Today’s memorial of St. Thomas Becket finds me reflecting on my career as a teacher of literature, retirement, and the importance of going on pilgrimages. All three of those things came together for me recently, as I had the opportunity to visit Canterbury Cathedral and reflect first,on St. Thomas’ martyrdom and then, my years of teaching T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral and Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales.
I can’t escape from my love of literature, and why would I want to? I’ve learned, too, that I can’t escape my longing for the Eucharist, for Jesus.
While John and I were traipsing around Scotland enjoying an epic almost month-long vacation, I became acutely aware that our travels were slowly turning into a pilgrimage. We might have called our desire to visit historical places a kind of secular pilgrimage, but our thoughts and actions turned to the Church fairly soon after our arrival. Isolation and a terrible experience programming an old Garmin GPS caused us to miss Mass on our first Sunday there. While it wasn’t intentional, it left us with the determination to plan carefully so we wouldn’t find ourselves in the same predicament the next weekend. There was an abundance of services for the Church of Scotland, but finding a Roman Catholic Church and Mass proved to be a challenge in some of the more isolated areas we visited in the Orkney Islands.
The unintended result? A constant state of awareness of this absence, and sheer and utter joy whenever discovering an RC Church in our travels. Communion, when we attended Mass, ceased to be an element of rote participation. I’m ashamed to say that it took the fear of missing the gift of the Eucharist (perceived rather than fact) that gave it the import it deserves weekly, if not daily.
One of my favorite visits was to the Italian Chapel, which deserves a post by itself. Another church, St. Margaret’s in the little town of Roy Bridge, had a shrine to St. Mary MacKillop, a saint I feature in my new book that comes out this fall. Every day brought some aspect of my faith alive, especially as we visited medieval and older churches that have been desanctified. I didn’t expect to be struck by so much sorrow in this, but it seemed like church after church in small villages have been turned over for use as community centers or worship in other traditions.
Eventually, we made our way up and around Scotland, and returned to London for the last few days of our trip. One of those days involved a trip south to Canterbury, and then Dover. While I love me some Matthew Arnold, I reread some of the tales from The Canterbury Tales. The trip to Canterbury was filled with excitement and expectation, and I was overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of it. What an astounding magnificent structure! Majestic!
I smiled at my pilgrimage there — the stories I would tell some day! The funny adventures John and I had for several weeks that have ended here on our last day of the trip. We entered, excited, and lingered over the baptismal font, set in a space larger than our little parish at home. Our reverie was interrupted by an Anglican priest who invited everyone present to prayer, as the cathedral is an active place of worship. John and I stopped and joined in silence. There was something both familiar and awkward about it.
John eventually had to sit down, but I went on for what seemed like miles, deeper and deeper into the cathedral until I reached the steps that signaled the site of the once-shrine of St. Thomas Becket. All that is left is a candle burning on the floor, a place-holder for where the shrine once stood. I prayed there for a little while, and ducked into a tiny chapel to the left — a place where there might have been a chapel for the Blessed Sacrament if history had played out differently.
It left me yearning again, an experience I admit is brand new to me. We left soon after, and as John and I walked in the shadow of the cathedral toward the center of town for lunch, I shared those thoughts with him. He had to stop and rest a little before we kept going, and we found a place to sit, when he pointed out the RC sign on the side of a building, and the presence of Catholic Church nearby. That’s when we found St. Thomas of Canterbury Catholic Church. I went inside only to discover it was covered in scaffolding. Still, I could see the altar clearly, and the tabernacle. Amazing the peace and gratitude I felt in that moment.
I started this vacation with an eye to history and literature, surprised at every turn that made it clearer and clearer I was on an unplanned pilgrimage. In that smaller church, somewhat eclipsed by the grandeur of the cathedral down the street, I discovered my need for pilgrimage — my need to see and feel and walk in the footsteps of saints.