Day 19d: A most humble Hospitality … (05/03/2019)
I was pretty gassed when I walked into the lovely town of Vicques and — as usual — I headed straight for the local Catholic church. Unusually, the church itself was closed (Catholic churches, unlike their Protestant counterparts, were almost always open havens of rest & respite during the entirety of my Walk), and yet a group of children and their parents were playing in the yard behind the sanctuary, a lovely gaggle of folks who eventually (after at first struggling mightily to understand my heftily-halting French) directed me to the parsonage home across the street.
A young and quite cheerful Father Antoine was exiting that home just as I arrived, and — after finally comprehending the nature of my pilgrimage (communicating in French, despite the cheat-sheet I had composed before the Walk began, proved to be far more difficult than I had anticipated) — he offered me a chair to rest my weary legs and a delicious espresso to warm my empty belly while he made a few phone calls to see if I could possibly stay the night in the church itself. The bishop for the region’s Catholic diocese was finally reached and, after hearing of my mission, offered not a space on the floor of the local sanctuary for that night but rather a soft guest bed (and a piping hot shower) in his own home instead … :O
Thank you so much once again, Fidel & Rosemarie, for your humbly gracious hospitality (and the much needed French lessons) … 😀
“Faith supported by any measure of certainty is but a feebly misguided delusion. In truth, if your faith isn’t fully blind while you live it, then you haven’t truly leapt therein. Indeed, any real & true Faith is only reborn in that moment we are completely unsure of our success and yet go for it anyway; when we set aside all hopes & dreams & goals and go for it anyway; when we realize we might die in the very first moment and yet go for it anyway. And ironically, when we embrace this mindset, we are never “safer”, and our Journeys prove far more fruit-full. For it is only when we care not for any particular outcome that we can relax into the groove of Love — a groove that transcends the need for ‘faith.’ We simply give Love to others anyway. Love is who we become in those courageous of moments, and therefore Love is what we experience in return.” ~ anonymous
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