Last night, my host, Juliane, told me about the sword in the stone on today’s walk. It’s a convoluted tale involving Charlemagne’s famous nephew Roland, bickering locals trying to escape responsibility for the bill, and a culminating “screw you guys, I’m going home” conclusion. Who wouldn’t want to see a sword lodged in a stone? Well, Juliane warned me, I shouldn’t get my hopes up. On the beautiful forest trail from Capranica to Sutri, the angle is such for pilgrims on the way to Sutri that it’s nearly impossible to spot. As a consequence, I relinquished this possibility entirely, shifting my focus to the stunning scenery. In the early morning, the light crept through the foliage surreptitiously, occasionally creating pocket explosions of luminous green, before slipping back to the margins. In Sutri, I realized I hadn’t once thought of the sword.
There is, I suppose, some truth to the “Reality – Expectations = Happiness” bromide. Without Juliane’s cautionary note, I might have sought doggedly for a sword that would never occur, missing the beauty of the trail in the process. What I’ve never liked about that saying, though, is the implication that we should restrain our hopes. By this logic, the lower you set your sights, the more you’ll enjoy the view. What a pity.
As part of the Jubilee 2025 kickoff, Saint Francis authored an autobiography that he titled Hope, and I’ve been listening to it over these last few stages into Rome. It is, admittedly, a meandering work, alternatively narrating Francis’s childhood progression to the Church, his subsequent election to the Papacy, and–by the end–a list of topics that we just wanted to write about, like the Internet and AI. It’s almost as though the aging, increasingly infirm pope knew this would be one of his last long-form public statements, and he wanted to cover as much ground as possible. Also worthy of pity–whoever served as the pope’s editor.
While I was interested in Francis’s life and thoughts, I was primarily focused on his thoughts on hope, given the subject of the Jubilee, and the fleeting nature of such positive notions in 2025. Increasingly, I wondered what made him a man of hope–how did his journey from Argentina to the Vatican shape the orientation of a man who became such a positive force in the Church and the world?
The Via Francigena in this section also takes a winding approach, navigating around various impediments. The busy highway outside of Sutri, the large expressway interchange after Monterosi, the passage through Monte Gelato and its small waterfall, the looping trajectory to make the ascent through Campagnano di Roma’s old town gate, and then the scenic roads and footpaths arcing through the Sorbo and Veio parks.
Young Francis, or perhaps I should write Jorge, made all the typical mistakes one might expect of a young man, and he accrued no shortage of regrets over the years. As I followed his growth from adolescence to young adulthood, I saw, time and again, how he was able to make amends–to revisit those personal failures and make a course correction. The boy he harmed in a fight. The visitor he neglected. The family friend who he lost track of for decades. Years passed, the wounds festered. “If I consider what is the greatest gift that I desire from the Lord, and have experienced, it is the gift of shame,” Francis writes. While I might suggest he’s thinking more of “guilt” than “shame,” I’ll skip the semantic debate for now, and instead underscore the point. It was a credit to his hyper-sensitivity to personal failing that ensured that when an opening ultimately emerged–an opportunity for reparation, reconciliation, or simply a fresh start–he jumped headfirst into it.
When we think about hope, we tend to consider it as a forward-facing orientation. Good things are coming down the road! Be optimistic–it’ll all work out! And indeed, Francis addresses this sort of hope, noting how it’s a balm to humans and a superpower for Christians. At his core, though, I see his groundswell of hope emerging from his engagement with his past, with a realization–implied and largely unstated in the book–that mistakes can be corrected. This is hardly a newsflash for a religion predicated on confession, atonement, and forgiveness, but I had never considered hope to be rooted in the past. What could be more foundational, though, than a belief that the past doesn’t have to own our destiny, to dictate our futures, to leave us permanently, unredeemably scarred?
Towards the end of the autobiography, Francis references a Chinese proverb, which suggests there are only two kinds of perfect people–the dead and those not born. I couldn’t help but laugh as I unrolled my bivy next to a Roman cemetery on the outskirts of Isola Farnese, preparing for my evening with the perfect. They kept me safe overnight, even from the hordes of mosquitoes swarming ravenously outside my tent, and the next thing I knew it was 4:50am. More than enough sleep to make the final push into Rome.
These weeks on the Via Francigena have also been backward-looking, grappling inevitably with moments of guilt from past student walks, especially the first one here 20 years ago. At the same time, though, pilgrimage has always afforded me the opportunity of processing shortcomings. As it took an annual role in my life, something I could anticipate each summer, if not more often, I began to see it as a system reset, a chance to clear out the cache from the past eleven months, and to return fully restored. It is clear now that this has made me more hopeful. You can always take another step. Consistency, persistence, clarity of purpose–those will get you through. Francis writes of pilgrimage that it is “a creative, vital urge, connected to hope.” The pilgrim, he explains, “walks, looks ahead, confronts difficulties, continues on, keeping alive a visceral connection with his or her roots.” Like hope, pilgrimage is an orientation of the spirit, a psychological practice.
For all my efforts to frontload the theme of hope in my final approach to Rome, I confess that arrival sent me stumbling off track at multiple points. The city is always swarming with visitors, of course, but September in a Jubilee year is a whole different level. The added congestion created by a massive concert event resulted in a further compression of space. Far from a quiet, reflective moment at St. Peter’s, arrival was a jostling, overwhelming, aggravating process–even with the much-appreciated ability now for pilgrims on the Via Francigena to skip the security line. I couldn’t help but reflect on R.A. Scotti’s great book, Basilica: The Splendor and the Scandal: Building St. Peter’s, which outlines how Pope Julius II’s efforts to build this artistic treasure nearly destroyed the Church, contributing along the way to the Protestant Reformation. It’s easy, when your gaze shifts downward, from the towering wonders of the church, to the bustling crowds, to cynically wonder if Julius succeeded less in producing a bastion of faith, and more in a tower of commercialism.
Stumbling out of the basilica in a daze, I caught my mood tipping over–I could practically feel Francis tsk-tsking me from beyond. And then I saw two pilgrims, freshly arrived like me, posing with their Testimoniums for a photo. I smiled, confused them terribly when I offered a fist bump, and then eventually arrived at the brilliant idea of using words instead. They were German. Older. The man was visually limited and had a white cane. When they left, he held to his wife’s backpack with his left hand, while pointing the cane ahead with his right. They were so happy. What an accomplishment!
I looked back at the Church. There is more than enough pain in the past to draw upon if we should wish to nourish grievances in the present, whether 500 years ago, 20 years, or even just yesterday. The lesson from Francis, though, is that the work of the present is to always strive to amend and repair our personal failings–to pair a deep sense of guilt related to our shortcomings with the accompanying confidence that we have the capacity to atone, to do better. It is only through that honest reckoning with history that we can carry forward with hope.
