As we left Chester, we passed St. Augustine’s Roman Catholic Church. How fitting that today’s journey began by evoking that saint, famous for saying—if in fact he he did say it—solvitur ambulando, “it is solved by walking.” Walking, apparently, fixes problems, although as Tanis MacDonald argues in Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female, everything depends on what needs to be solved and who needs to solve it. What problem am I trying to solve? So far, it’s the question of what community means, especially the community that forms when a group of strangers goes on a long walk together.
The drizzle at the beginning of today’s walk pleased the slugs on the path. After an hour or so, I decided that the rain was heavy enough to put on my rain jacket. It immediately stopped.
Much of the land we travelled through was boggy, with lots of Labrador tea in bloom in the peat bogs, along with more purple pitcher plants. Don, my walking companion, found some wild strawberries and ate a couple, leaving lots for the squirrels and chipmunks. My plant identification app told me we were passing rhodia and sweetfern, which were new to me. Oak seedlings grew beside the path, and I wondered if they would eventually tower over the birches next to them. The ground under the trees was carpeted in blueberries. When they ripen, will cyclists and pedestrians share the trail with bears?
We talked about walking, our jobs, our health. Don is a minister at a rural church in Nova Scotia, a second career after working in the corporate sector. As we chatted, I thought about how much commonality is needed to create community. Are there degrees of community? Is there a spectrum of connection? Probably. Sociologists distinguish between strong and weak ties—relationships of greater and lesser emotional depth and intimacy. The apparent binary of strong and weak is likely an oversimplification; like almost everything else, there must be a range of possibilities. Robert Waldinger, the director of the Harvard Study on Human Development, tells us that the key factor in a happy life is the quality of our relationships. It’s a bit like the movie Moneyball: that one variable tells a person’s entire story. I’m not sure whether Waldinger focuses primarily on strong ties, though, or if he sees weak ones as also important.
What kind of tie forms during a pilgrimage? Does communitas lend itself to acquaintances or deeper friendships? Perhaps both are possibilities. That’s been my experience. As Don and I trudged along, we talked about the complexity of Christian theology and the fact that many of its tenets are based in mistranslations or other confusions. My friends Matthew and Sara tell me similar things. Letters that are attributed to Paul, for instance, were actually written by someone else. The simple Bible story I was taught as a child, its certainty and sharp edges, bleached all of the nuance and difficulty out of those ancient texts. When understood in their historical context, that stark clarity evaporates. “How do you convey that idea to a congregation looking for certainty?” I asked. “Gently,” he answered.
I told Don stories about my Baptist childhood—answering an altar call when I was nine in hopes of bringing an interminable service to a close so that everyone could go home for lunch (spoiler alert: that didn’t work, at least not for me)—and he told similar stories about evangelicals driving curious people away from faith with their dogmatism. It’s good to know that I’m not the only one, but I doubt my perspective will change. The closest I can get to a belief in immortality is through Primo Levi’s essay on carbon: that element perseveres after we die, and is taken up by other creatures as part of their bodies until, when they die, it’s released into circulation again. That’s cold comfort to folks who have trouble with the idea of their nonexistence, I know, but it’s enough for me.
Different people have different ways of seeing things, of course, and when Don explained that he’s been colourblind since birth, he gave me a clear example of that. He sees reds as what I would call dark green or black, and greens as what I perceive as gold. He showed me an app on his phone that renders the world in the tones he sees. Everything is autumnal, all the trees and flowers and grasses a burnished orange-yellow. What I call red or green means nothing to him. “Can you imagine a colour you’ve never seen?” he asked. No—that’s impossible. Let’s show each other some grace, then, some compassion, I thought, since we might be unable to see the world differently than we do. Except Nazis, of course. I’m not falling into the paradox of tolerance, making space for people who aggressively refuse to extend that tolerance to others. Of course, tolerance is a pretty low bar. Acceptance, even love, are what’s required. But if tolerance is the best we can do, then okay.
I’m writing these words in the early morning darkness of the sanctuary in the Anglican church in Hubbards, where I slept on the floor between two pews last night. I didn’t sleep well last night, either. The snoring the night before was an ear splitting cacophony, but it was the cold that kept me awake. I decided to follow my friend Geoff’s example and carry only a sleeping bag liner, and even wearing all my clothes, it was too cold. My thin sleeping pad didn’t help. I had no space in my bag for anything more luxurious, and if this walk continued for two or three weeks, I’d get used to it. I did sleep a little better last night, because this church is warmer and the snoring slightly muffled. It’s six o’clock now, and coffee is probably being made in the downstairs kitchen. I think I’ll try to find a cup.
