The Grace of a Strugglesome Sienese Pilgrimage
By Emma Restuccia
Amidst the convenience and ease of modern travel, it’s hard to believe the journeys we now make in a matter of hours once took days, months, and even years. Nowadays, many go on pilgrimages to holy sites to return uplifted, comforted, and refreshed, but such trips originally were taken for the very hardship and discomfort they promised. Early accounts of pilgrimages note the journeys were often made—either freely or compulsorily—to a site of religious significance to make atonement for sin. The pilgrimage was a wearisome penance, one which pilgrims undertook with prayer, fasting, mendicity, and (some sources say) barefoot or naked.
The following experience was more like that kind of pilgrimage—minus, thankfully, the barefoot and naked part.
Frustration meets wonder
In commemoration of the feast of St. Catherine of Siena on April 29th, my thoughts return to my Sienese pilgrimage in 2018. My mother, brother, and I took a day trip pilgrimage from Florence to visit Siena, the hometown of mystic and Doctor of the Church, St. Catherine. We made this journey to pray for the Catholic Church and Church leaders after a painful year, riddled with revelations of scandal and abuse.
Our pilgrimage didn’t start well. After the car ride, we circled the crowded town to find parking, received a driving ticket (more would follow by mail), and arrived at the St. Dominic Basilica grumpy, hungry, and with other bodily functions nagging. The spirit was willing, but the flesh was weak.
Inside the basilica, we prayed before the remains of St. Catherine—her severed head and thumb. From there, we trekked around the hilly city to see the peaceful house of St. Catherine, the powerful and awesome Siena Duomo, in which looming busts of the popes line the nave, and the San Francesco Basilica, the site of a Eucharistic miracle which, incidentally, is only publicly displayed on the 17th of each month. It was the 14th.
Throughout the pilgrimage, divine mixed with human. Beauty meshed with discomfort and exhaustion. Sheer wonder salved frustration and frailty.
Despite travel frustrations and aching feet, we realized we were wandering the streets a saint had walked. We wondered at the shrunken head of the saint, yet believed in the resurrection of the body. We were disappointed at not seeing the Eucharistic miracle, yet took solace in the fact that the miracle takes place at every Mass. We hungered and thirsted, yet were reminded of our calling to seek the true Food and Drink. Even today, we remember this pilgrimage with a degree of disappointment, but also with immense gratitude.
“To step out of ourselves”
Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI beautifully described the meaning of pilgrimage during a visit to the site Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Spain:
To go on pilgrimage is not simply to visit a place to admire its treasures of nature, art or history. To go on pilgrimage really means to step out of ourselves in order to encounter God where he has revealed himself, where his grace has shone with particular splendour and produced rich fruits of conversion and holiness among those who believe.
A pilgrimage is an exterior act that brings about interior fruit, fruit we certainly did not see while on our journey. Even now, it is difficult to see. But it was indeed a stepping out of ourselves to encounter God or, rather, to allow God to encounter us in our frail humanity.
The Church Fathers and Doctors, too, speak eloquently about pilgrimages—and the misuse of them. “It is just as easy to reach the portals of Heaven from Britain as from Jerusalem,” St. Jerome writes. And St. Augustine says of the restless heart: “It is not by journeying but by loving that we draw near to God. We approach Him…not by our feet but by our hearts.”
I can’t say my faith was strengthened by the beauties I encountered on the pilgrimage. I can say it was strengthened by the trust that, beyond what I felt, God would bring about grace from the mess. The journey itself did not bring us to God, nor did any pleasureful mystical experience of Him strengthen our faith. “For the changing of one’s place does not bring about any greater nearness to God,” St. Gregory of Nyssa writes. “No, God will come to you wherever you are” in the “abode of the soul.” My family and I look back now and see how God presented Himself in the pain, in the reality of our humanity. Perhaps the abode of our souls needed to grow by sacrifice, not by pleasure; our hearts approached, painfully and begrudgingly, despite the paths our feet trod.
I continue to think on the experiences of our pilgrimage, of the joys and pains, of the deep and lofty beauty we witnessed in that steep, slight Italian city. I think about our Sienese saint correcting and urging, powerfully, passionately, Pope Gregory XI to return from Avignon to Rome, and her work to reform the Church. And I think about my own life’s work and what contributions I can make to God’s kingdom on earth.
Maybe this strugglesome pilgrimage was part of that mission. And though the outer work of the pilgrimage is complete, the inner work is still coming about, and, God-willing, may yet be brought to rich fruition.
