Everything You Knew is Wrong

When I studied in France years ago, I lived in an attic maid’s room and took meals with a family who lived in a small apartment in a nice neighborhood. The family rented a room within their apartment to another student, an Evangelical my own age from Arkansas, and we all often had dinner together. The family forbade us to speak English to each other in the house, and we often had very deep and fascinating conversations over dinner, even with our slightly mangled French. Nicole’s hadn’t studied French for very long, only five semesters or so, and her language skills were weaker than mine.

Our host family were indifferently Catholic, perhaps practicing a little more than most French people. I was lapsed at the time; I think I attended Mass two or three times in the six months I lived there, but visited dozens of interesting churches. The other student–I’ll call her Nicole here–attended small non-denominational churches, many run by expats, in Paris. Sometime that spring, she heard about an organized pilgrimage to the cathedral at Chartres. She had never visited that cathedral, and made a note of the meeting time and place, deciding to go.

Now, Chartres is a spectacular cathedral, and an old, old traditional pilgrimage site. As Nicole reached the gathering site around dawn, she noticed that other people had large backpacks and other camping gear. She didn’t pay much attention to this until the group of people started to move. She assumed that they were moving to buses…or to a train station….to some sort of motorized transport.

They were not. This was a traditional pilgrimage, and it was on foot. Nicole realized this too late, traveling with only the spring clothes she was wearing and her school bag.

I think that the trip she was part of was the Notre-Dame de Chrétienté Pentecost pilgrimage that happens every year, and that she had received bad information about the nature of the trip. (Here’s another article about the Notre-Dame pilgrimage, which sounds fascinating.) They had traveled outside of the city before she realized what was truly going on.

She decided to continue with the trip. She kept to herself and was too shy and embarrassed to ask her traveling companions for help or for food. Some people may have shared water or snacks with her, but she traveled without meals. When it came time to sleep, she separated from the group and slept on the ground with no blankets. She had decided early on to make this a true pilgrimage of her body and her spirit, and though I don’t think she framed it in quite those terms, to unite her suffering with that of Jesus on the cross. She did not tell the other pilgrims how she was suffering, and as she told us about her pilgrimage trip, she was modest and matter-of-fact, not seeking sympathy or pity.

I’ve tried very hard to forget most things that happened to me during that part of my life, but this story that she told at the dinner table has stuck with me. Her suffering in silence, determination to finish the trip without complaining, and ability to view a disaster as a spiritual learning experience have stuck with me.

It reminds me of a lot of adventures we have in this life–things we never would have started if we had realized beforehand how difficult they would be.