So we're back from Italy and over the next several days, I'll be posting some thoughts and reflections from our trip. You can find them under the category "Journeys in Italy," which I realize is not close to a creative name.
Somewhere between New York and Rome, I was having serious problems trying to sleep. I’m over six feet tall and my frame just cannot get close to a state of rest in a plane. The cabin was mostly dark and many were resting, which made my lack of rest all the more frustrating. Across the aisle, a ten year old had a made a fort with his airline-provided blanket. Next to me EA’s breathing indicated that she was asleep but it wasn’t a deep slumber. Hanging from the ceiling a few rows up was a monitor showing The Wolverine, which without sound is one crazy weird movie. In this odd state, a word popped into my head: pilgrimage.
The word has actually been on my mind recently. Most likely because our first two stops in Italy—Rome and Assisi—are sites that annually attract an avalanche of religious pilgrims. These are places that mean a great deal to many people of faith. These sites mean something to me too, but being Protestant in a Catholic context complicates matters slightly. The sacred spaces speak to me but it’s often with a heavy accent that I don’t understand.
This trip is another kind of pilgrimage as well. I came to Italy on a foreign study trip in college. While it was a good trip and I had friends on it, the experience is tinted blue in my memory. It was the longest I had ever been gone. I missed home. I missed the girl that I loved. The feeling of not fitting in that has hounded me throughout my life seemed to nip at my heels on that trip.
So here I am again: on my way to Italy, but this time with that girl. This time I am not a 20 year old lovesick and homesick kid, but a 32 year old husband and father of two. EA could have gone on that foreign study trip but didn’t and always regretted it. Around our seventh anniversary, I said we should save our money and go to Italy for our tenth anniversary. So we did and, with the generosity of family, here we are.
We’re hitting many of the same places that I did over a decade ago: Rome, Assisi, Florence, Siena, Venice. When I was 20, we started in Venice and worked our way to Rome. Without thinking about it, our itinerary has set us up to do the whole thing backwards. There might be some poetry in that unraveling, but I can’t really come up with anything right now.
The other big difference is that it’s just the two of us. Last time I was part of a big group. Our itinerary, our lodging, and many meals were all set up for us. This time there is no such safety net. We booked the hotels and train tickets. Getting from Point A to Point B (which frequently requires Point A1, A2, and A3) is solely up to us. Neither of us speak Italian or have connections to anyone over here. We are strangers in a strange land.
But that’s a pilgrimage of sorts too. Pilgrimage comes from the Latin word peregrinus, which means a person wandering the earth in exile. It is someone who is in search of a spiritual homeland. It’s a journey of strangers and this summer I have definitely felt like a stranger. Even my own hometown has seemed foreign to me so maybe it’s appropriate that I get baptized in utter foreignness: to not know the language, to get frustrated by the maze of streets seemingly designed by a drunk who had a ton of cobblestones. Maybe in these moments of feeling so totally lost, I’ll get found.
So, yeah, maybe this is a pilgrimage; not necessarily like the one for the person standing beside me at St. Peter’s Basilica. But it is my hope that in this brew of faith, foreignness, familiarity, celebrating love, eating good food, seeing new places, and just being that I might just stumble a few miles closer to my spiritual homeland. We'll see.