SUNDAY, SEVENTEENTH WEEK

We have made our way to Finisterre, the end of the known world ’til 1493.

At sunset at 10pm we watched the sun sink into the sea.

Finis Terra. Deo gratias.

MONDAY

I am reading G.K. Chesterton’s ‘Life of St. Francis’. He is, I know, a much-acclaimed author. I find him rather dated. He seems somewhat pretentious, pompous and self-regarding but I agree with him in this: there is no point in just writing a biography of a medieval saint. The stories of St. Francis are so well known. Just repeating them again seems to have little point. They are more interesting as an allegory.

TUESDAY

This is the eight-hundredth anniversary of the birth of St. Francis. He is supposed to have walked the Camino of Santiago. I thought of him as I trudged those weary miles.

We went to the Franciscan church in Compostela to try and get some sort of certificate of our walk. We got to catch the start of a wedding instead.

WEDNESDAY

We got to the mountains at Combloux by 8:00 and in the twilight I decided to walk. I passed by the Augustinian house and walked into the chapel. The nuns, five of them, trooped in. I think they were a bit surprised to see me and they sang compline. Strange to be sitting in that modern room looking through the plate glass windows towards Mont Blanc listening to the familiar words sung in French, but a moment of stillness too and peace after an eleven hour drive.

THURSDAY: FEAST OF ST IGNATIUS LOYOLA

The nuns had told me mass was in the village church at 9. I walked there, Mont Blanc shrouded in the mist. It is difficult to follow every word in French but the essence is there, something about gathering the flock.

After I tramped up the mountain, then on a chair lift to the very top and walked back through the silent pine trees. It is very quiet here. I thought of the last time I was here, the snow falling off the bough and them lifting from the released weight.

FRIDAY

We drove across the flat hot north Italian plain for twelve hours ending up near Rijeka on the northern Adriatic coast.

I was dipping into G. K. Chesterton when driving as a passenger. For all his self-regard, his prayers are always littered with insights like this one – “Rossetti makes the remark somewhere, bitterly but with great truth, that the worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful and has nobody to thank.”

Is this fair? Cannot the atheist thank luck or fate or circumstance, but it is good to thank God. Does it do any harm?

SATURDAY

They have just built a new motorway in Croatia and one avoids the coast road, hurtling south through an extraordinarily empty landscape. It is more American than European. And there are great areas of unclaimed land, of slums.

Chesterton says that “the transition from the good man to the saint is a sort of revolution by which one for whom all things illustrate and illuminate God illustrates and illuminates all thought”.

It is rather like the reversal whereby a lover might say at first sight that a lady looked like a flower and say afterward that all flowers reminded him of this lady. So is all nature, beautiful in its grandeur diffused with God in God or as all nature a pointer to the work of God.