I did not set out to live my life as a pilgrim; rather, my life was given to me as a pilgrimage. Every day is a part of the journey: the being there, the returning, the remembering. The truth is that we are all on pilgrimage, whether we see it or not. We are traveling each moment through time and space, always going forward, never going back—except in memory. But the memories, too, are part of the pilgrimage, and will be with us in the end.
J.R.R. Tolkien reminds us of the risks of this journey of life, putting in the mouth of Bilbo Baggins: “It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.” Tolkien knew that we are not the same again after we go on pilgrimage—our experiences become a part of us, for better and for worse. As Christians, we can trust in the Lord that He will always use our experience for the better in the long run. Each of our life pilgrimages are made up of little ones along the way. These sub-pilgrimages of our one long pilgrimage can be literal journeys when we travel from one physical place to another, but they also can be literary pilgrimages we experience through the mediation of books.
This spring and summer, I found myself immersed in a pilgrimage of sorts through the lives of writers. I already wrote about reading the spiritual biography of J.R.R. Tolkien. In June, I began reading a book by Paul Elie about Flannery O’Connor, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, and Walker Percy. It is titled after one of O’Connor’s short stories, The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage. I started this tetra-biography after going to the film Wildcat with Mark and two friends, who also happen to be readers (PAID subscribers!) of this Substack. The copy of Elie’s book belongs to these friends, which was promptly lent to me the same evening we saw the film.
My initial reason for reading the book was to compare the film to the historical details of O’Connor’s life. However, as I read the book, I found myself coming to a deeper appreciation and understanding of all four writers as individuals and also as people who have influenced me personally through their writings. I saw, as I think Paul Elie intended, that they were my fellow Catholic pilgrims and fellow Catholic writers. They have impacted my thought and my writing in ways that I have not yet fully explored. Elie has shown me that I am a part of the same family tree of American-Catholic writers, and that where I am on my journey of writing is a stage that Day, Merton, O’Connor, and Percy all went through. In his prologue, Elie has a relatable quotation from Percy who called the writing of novels a “strange paradox.” Percy said:
There’s no occupation in the universe that is lonelier, and that at the same time depends more radically on a community, a commonwealth of other writers. . . . As lonely as is the craft of writing, it is the most social of vocations. (p. xiv)
As I write this post, I am alone in my house, all my children at school, Mark on his campus preparing to teach a class. And ironically, I just had to interrupt my writing to open my front door and sign for a package sent by someone as a thank you gift to my husband. That somehow fits with the loneliness yet sociality of writing. I need to be alone (for the most part) to focus on writing. Or I at least need it quiet, so that the thoughts in my mind that swirl with the thoughts of the authors I have read can settle down and so that I can form them into words that come out through my fingertips onto the screen before me. I think that is what this Substack is all about for me, letting the writers I have read over the years and am currently reading walk beside me on my pilgrimage. Like a physical journey or pilgrimage, these writers and their work changes me and stays in my memory.
Dorothy Day
I first encountered Dorothy Day in high school, when a religion teacher showed us a film based on her life. During that same time, I volunteered with my youth group at the Catholic Worker House in North St. Louis. It was not until I was in early motherhood that I read her autobiography, The Long Loneliness, which moved me deeply at the time, helping me in the loneliness of suburban motherhood and my early attempts at blogging. I read her biography of St. Thérèse of Lisieux a few years ago in which Day reveals her initial struggle to embrace this saint who grew up in an upper-middle class home. But like we all learn from St. Thérèse, the Little Way of doing small things with love is a call within each of our own calls. Day was called to live the little way in her Catholic Worker movement where God lead her to use her gifts. I am called to live this little way, open to the movements of God’s call for me, in my vocation as a wife, mother, writer, editor, and member of my local community.
Thomas Merton
Then there is Thomas Merton. I first heard his name in college, when Mark’s friends would tease him about his love for Thomas Merton’s writings. Mark had just been on a retreat at Gethsemane Abbey the summer before I met him. And to this day, he says that Merton is someone to whom he deeply relates. I, personally, have only read Thomas Merton’s Seven Story Mountain, but even that single work impacted me in a significant way, helping me grow deeper in my spiritual life. Elie presented Merton’s journey through life beyond his entrance to the monastary and his struggle to be content in his monkhood while at the same time being asked through obedience to write to support the monastery. I relate to the impulse to always look for a new thing that seemed to penetrate Merton’s life, rather than to “stay in my cell” and live out my vocation as a desert father advised. In Merton’s struggles, we see a depth of human weakness, passion, and need for God.
Walker Percy
Walker Percy is one of those Catholic writers that students at Franciscan University of Steubenville say that every Catholic ought to read. And then I read Love in the Ruins after growing up somewhat sheltered, without having fully digested the Theology of the Body, and I felt a little uncomfortable, which is probably one of Percy’s goals. He has his own way of presenting the sacramental worldview by forcing his reader to come face to face with all aspects of our bodiliness, especially in the sexual sphere. I was deeply influenced by the “purity culture” of the 90s that promoted a fear and embarrassment about sexual impulses and desires among Christian teenagers. But I am coming to an understanding of the beauty and truth of our human sexuality through things like John Paul II’s theology and Walker Percy’s literature. I know that if you have not read Percy and John Paul II, this might not make much sense. Perhaps this is a whole post for some other time, after I have revisited one of Percy’s novels. Elie helped me know Percy better, and in knowing him better, I might get more out of his novels.
I also understand Percy more because of the afternoon we spent in New Orleans and the morning we spent in Covington, Louisiana on our summer literary pilgrimage road trip. Percy lived in the Garden District of New Orleans and wrote about the French Quarter in The Moviegoer. In Covington, we looked for places connected with Love in the Ruins, such as swamps taking over parking lots (which is a thing!), cloverleaf entrance ramps to the highway, and the country club where the character Dr. Thomas More drank his gin fizzes. We were yelled at by a lady at the country club gate for making a U-turn in the wrong place.
Flannery O’Connor
Of these four writers, I am most like Flannery O’Connor in that we are both cradle Catholics. But after that, there is not much resemblance, since growing up in heavily-Catholic St. Louis, Missouri feels more like the Midwest than O’Connor’s deep Protestant South. I relate much better to Percy’s insights into bad Catholicism, which he got while living in New Orleans. Those insights fit well with the secular-Catholicism of the Catholic cities I’ve lived in, like St. Louis and Buffalo, New York, when Mark and I lived while he was in graduate school.
But back to O’Connor: I found that the film Wildcat did a fair job presenting her personality and life, even though it took some liberties with her stories and relationships. After reading Elie’s book and visiting her home in Milledgeville, I find that I am coming to know her and that I relate to her more than I used to as a fellow writer and Catholic. I am hoping to read the volume of her letters in the near future. Through Elie’s interpretation of her work, I appreciate more fully the way grace breaks through in our lives—and am inspired to intercede more fervently for those I love whom have left the Catholic faith. She shows us that grace finds a way.
My Story is Not My Own
As I read Elie’s book, I found myself updating my family each day on the lives of each of the four writers. I let them know when Merton became a monk and when Day had lunch with Evelyn Waugh; I expressed sorrow when O’Connor died and stuck with Percy in his search all the way to his death. I am thankful to have made pilgrimage with all four of them up to their earthly end.
Elie wrote in his prologue that while we travel with others on our pilgrimages that:
[E]ach must be changed individually; they must see it for themselves, each with his or her own eyes. And as they return to ordinary life the pilgrims must tell others what they saw, recasting the story in their own terms. (p. x).
When I read the lives of fellow Catholic writers, I see them as fellow pilgrims on my journey. I am brought into their life through their writing and their experiences. I filter their stories through my own, and I even form a relationship with them. Nothing that we say or do goes out into a void, but it is part of who we are and of history; it all becomes a part of all of human experience.
Our communion with the saints in heaven and the souls in purgatory is one of the most beautiful things about the Catholic Church. The fact that someone is dead does not make them unreachable—in some ways it makes them able to be closer. I can pray for them; I can pray to them. They, through God’s grace, can reach down to me and help guide me to truth. I can connect with these deceased Catholic writers in a similar way in which I often relate to the saints whose lives I read about. And I know that I will spend more time with their writing as I am able.
Occasionally, in my parish’s bulletin, where Mass intentions are listed, we have seen Masses being offered for the repose of the soul of Flannery O’ Connor. Seeing her name there is a reminder that she is one of our fellow pilgrims, perhaps still suffering and on her way to her eternal home or maybe living in eternal joy in a home where we all hope to be together. It reminds me that there is more to life than just my own day to day, that I exist in the middle of eternity, and that there are others on the way with me and others waiting for me at the end.
A final word from Paul Elie:
Like it or not, we come to life in the middle of stories that are not ours. The way to knowledge, and self-knowledge, is through pilgrimage. We imitate our way to the truth, finding our lives—saving them in the process. Then we pass it on. (p. 472)