A year of pilgrimage yielding hard answers

A 10-part series of articles on the pilgrimages I have made this year on land and in the soul.

PART 2- the start of the journey can be the hardest part.

I woke up on the morning of September 22nd, with a torn heart. Half of it wishing I could wish my son a happy birthday, half of it anticipating the adventure ahead.

By the time I arrived at the hotel in Lisbon, Portugal, I had been up for about 27 straight hours with only a brief nod off on the plane of about 30 minutes. The tour and dinner stretched that to about 31 hours and the very early next day rise didn't make things any easier.

Thus, if there was one word to describe the start of my foray into Europe, it was exhaustion. Did that exhaustion preclude the reception of the graces of these special places and events, or did it increase its value due to the difficulty of its acquisition? It's a fair question.

Since every facet of the experience was something new, it was a lot to absorb, and the best conclusions have taken some time to form.

In that airport in Lisbon, there must have been 100,000 people and an awful lot of them were Americans. This rubs our American sensitivity the wrong way because we are so used to thinking that we are the center of the universe. The truth is, in the sense of authentic Christianity, America is one of the least important destinations on earth.

It's not where Christianity was founded, that is Jerusalem. It's not where the Church was established, that's Rome.

It's not where Christianity flourished and dominated the culture for more than a millennium, that's France and Spain.

It's not where the sun danced, that is Portugal.

Lack of sleep was just one obstacle. I had to adjust to jet lag and culture shock as well. The culture shock was stark.

New York's Rockefeller center was the only comparison that came to my mind. Seeing Saint Patrick's Cathedral among all those modern skyscrapers is a stark contrast but Lisbon, Portugal is even different. It is an almost schizophrenic city that lives in both 2025 and 1225 at the same time. Along stone streets and ancient spires and people neck deep in middle age culture, exists light shows and modern music and those scooter things. Somehow, they exist side by side. This city pulls it off and I don't know how.

This picture shows it about as clearly as any I took.

We spent one night in a hotel that temporarily misplaced 2 of my bags and were rather flippant about the fact that dinner dragged on past 10 PM.

Blasting loud music and flashing a light show at that late hour didn't sit well for me after 30 hours of virtually no sleep.

Nevertheless, a first highlight was Mass at the cathedral marking the place of the birth of Saint Anthony of Padua.

Saint Anthony is kind of a swiss army knife of Saints, knows as a saint of lost items and impossible causes.

I have often felt like I am both of those things, so I started off this journey by leaning on him.

Using that as a springboard, and fighting through the exhaustion, I moved forward through the next 2 1/2 weeks, remembering the gate that protected the birthplace of the first of many saints I'd encounter on this journey.

Lisbon will always be remembered by me as the first land I ever stood on outside of America, the first place I encountered an actual saint outside of a book and an enigma of a city. It will also be remembered as a really hard slog to push through.

Ultimately, I am hopeful that it will be remembered as the first step in the next phase of an even more incredibly difficult journey, the one to conquer and overcome myself.