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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      An Imprint of 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