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

Men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty waves of the sea, the broad tide of rivers, the vast compass of the ocean, the circular motion of the stars, and yet they pass over the mystery of themselves without a thought.” We are spiritual beings. But for many of us, malnutrition of the soul is a plague of modern life.

Napoleon rarely marched off to battle without hundreds of cases of Moët & Chandon in tow. “I drink champagne when I win,” he said, “and I drink champagne when I lose.

Oh, for the pre-Twitter days, when it took something more than a word fart by a president who never opens a book to turn the world upside down.

He [i.e., Augustine] asked the right questions. But some of his answers do not fit in a world that is so much more than sorrow and penance, more than denial, more than predestined awfulness or salvation, a world capable of producing joy and wonder in its everyday details. And those joys and wonders are not forbidden fruits— otherwise why would they be so abundant? To reject the "pleasure, beauty, and truth" that can be found in creation, as Augustine said he had to do in order to understand the divine, is not an argument for God. It's an argument against God.

As well, she [i.e., Joan of Arc] is the only person ever condemned to death for heresy by the same faith that made her a saint—evidence of the deep bewilderment about women in a church run by men.

In his preaching, Christ condemned adulterous behavior, but otherwise said nothing in any of the four Gospels about whom you could love, or how you could love. He said nothing about sex between people of the same gender. He said nothing about the superiority of abstinence over experience, nothing about the who and how of coupling, the timing of when to have children and when to practice birth control, all the forbidden sex later codified in exhaustive detail by celibate men.

I'll take the advice of Labre, the patron saint of wandering souls, who grew up not far from here: ‘There is no way. The way is made by walking.

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 church in droves. And it’s no small part of my struggle as I step into the pilgrim realm.

We are spiritual beings. But for many of us, malnutrition of the soul is a plague of modern life.

I can see Saint-Omer on a rise above the thinnest veil of dew, and beyond-- I can see for miles and miles. Off in the immediate forever, the days have no past, no future, only present, only the moment.

It is not fitting, when one is in God's service, to have a gloomy face or a chilling look

Poverty is the ultimate freedom. You can't rob someone who has no possessions. You can't insult a person without pride.

Start by doing what is necessary, then do what is possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible.

The audacity. Not only was she (Joan of Arc) a peasant girl, unschooled and clueless in the ways of power, class and the military strategy, weaponry, the mechanics of a siege, but was determined to go into battle. What she had was courage.

He who opens a school door closes a prison.” “All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.” “It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live.” “Death has revelations: the great sorrows which open the heart, open the mind as well. . . . As for me, I have faith. I believe in a future life. How could I do otherwise? My daughter was a soul. I saw this soul. I touched it.

An apple that hasn't experienced the hard times of cold is flat, tasteless, bland. But an apple that's hung in the hundred-degree temperatures of day and held through the thirty-five-degree nips of night is a fruit with experience. Cold helps to bring out the acid, which makes an apple tart. Color is painted by warmth.

Keep your ears open. You know what the first word of the holy rule of Saint Benedict is? Listen.

The only difference between a saint and a sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.

Religion is fable. Yes, a story! Poetic. Universal. And I would start in about faith, which by its very nature can never be proven, and that the foundational narratives of most religious

Observing that his penis had a mind of its own — "sometimes it refuses to act when the mind wills, while often it acts against his will" — led Augustine to theorize that we were born flawed.

Nearly seven in ten Americans are still Christian. But if White Anglo-Saxon Protestants were indeed the rootstock of the United States, then the mother ground is nearly barren. What's happening is a mass exodus, particularly among the young: 71 percent of people aged eighteen to twenty-four say they have no religion.

I don't expect a miracle cure, but I have found that wishing for one is the most humbling form of prayer.

The main social media platforms have been weaponized to sow confusion and turn people against one another. Mass murder has come with misinformation. There’s a community for every viper’s pit of falsehoods on the world wide web.

Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.