20: Hearts in Search of God

Episode 20: Phil talks about his own faith journey and how this has led to his current pilgrimage project - while we walk part of a new Pilgrim Way he is uncovering in the Diocese of Shrewsbury.

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The Hearts in Search of God project

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Transcript

 You are listening to All Kinds of Catholic with me, Theresa Alessandro. My conversations with different Catholics will give you glimpses into some of the ways, we're living our faith today. Pope Francis has used the image of a caravan. A diverse group of people travelling together. On a sometimes chaotic journey together. That's an image that has helped to shape this podcast. I hope you'll feel encouraged and affirmed, and maybe challenged at times. I am too in these conversations. 

This is a different kind of episode today. This conversation took place outdoors, in sections, as I walked alongside Phil through a little piece of Shropshire. It was a rainy day, but the story of Phil's pilgrimage project unfolded gradually during our conversation. In this first part, we had attended Mass together in Shrewsbury Cathedral, which is being beautifully reordered at the moment. The fitting psalm response during Mass was, Your words are a lamp for my feet. The priest celebrating Mass mentioned Phil's walking journey to the congregation and shared his own experience of the route as we left afterwards. And then we crossed the town in search of a sandwich to take with us and stopped beside Shrewsbury Abbey, where there's a memorial commemorating the war poet, Wilfred Owen. And that's where we started to talk. 

So listeners, I'm here with Phil standing by Shrewsbury Abbey. In fact, we've just been to Mass together at Shrewsbury Cathedral. Phil, tell us about the project and what we're actually doing today. 

Well, today we're at the start of the Shrewsbury Diocesan Pilgrim Way, and over the next few days, I'll be walking from here in Shrewsbury North, eventually ending up at the tip of the Wirral at the Shrine of Saints Peter, Paul and Philomena, and that'll be the end of the walk, it's about 80 miles. So today is the first just the first five miles. 

Okay. 80, eight zero?

 80. 

Okay. And how many pilgrim routes have you organised now as part of your project? 

This in fact is the last one, so I've done one in every diocese of England and Wales and this will be the last the last one for me to do. Yeah. 

Wow. For listeners I'll put a link to the project page so that people can have a good look at all of those, but tell us what inspired you to start this project then Phil?

Well, I've always loved long distance walking right since I was a small child and particularly the idea of walking continuously in one direction has always appealed to me for some reason. In 2008, I walked from, took an elective from work, and I walked from Canterbury to Rome over 3 months. And then in 2015, I walked on from Rome to Istanbul. So those were two really important and significant walks in my life. After that, I went on to work for Caritas Social Action Network, the domestic social action agency of the Catholic Church in England and Wales. And after I retired from that in 2021, I was sort of looking around for something new and something different to do. And, one day I started to walk from Clifton Cathedral to our diocesan shrine in Glastonbury, and I was going along beside the ring road and it was a beautiful day. There was sort of a lovely stream on my left hand side. Although there was loud traffic on the on the right, I could hear lots of birdsong and there were wildflowers. It was just lovely. And I decided then that pilgrimages were - walking pilgrimage -  is what's made a big difference to me in my life and I'd like to share it with others. So then I thought how could I attach that to an idea and the idea came to me of one route in each diocese from the Cathedral of the diocese to a shrine. 

Okay. When you say that those two big walks that you did were important in your life, in what way were they important for your faith would you say? 

Well, I think they were important to me as just a whole experience. When I started off the walk to Rome, everyone would say to me, is it a pilgrimage then? And I'd sort of obfuscate because I didn't want to be pigeonholed into their ideas of what it is to be a pilgrim. And also, I wasn't sure what it means to be a pilgrim in the 21st century. And I think I set off, you know, it was 2008. It was the time of maximum hurt and pain about the child sexual abuse crisis and I think, like a lot of Catholics, I carried a lot of anger about that. And the walk itself helped me firstly to resolve some of those feelings, and also secondly to actually become a pilgrim and that was really because of how I was welcomed along the way, how people saw me and how they welcomed me particularly in Italy where the tradition of welcoming pilgrims is particularly strong. 

Thank you, Phil. So as it just starts to rain, we're gonna set off now on this walk. We'll stop again and talk on the way. 

Lovely.

We walked beside the River Severn on part of the route. There was a convenient picnic table that I was able to lay the recording device on and hold my umbrella over it to protect it from the drizzle. But in this especially rich part of our dialogue, we talked about Phil's own faith journey. So here we are sitting beside the River Severn with, just a tiny bit of drizzle falling. I was thinking Phil, listeners might be interested in something about your own faith journey. Has your faith always been important to you? 

I think it's always been important but in different ways and there have been certainly times when I tried to ignore it. So I grew up in a very sort of typical Catholic family. I wouldn't say that we were devout because that sort of implies some sort of emotionalism, which I don't think was there, but my parents were very committed, both Catholic teachers in Catholic schools, and, the parish was an important institution in our lives and I went to Catholic schools. And then, but when I was 11 and I'd been a keen altar boy and, and involved in things in the parish. But when I was 11, I went on school journey down to Kent and I was walking along towards the beach with a great friend of mine and he said to me, You know all this God business? And I said, Yes. And he said, It's all rubbish. It's just, it's what they tell us to try and make us behave and I said, you know, I was absolutely shocked at what I was hearing and I said, Who told you this? And he said, Bunty, who is his big sister. So I thought, well, Bunty thinks that, it must be right. And so, for a long time, I stopped being an altar boy, I decided I didn't believe in God, but when I went to secondary school, we had a physics teacher who's also a Marist priest and he said, I'm gonna teach you about the only two things that matter in this school, the ultimate structure of the universe in physics and its ultimate meaning in theology. So, and all the other things that the other teachers would try and tell you is just stamp collecting, just listen to me. So I thought that's really interesting and if we had some, some lessons with him, when we'd have some religious discussion, not just the scriptural learning or apologetics that you had. So I went to a Catholic grammar school for boys run by the Marists, and then when I was about 17 in the 6th form, one of the Marists, Fr Tom Goonan, said I'm gonna go out on an overnight soup run in Central London tonight, who wants to come with me? So I went along with another great friend of mine, Tony, and we spent all night going around the city of London, and it was the time of the cardboard cities. There's loads and loads of people sleeping in boxes by the Thames. I saw people huddling for warmth outside of Strand Palace Hotel. And we went round with a group of I think there were 2 priests, there was a collection of religious sisters and people, committed lay people, and this completely changed my view of what the church was about, you know, that I had previously seen it as being about, you know, if you had been told what to do and about services on a Sunday. But then I really saw the church in action, and that rekindled my interest in it so when I went to university I became involved in Catholic chaplaincy. And over the years, you know, I've been more involved with the church sometimes and less involved at others, but as I was saying earlier, I think the big walk in 2008 did make a big difference to me because it was a time when I was not only walking every day, but I was trying to follow morning and evening prayer of the church. I had to go to Mass as often consciously as I could because I was on a pilgrimage. 

That's really interesting. I think there is something about the idea that theology is about, and our faith is about, making meaning of our lives that I think sometimes is missed by atheists who dismiss, you know, because they think science just rubbishes religion. I think they don't understand that that these are different things. 

Yes. Different things. Yes. Exactly. 

Asking and answering different questions maybe. I was going to ask if there was anything that if you look back, can you see God working in your life, are there things that you think oh yes now I see why that happened because that means that could happen.

I mean you've covered some of that actually but is there anything else that comes to mind? 

I mean there have been occasions but I suppose I come from a medical background and so I'm sort of trained to see cause and effect in rather concrete terms, so that makes it more difficult for me to perhaps, to see the promptings of the spirit in my life, though I'm sure they're there. Okay. I’d have difficulty in recounting them in a way that would perhaps make sense because I'm so, my whole life has been about, has been a scientific life, it's been about seeing what things lead to, like through a scientific method, and there's nothing wrong with that of course. 

No. 

But it's, perhaps it limits our view. 

Well, that's quite interesting isn't it? Because actually in a concrete way you're walking a path with your pilgrimage project and with the big walks you've done, but just the narrating it, you know, as in a kind of more disconnected from real footsteps way doesn't work for you.

I suppose. Perhaps. No. But I'm on a journey as they say. 

Yeah. Speaking of which, as the rain picks up Yeah. Let us keep moving. As you'll hear, we met a man on the road before we paused to talk again. He was standing very still, seemingly just looking at the river, but he explained that this was a good place to spot a kingfisher if you were lucky. In this part of our conversation, we return to Phil's pilgrimage project and where his inspiration for it came from. Okay. We've just taken a break for a moment on our walk. Phil, I was wondering how you came to choose the name Hearts in Search of God for your project. 

Yeah. It actually comes from, a document written by Pope Francis shortly into, I think about 2016, so not long into his papacy. He wrote a document addressing shrine directors and others involved in pilgrimage and advising them on how to build their shrines really, and how they should be given a good focus. But in that, he wrote of pilgrims to the shrine directors. He said, and I paraphrase, Just remember that in each one of those who visits your shrine, whether they be consciously a pilgrim, whether they be in good health or poor health, young or old, rich or poor, or would they just be a casual tourist, remember in all those people there beats a heart in search of God without necessarily being aware of it. And that really struck a chord with me. I think we all do have parts which are in search of God, which are in search of meaning and purpose in our lives, and we seek to understand the world and our place in it. And we're we're, none of us are absolutely clear what it is we're searching for, but we do know we're on a search. And so I think it was, it's a phrase which connected with me and I hope will connect with others.

Is there something, do you think there's a spiritual element to being on pilgrimage? 

Yeah. I think there's a distinctive form of Pilgrim spirituality. For one thing, it's a very grounded spirituality. So your journey is literally as a walking pilgrim, you're constantly in touch with the Earth, so you are grounded in that way, but it's also a sort of a humble sort of spirituality. You're very aware of your smallness and the slowness of your movement across the world, and also the vastness of creation. So it tends to lead, I think, to feelings of awe and wonder and of just awareness of one's own small place in in the scheme of things and the massive nature of creation. I think it's also a sort of spirituality which leads you to encounter other people. So you're often on your own, you might be on your own for many hours, but then you have some unusual encounter and the time to reflect on it. So it's a bit like breathing in and breathing out. You sort of, you have time to look within yourself but also you have time to look without to the world around you but also to encounter other people. 

And in fact, we did just meet somebody, didn't we, on the road earlier and had a chat about the route and where we're going or where you're going, over the next few days. And it was a lovely thing to meet another person and just speak about what we're doing and who we are. 

Yeah. Absolutely. And I think often you find that particularly on longer walking routes when you get walking alongside someone, you have this sort of conversations that you might not have, if you were sitting down opposite them in a pub or something like that. It's that feeling that you are walking side by side on a journey together is something that often does lead to depth in conversations. 

Mhmm. Thank you. I think that that's really interesting. I think that's captured why people are interested in pilgrimage again at the moment, you know. It it's interesting that it's growing up around the time of COVID too. 

Yeah. I think after the pandemic, we all felt the need to engage with each other, but also to engage with the outside world again, be able to travel a bit. I think one of the distinctive things is about pilgrimage is that you're generally following your route. You're not just rambling at a random if you like. There's a particular pilgrim route, you know, going from one end of it to the other, and it usually has some sort of tradition behind it, some reason why people have walked this route. People have described them, as pilgrimages, as sort of covenantal journeys. So you have a covenant with the people you will walk with, but also with those who have gone before. And also, you walk in the hope that people will follow in the future. 

Thank you, Phil. That's really interesting. Every time we stop to pause and talk, it starts to rain more heavily. So let us let us move on again. Honestly, listeners, for this final part of our conversation, Phil and I had reached my car close to Haughmond Abbey, and we jumped in to avoid the very heavy rain that had begun to fall by now. I was quite distracted by the rain thrumming on the roof of the car. But as you'll hear, Phil was able to fluently continue exploring the idea of pilgrimage, looking right back to the scriptures. So Phil, we've reached the end of this leg of the new Shrewsbury pilgrimage. What are your thoughts about this little section? 

Well, I enjoyed the section by the river. That was lovely. And coming round to that last woody section, I thought was lovely. I know it was raining but we didn't get so soaked but we could hear the pitter patter of the rain on the leaves and that was beautiful. Yeah. So it's been very nice and lovely to have your company. 

Well, thank you. I feel cheeky crashing your solitude. It was really good to walk along, talk a little bit and like you say, you hear the rain in the trees. So what are your thoughts, Phil, about - this is what a pilgrimage might look like today with our walking gear on against the rain and a bit of technology to help us. But where do pilgrimages come from? 

Well I mean they’re as old probably as humanity itself, you know people have always gone on walks looking for meaning and purpose in their lives and to religious sites and they're across many traditions. But within the Christian tradition we often think of the paradigm of Christian pilgrimages being the walk to Emmaus where 2 people are walking away in this case from the holy site. They're walking away from Jerusalem and they meet Christ and a stranger and they travel together and they discuss the scriptures and then they recognise him in the breaking of bread and then they're filled with the spirit and they have the courage to return to Jerusalem and face what's going on there. So several things which’re there are typical of pilgrimage. One is the encounter with people who are strangers, one is the is the ability to be changed by it to you know to feel your heartburn within you as it says in the story and also then to set off on another journey in a different direction to what you're anticipating. So pilgrimages were, you know, reached an absolute heyday during the Middle Ages and at that time England was really important so we had several most important pilgrimage sites within Europe at Canterbury and at Walsingham and people would come from right across the continent to visit those sites but that came to an end with the reformation in 1538. Henry the VIIIth had pilgrimage banned by a royal injunction and the shrines were destroyed many of them and the infrastructure which provided the support, all the religious houses were often suppressed and closed down. And so pilgrimage was lost as a practical thing within England and Wales, but Catholics continued to go abroad on pilgrimage. Pilgrimage stayed alive as a sort of metaphor in the Protestant mind as we've seen in the Pilgrim’s Progress by Bunyan. And then gradually as the church started to recover after the penal centuries and Irish people started to settle in Britain in large numbers they started to have pilgrimage sites and obviously Walsingham was one of the most important. But if you still talk to Catholics in England and Wales today, they'll talk about going on pilgrimage and very often it means going to going to Lourdes or going to Rome or going to the Holy Land but what I'm trying to encourage in this project is people to actually go on pilgrimage and to go on walking pilgrimage in our own country because I think there's so many interesting things to find. And because of our particular history in this country, they're not the typical places. They're not the obvious ordinary places, but they're full of interest. 

And I think you said at the beginning that this is the last of the Diocesan Pilgrimage routes now that you're walking through over these next few days. So we wish you well in that.

Thank you very much. 

Listeners who are interested in following up, I'll put some links in the episode notes so people can see, find out more about it, and we look forward to seeing where the project takes you next. 

Well, I think we're in an exciting time because we've got the Holy Year next year with the motto, Pilgrims of Hope. So I hope there'll be an opportunity for some national walking pilgrimages next year. So if people are interested in that, please go to the website and sign up for the updates, and you'll get a quarterly newsletter.

Fantastic. Thanks ever so much, Phil. I've really enjoyed this. 

It's been great. Thanks very much.

Listeners, I hope you've enjoyed this different kind of episode. Maybe myself or Phil will meet you on the road somewhere in the future, perhaps even during the Pilgrims of Hope Jubilee year next year. Thanks so much for joining me on All Kinds of Catholic this time. I hope today's conversation has resonated with you. 

A new episode is released each Wednesday. Follow All Kinds of Catholic on the usual podcast platforms to be sure of not missing an episode. And follow our X/ Twitter and Facebook accounts @KindsofCatholic. You can comment on episodes and be part of the dialogue there. You can also text me if you're listening to the podcast on your phone, although I won't be able to reply to those texts. Until the next time.