenty years after they graduate. I love the romance of merge signs.

I love watching people pull over on the side of the road to take pictures of a rainbow. I love that I can fix almost anything with shoelaces or duct tape. I love listening to my partner yell, “Andrea! Where did my shoelaces go this time!?” I love pointing out the window at our singing wind chime.

I love listening for the quietest notes of the loudest songs. I love carnivals in the parking lots of tiny towns. I love paper planes with love notes written inside. I love watching children realize that the seashells on the beach are free. I love the perfect contentment of a kite caught in a tree.

I love coffee shops on Saturday mornings. I love the kind kids who have hard lives. I love the mean kids who haven’t yet learned a better way to survive. I love that after chemotherapy, my straight hair grew back in curls. I love the tiny hurt that makes each pearl. I love trying to jump over puddles and failing.

I love that cows have best friends. I love that fleeting moment of annoyance while deep in writing a poem, someone interrupts to ask me to come look at the sunset. I love the instant that follows, when I recognize that to be a true poet, I must abandon every poem for every pink sky.

I love the pink sky and the sound of my grumpy neighbor opening his door at the same time that I do. I love both of us peeling off the husks of our minds to taste the sweetness of the world’s truth. I love what I have in common with people I have nothing in common with.

I love that my best friends kiss me on the forehead whenever I am sick. I love the baristas in fancy coffee shops who never ever smile. I love old diners with signs that say, “Stay A While.” I love the desert. I love the sea.

I love how much longer this list would be if the sunset were not, in this very second, calling me.

And I love all of you, friends, for caring about what I love. What are you loving today?

by Andrea Gibson 

dream

© 2025 Hector Viveros Lee

 Congratulations Robin on graduating from secondary school! Good luck in Art School!