Day 34h: Left out of LOVE — Part 1 … (05/18/2019)
After many hours of wandering the streets of Geneva looking in vain for a place to lay my head, I decided to simply leave the city proper … The churches in town had been less than receptive (a drastic understatement) up to that point, and even the Salvation Army could not promise me a bed. So, after a long series of rejections I decided to simply get as far out of town as possible in the daylight I had remaining — if not walk throughout the night as well … :O
And yet I didn’t walk very far at all from the center of town when I heard a church bell tolling and came upon the Church of St. Francis de Salles. I had heard from some locals that this church was run by some friendly friars who lived next door, so I waited until after mass to ask the head monk if I could stay the night in their parish before walking onward the next day. While sympathetic to my plight (and even offering me money for a hotel, which I of course gently rejected) he turned me down. My legs and feet were aching quite intensely at this point, so I decided to abandon my trek for the day and hide in the church proper and spend the night therein … 😉
I entered the sanctuary and sat in the back pew until everyone else had departed, and then huddled tightly in a back corner as the lights were eventually turned off and the doors were locked for the night … :O … Once I was sure that I was alone and that my new “bedroom” was indeed my own, I went about making my bed for the night — gleefully finding & using some incredibly thick confessional-cabin cushions to construct and lay upon the same … 😀
And yet what I didn’t know at the time was that this particular church (and indeed many other opulent churches in Geneva, I later learned) had its own motion-detector alarm system (!) — one which had at that point already automatically summoned a private security team to apprehend me shortly thereafter (sigh) 🙁 … The two security guards who entered and apprehended me were kind enough — eventually setting me “free” into the now-fully-darkened Geneva evening, and I resolved to follow The Camino’s scallop shell markers as long as I could to get as far as I could past the city limits, to ultimately walk on through the following morn … 🙁
“Because he himself was so severely tested by all that he selflessly endured, he was able to inspire all those who were then similarly tested.” ~ unknown (Hebrews 2:18)
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