A Pilgrimage to Eternity:
From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith

By Timothy Egan, 382 pages, Viking, 2018
Reviewed by Gary Davenport, April 17, 2020 (Janet Cleveland's 2022 review appears below)

I have read a couple of Mr. Egan's books and this is arguably his best effort. He is a man looking for spirituality in the throws of his mother dying and his sister-in-law suffering through stage 4 cancer. Wait, I can feel you on the brink of not reading further particularly in light of our current crisis. Fear not, this book is educational, funny, heartfelt and just a great account of a hike from Canterbury to Rome, the ancient Via Francigena pilgrimage route, in part to seek audience with Pope Francis who is mired in the great desolation of the Catholic Church. But in larger part, it is about the present state of religion in secular Europe ( in England now only 50 % of the people believe in God and the country has a Ministry of Loneliness) and his quest to seek spirituality. Mr. Egan makes no bones about it, he has lost his way a bit and is looking for a "stiff shot of spirituality with no bullshit".

Mr. Egan is a superb writer with a deep curiosity of how we got to where we are on the landscape of faith and religion. Spurred on by his dying mother, a devout Catholic, who says on her death bed that she just doesn't feel it, he takes off on the journey of the Via Francigena, a trail of some 1200 miles through England, France, Switzerland and Italy dating to 990 AD. He encounters places on the journey that bring to life Joan of Arc, St Francis of Assisi and my favorite, Sigeric the Serious, and many others.

Mr. Egan's wife, son and daughter join him on legs of the trek and the give and take between is good stuff. The people, lodging , meals and blisters he experiences are worth the price of admission alone but there is much more here. You are left to decide if religion at the end of the day has been worth the trouble and whether spirituality is attainable these days.

A very difficult part of the book is the account of the abuse visited upon Mr. Egan's brother and friend by a pedophile priest. Some solace seemed to be taken by the Pope's words "Never yield to negativity. Keep your eyes open to beauty all around you. If sitting get up and go. If boredom paralyses you fill your life with good works. You must always forgive."

The reader must decide whether Mr. Egan found what he was seeking on the journey. A clue, "I will never look at a thunderstorm the same way or hike without blister medication."

Seems he may have found what he was looking for. Can't recommend it more.

Reviewed by Janet Cleveland, December 18, 2022

If “joust” hadn’t been a Wordle winner, this review of “A Pilgrimage to Eternity” might never have been written.

I had the answer in two tries to The New York Times’ daily game in which players have six guesses to determine the five-letter word of the day. Then I checked in with Gregg Herrington and Vanessa McVay, fellow Wordle travelers and former colleagues at The Columbian newspaper, to share results.

Gregg wanted to know how I arrived at “joust” so quickly.

“I’m stuck in medieval times,” I wrote back, “and I just finished Timothy Egan’s ‘A Pilgrimage to Eternity,’” in which he chronicles his 1,100-mile trip, almost all of it on foot, in 2017 from Canterbury, through France, across the Alps and into Rome on the Via Francigena. No walk for wimps, the trail climbs to 8,114 feet at Great St. Bernard Pass, where the same-named dogs have run of the summit.

I went on to summarize the book, citing Egan’s visits to cathedrals, small hotels, monasteries, vineyards, restaurants and battlefields. I suffered with the pain he carried as his Los Angeles-based sister-in-law was dying of cancer. I laughed at his conversations with his adult kids when they joined him on the trail, and I admired the love he shared with wife, Joni Balter, who

accompanied him on the last leg of the trip into Rome.

“There’s barely a village along the way that has not played host to some life-changing event, a cathedral stairway that has not been trod by martyrs, madmen, or monarchs,” Egan writes of the 1,000-year-old Via Francigena.

I had the bones of a review.

Egan grew up in Spokane in an Irish-Catholic family of seven kids. They lived “within a Frisbee toss” of the church, and he worked his way through Gonzaga Prep by washing dishes for the Jesuits.

His youngest brother left the church, “nearly destroyed” by the still-unresolved, sickening cleric-abuse crisis, but a sister said she was saved by God after her teen-age son was shot and killed. Racked with brain cancer and on her deathbed, his devout mother said, “I’m not sure anymore. I don’t know what to believe or what’s ahead.”

With that, Egan was ready for what he calls a “stiff-shot of no-bullshit spirituality.” He says he is no longer “comfortable in the squishy middle,” and he needs this pilgrimage to settle “what I believe or admit what I don’t.”

That’s a towering challenge for anyone — not just a skeptical, questioning, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who spent a summer as a University of Washington intern at The Columbian in the late 1970s.

So his journey begins. Our traveler is on the London Underground, heading to the Cockfosters stop. Cockfosters? “Contain the snickering,” he tells himself. You are supposed to be in pilgrim mode. Yes, the lofty search for spirituality and meaning begins with juvenile humor. He has my attention.

But it doesn’t take long for Egan to react to massive cruelties inflicted on humankind in the name of religion.

At his first stop in Canterbury, he recounts the brutal, bloody murder of St. Thomas Becket at the hands of knights who were more than happy to answer Henry II’s question: “Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?” That was the murder of one man, horrifying, yes, but not on the scale of crimes to come.

Egan collects his “passport stamp” at Canterbury and notes that the giftshop doesn’t sell Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales.” Too bawdy, says the clerk. Egan will continue to collect the stamps all along the Via Francigena until he gets to Rome, where he will get the Vatican seal of the Testimonium, and, he hopes, meet Pope Francis I and ask some heavy-duty questions.

But now it’s on to Calais, France, where an English king once tried to starve the inhabitants into submission during the Hundred Years War (1337-1453). Misery still lurks nearby with Muslim migrants being systematically displaced as the French government bulldozes their sandlot, “the Jungle.” Some citizens demonstrate for evictions and a hardline, saying they are there to protect “French identity,” even as Secours Catholique tries to distribute food and clothes to the scattered, terrified refugees. Fights break out over the showers. Egan is horrified. Isn’t feeding and clothing the least among us a given, according to Jesus?

The atrocities he condemns in the name of religion grow: the Crusades, massacres of French Protestants, persecutions of Jews, millions wiped out during the Great War. (Christian against Christian. How do you explain that?)

“This paradox — how a belief founded on a gospel of love could cause so much pain — is a big reason why people are leaving the pews in droves,” Egan writes. “And it’s no small part of my struggle as I step into the pilgrim realm.”

But Egan has a personal, more intense battle to reconcile: the priest-abuse crisis that vile men and their bishops perpetrated on children. The scandal probably reaches back for decades, probably centuries, but the past 25 years have exposed vivid details of wrongdoing of the most heinous kind — sexual crimes against innocent, helpless children under the control of trusted and

even revered adults.

Egan’s youngest brother said he wasn’t molested, but his best friend was, starting at age 11. Years later, when former parish priest Patrick O’Donnell’s rapes and sexual abuse came to light and Catholics in the Spokane Diocese learned that he was transferred to parish after parish, this friend threw himself in front of a train. Whether Egan can forgive the institutional church is left

open. His mother did so with reservations, but his brother could not.

“I’m starting to doubt whether even the most reform-minded leader can do anything about this scourge. If not, why take another step in Rome’s direction?” Egan writes.

Our pilgrim doesn’t settle anything, or at least he doesn’t make it explicit. He doesn’t get to question the pope. But he does inspire those who read his book (and metaphorically accompany him) to do some searching — soul or otherwise. That’s but one gift from Timothy Egan.

Another is writing that makes readers laugh, cry and want more. I’ll never look on a foot blister again without thinking of the inflamed, oozing sacs of blood and goo he endured while crossing the Alps. (He had to resort to renting a car and taking a train for a couple of short hauls. His justification? Cars and trains were OK as long as wheels stay grounded.)

And if there’s another Egan book in his career? I’m all in.

— Gregg Herrington contributed to this review