Some years ago my attention was drawn to Xavier de Meistre’s book entitled “A Journey around my Room” where a young man, condemned to house arrest for 42 days in Turin, keeps himself gainfully occupied by wandering around his room and recording this exploration as a travel journal. A contributor to Sunday Miscellany took this as a starting point for a reflection on his life into the future when a time would come when, either because of health or age, he would be confined, firstly, to his garden, and then to his house, and finally to his room. Anticipating this probability he decided to embark on the Camino de Santiago to fill his mind with a treasury of memories of people and places and events that would nourish and sustain him through this time of confinement.
As we rang in New Year 2020 none of us entertained the possibility of imminent prolonged confinement in our homes. A virus had appeared that would close down the whole world. A verse in Psalm 83(84)(Morning Prayer Monday 3) says “As they go through the bitter valley, they make it a place of springs”. This time has indeed been a bitter valley for so many people who have suffered deeply through losing loved ones, through illness and unemployment and pain in many guises. It has also been “a place of springs” where we have witnessed the generosity and selflessness of so many involved in frontline services and all volunteers working locally to support the more vulnerable people. Families have been gifted quality time together and it has been a wonderful time of rest, renewal and regeneration for our planet Earth.
Those of us of a certain age were asked to “cocoon”. With all external commitments put on hold I embraced the opportunity of spending time each day walking around the house. These daily walks were to be “my place of springs”, my daily oases of peace, prayer and exercise and also times of encounter with younger neighbours passing by as they walked with their families.
Laudato Si’ mentions that “the history of our friendship with God is always linked to particular places which take on an intensely personal meaning; we all remember places, and revisiting those memories does us much good…going back to these places is a chance to recover something of our true selves” (Paragraph 84). As I walked I inevitably found myself delving into my rich reservoir of Camino memories reflecting that indeed each Camino had also been “a place of springs”. The relevance of the Sunday Miscellany reflection became obvious to me as I feasted on life-giving memories of kindness and helpfulness from all the different Guardian Angels whom we had met along the way and the evocative names of little hamlets and hilltop villages kept springing to mind. I was already revelling in such memories when Ray D’Arcy issued an invitation to his radio listeners to write an account of
“A Page in my Life”……
Awaking at dawn in Sulmona, an Italian town nestled in a valley in the middle of the Apennines, I was filled with excitement tinged with just a little apprehension. My cousin, Ann, and I were beginning the second part of an Italian walk “With Wings on the Feet” which would take us in the footsteps of St. Francis of Assisi to Monte Sant’Angelo on the Adriatic – a walk similar to the Camino de Santiago only totally undiscovered and traversing tracts where “not even a soul passes”. I was somewhat apprehensive as our first day involved a lot of climbing in very hilly remote terrain leading us up to Pescacostanza – a ski village 33 kms away and at altitude of 1,295m/4,577ft!
Little did I realise just what was awaiting us on this glorious sunny day in May 2019.
Setting off from Sulmona through the Porta Napoli we reached the cemetery where there was meant to be a choice of routes…but no yellow Tau signs. I was studying the map and scanning the area when I noticed a young man on a pathway high up on our right. He obviously noticed my indecisiveness and immediately came running down the steep hillside, accompanied by his big black dog, and very kindly told us that there was a sign a bit further on. Leaving the road we embarked on a beautiful pathway flanked by an array of blue, yellow and red wild flowers. We reached an old ruin with a sign indicating left but, as the path we were on was veering left, we continued on enjoying the beautiful fragrance of the broom and the cuckoo serenading us until ….we reached a dead end, steep mountains on three sides and no path! Retracing our steps to the ruin we finally found a tiny trace of a path, less than a foot wide, climbing up through long grass. The gradient got really steep leading us up to a huge plateau stretching out ahead with the snow covered Mother Mountain – the Majella – towering above us to the east.
We continued climbing through woods and clearings before reaching an old Roman road, Via Numicia, which led into a beautiful beech wood. A fox crossed our path and, almost immediately, there facing me on the path, just about 20m ahead, standing erect on his hind legs, was a big brown bear just like something you’d see in Disneyworld. The bear and I stood transfixed, just looking at each other. I had my camera on my belt and would have liked to have captured the moment on film but….I somehow knew that I needed to stand still. I felt amazingly calm asking St. Francis to look after us as we were walking in his footsteps – I asked him to tame this bear just as he had tamed the wolf in Gubbio. With that the bear turned and went off the path up into the woods. I waited for my cousin and alerted her. There was no going back so we ventured forward together aware that the bear could still be around. As we passed the spot where he had been standing we furtively glanced up to our right and there he was again, still on his hind legs, looking down on us but, gratefully, once again he turned, went down on all fours, and walked away into the trees.
Coming face to face with a big wild bear, in the middle of nowhere, was certainly not on my agenda for our first day’s walking. It was a very real relief to reach the road eventually and find refuge in a restaurant “Il Faggette di San Antonio”. The proprietors, Rita and Vittorio, were very interested in our encounter with the bear – apparently the bears have only appeared in recent years. As we left to continue our climb to Pescacostanzo Rita insisted on gifting us with a bag of delicious lemon cakes and gouffres. Throughout our walk we experienced the goodness and generosity of the Italians on a daily basis – gratefully, it was our only encounter with the Marsican Brown Bear….. but the memory will last forever!
A few weeks after our memorable encounter Richard Rohr, in his daily CAC reflection, quoted from Carlo Caretto’s “I, Francis” – “ I, Francis, was not afraid to meet with the wolf – Not since I had experienced the fact that my God is the wolf’s God too…This is the miracle of love: to discover that all creation is one, flung out into space by a God who is a Father, and that if you present yourself as God does, unarmed and peaceably, creation will recognize and meet you with a smile”. My meeting with the bear has really convinced me that my God is the bear’s God too and the God of all creatures and all of creation. Laudato Si’ (Paragraph 220) invites us to a conversion that “entails a loving awareness that we are not disconnected from the rest of creatures, but joined in a splendid universal communion”.
Ann Lenihan rsm
Southern Province
