After 28 years of family life, seven children and an operation for cancer, Jini Fiennes buys a money belt from Kensington market and sets out alone for the shrines and monastic communities of France, on her way to Spain and Compostela. Advised not to walk or stand, her illness inspires her to find fresh ways of living and she makes a feisty traveller. Discovering freedom in the feel of a rucksack, she is prepared to hitch-hike and sit up overnight, good-humoured when she is taken for a shabby nun, ready with Anglo-Saxon expletives when grabbed in a train.
Her inner voice urges a broad sweep: "Make a pilgrimage. Go to ancient places. Go wherever there are contemporary seekers. Go in whatever way it works out. Just go." The journey embraces Tibetan Buddhists in the Dordogne, Easter week in a Russian Orthodox monastery in Burgundy, and the gipsy pilgrimage to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in the Camargue, as well as Lisieux, Paris, Lourdes, Taize, Paray-le-Monial and Nevers. She is a funny, alert and sensitive observer.
Staying in a small convent in Alencon, birthplace of St. Teresa of Lisieux, she notes that the silence of the rooms is far more intense than the words on the page. She wodners whether "simply by being 'in silence' one might edge closer to the whole mysterious business of saints and prayer and faith." Mystery and belief are the dominant motifs of her journey. First beckoned by the places and the route itself, she laters wants to plumb "the magnetic mystery of a loving unity, with no created thing outside its consolation."
She is drawn, although not exlusively, to the small and domestic rather than the grandiose. Les Buissonnets, St. Teresa's family home on the outskirts of Lisieux, ugly and pretentious according to Vita Sackville-West, is sympathetically described here, a place of toys, books, and paintboxes, "a blue-white feel of jasmine and violets." In the garden, she discerns the presence of Louis Martin, the melancholy widower who went insane after losing his wife to breast cancer and all five of his surviving daughters to religious life. And this group of isolated, bereaved sisters evokes comparisons with the Brontes.
But the town's tomb-like basilica, displaying the saint's arm behind banks of plastic flowers, repels her -- "everything as big as you could get without any feeling of joy or celebration." So far away from someone who understood the gift of littleness, she notes. Relics and preserved bodies try her patience and she is relieved, in Paray-le-Monial, to find a real skull and femur "all rich greenish-brown," reflecting, she believes, an honest encounter with death.
Arriving in Nevers at the huge convent where St. Bernadette's body is displayed her only thought is how soon she can leave. Watching the coachloads of Germans gaze at the saint's plucked eyebrows and glistening pink nails she feels sad for the country girl of Lourdes who would surely have preferred burial in some rich earth. But coming across a wool stocking darned by the saint there is a moment of closeness: "A perfect circle of calmly woven thread, no bobble or tug, no tension, no rough knot. Only someone very special, stable and peaceful could make that kind of darn."
Lourdes she finds grey and sad, "nothing but increasing alienation and dread...a place of water and stone," but her imagination is stirred by the tiny space, four by four and half yards, which housed the Soubirnous family of six. For those living in such terrible conditions, faith would be forced to become dead and bitter, or heroic, she reflects.
Taize, "all sunlight and flowers, jokes and smiles," which induces a feeling of vertigo and acute belonging. Her back begins to rage as if it will fall apart. Santiago de Compostela, by contrast, is quite beyond anything she has experienced or imagined, the high point of her journey, "a human hum of perfect heaven," extraordinary energy and presence" conveying "a sense of joy and arrival." Unlike most churches, the cathedral cannot be absorbed gradually, she notes: "A blast of energy seems to bound out from the centre, second by second."
She eats free in the kitchens of the Hotel de los Reyes Catolicos (a park
for pilgrims), and enjoys a healing feast for the psyche. Her relationship
to her long abandoned Catholicism remains undefined but a feeling of reconciliation
and rejuvenation surrounds this journey.
--------------Joanna Lyall
Joanna Lyall is a free-lance journalist