Perigueux
The optimistic reports about the weather passed on to me mid-week have been right only about one thing: it IS warm for October in France; the temperatures in the afternoons are getting into the mid-20s C. (upper 60s low 70s). The sunny skies just are not showing up, though. The village of Sorges at 8.00 this morning was enveloped in a dense cloud of drippy mists through which I then walked for the next 3 hours; it was so damp that water droplets were drizzling down the front of my glasses.
I walked for most of those early hours along a small highway, so for extra safety in the pea soup I put on my headlamp, a small, bright LED flashlight that straps to my forehead; no use getting whacked by a Renault.
The fog eventually lifted, though the skies remained low and grey. As I walked I passed a large goose ranch, hundreds of the birds out in a field, as a moving, cackling carpet of grey. I called out to them that they should try to break out, or they’d be seeing their livers being served up in little pieces of toast on Christmas tables all over France. They didn’t take my warning seriously, so I see nothing but foie gras in their future. Thiviers, by the way, is home to the Foie Gras Museum, and Sorges claims for itself the Truffle Museum, but can they compete with Leuven’s Museum of Witloof?
I would like to come back to this area of France, for this is Cro-magnon country, and nearby caves have ancient paintings deep within: running horses and handprints, much more interesting than truffles and foie gras.
Perigueux, where I ended today’s walk, is a fairly big city, and one of the more famous pilgrim stops from the Middle Ages. At the center of town is a massive Byzantine cathedral with a multiplicity of domes and great sweeping arches in all four directions. It is a magnificent thing, and the recent renovations to the sanctuary are beautifully done. I felt at home there, and enjoyed just sitting in its dark coolness for awhile, taking a deep breath or two after a long day on the Way.
These churches in these pilgrim towns are the real links in the pilgrim chain; the walking takes us from one to the next, with the expectation that in these great places of prayer, one after another after another, we seek and find the true Way. It’s a cumulative effect; they slowly open up more and more of the mysteries of life and God to us, the more that we walk into them and breathe in their strange air. The walking too, with all that it holds, day in and day out, does plenty of revealing and unfolding, but it’s in the churches that the truths are made explicit for the pilgrim, at least for pilgrims who are looking for truth and what is real in themselves and the universe. So I think, anyway.
