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Pilgrim’s Gait
David Craig
Pilgrim’s Gait
Copyright © 2015 David Craig. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
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ISBN 13: 978-1-4982-2556-4
EISBN 13: 978-1-4982-2557-1
Manufactured in the U.S.A.
For the ones I have failed too often:
Linda, David, Bridget, and Jude
“Moment of Conscience”
—Garabandal
1.
San Vicente de la Barquera: boat beached
in mid-river sand—the Catholic in Europe!
Not everything-in-its-Puritan-place;
but the thing, skewed, as place.
Garabandal grows out of the Cantabrians,
buildings squatting in irregular red stone, mortar—
though everyone we met was from somewhere else.
I felt like the Beach Boys, waiting for a wave:
“the moment of conscience,” with a woman
someone knew who’d married a brother
of one of the visionaries!
(It was labor intensive,
this waiting for God!)
I got to stand—the pillar said—where St. Michael
had stood! And later, as we prayed our rosaries
beneath the pines, hoping for the three o’clock
change: strange swirls of low grey clouds appeared,
God finger-painting, moving them
under higher slate; a whole new world
seemed in the offing.
(Jude, for his three year old Downs’ part,
chimed in with comedic “alleluias.”)
The appointed hour: nothing happened!
Nothing.
Wrong year.
2.
Many of those pilgrims dead now: sunny Erla,
wigged switch board operator—cancer;
a too-needy Frank, on his crutches; both with what
Fr. Peter had labeled “real problems.”
And he was almost right. Jude is life-raft,
yes. Who’s ever been happier just to run,
as awkward as time, though his pain
is real enough, seventeen years later:
never finding a face to suit his classmates,
or a girlfriend, or a talent in life.
I caught a soccer game, passing a bar:
their Monday Night football; and huge,
beautiful statues, two over-sized religious stores;
our theologian and his family
seeming to go to confession every hour
as the time neared.
I ran into Fr. Scadron—ex-Parisian
artist, Jew—the priest my wife
had just edited a book for.
(I wondered if he were real!)
The locals were used to it, the us of things:
one Garabandal woman, hanging laundry
as Jude played with her boy’s trucks in the dust,
me sitting on a nearby stone
next to an older Dutch guy, a man who knew
the minutiae of every apparition
everywhere—trying to situate himself
in the infinite know.
It was all anti-climax, which was only right—
because our lives are precisely that.
Each one brought Jesus with him to get there,
shared Him along the way. And though I know
Jude, seventeen years later, would still like
to be healed—to have a life like other people,
what could any of us, finally, have traded
for what we’d been given?
Lourdes
After French McDonald’s,
an older, thicker bicyclist—with curls—
not yet pathetic, lagged behind, racing
younger mates. I watched him,
Jude on my shoulders. (We sized each other:
France and America, in the wake
of Charles de Gaulle.)
Just outside the gates of that heaven,
that idyll of praise: shops stuffed the street,
good art—and not—for sale.
Tasteful French corps pushed wheelchairs
inside; and underground, a massive church,
like some holy bus terminal: 100,000 people;
Masses, screens in different languages—
the great, decaying church up top, with its inclines,
pews, decrepit enough to convince anyone
that what mattered most wasn’t there.
In town at Sacred Heart Church,
where the actor-priest had reduced Bernadette
to sainthood: no pews, just benches
and the Mass in French—airy as a town square,
which is what it was: the nation’s fiber.
Jude, at three, ran across that basement,
through shadows, just to sit next to
a darkened statue of St. John Vianney.
The water in the holy baths froze,
and I, flippant: tasteless at mom’s, bouncing
on her furniture—as an attendant mumbled
something