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Walking to the Saints: A Little Pilgrimage to France

by Anne McPherson, Tony Urquhart, illus.

The Geometry of Love: Space, Time, Mystery and Meaning in an Ordinary Church

by Margaret Visser

To refer to the new books by Anne McPherson and Margaret Visser as “religious titles” is to do them a disservice, especially to readers, like this reviewer, who shy away from overtly Christian material and might have overlooked these titles as a result. Rather than weighing in on theological issues, Walking to the Saints and The Geometry of Love examine the physical legacy of Christianity, in the form of churches, relics, and pilgrimage routes.

Subtitled A Little Pilgrimage in France, Walking to the Saints chronicles McPherson’s personal spiritual journey through the framing device of a physical walk along the traditional pilgrimage route in Southern France. Each pilgrimage site, including Tours, Conques, and Toulouse, is investigated physically and historically, allowing McPherson time to discover and develop aspects of her own faith.

Similarities to Frances Mayes’ best-selling Tuscany books (Under The Tuscan Sun and Bella Tuscany) present themselves throughout the geographical pilgrimage. Both narrators are academics who choose to live in Europe for a portion of each year, restoring aging houses and travelling in their adopted regions. In a sense, McPherson savours saints and their churches, taking delight in their stories and curiosities the way Mayes collects and savours food and wine. McPherson is gifted with a strong descriptive voice, and captures scene and sense, both contemporary and historical, with an economic effortlessness.

McPherson’s own faith unfolds gradually through her physical explorations. Hers is a gentle awakening – there is no dark night of the soul here, no compelling plunge into belief. Instead, her spirituality takes on an almost pastoral quality – simple, close to the ground, inextricably linked to the everyday pleasures and duties of life in the French countryside. It’s a bucolic image, and one that will tempt and stir many readers.

However, the book’s dual character keeps it from being great: the geographic and transcendant aspects tend to undercut each other. The pilgrimage part of the book, with its history and insight, is somewhat superficial when juxtaposed with the very real questions of McPherson’s faith, while her gentle spiritual questing seems, at times, just another aspect of her travel, another thing to do while in France. Tony Urquhart’s illustrations, while lovely and occasionally evocative, do little to complement the text or aid the reader’s understanding of the sites being described. That being said, Walking to the Saints can nevertheless be read for both genuine insight and considerable pleasure.

If McPherson’s Walking to the Saints is reminiscent of Frances Mayes, Margaret Visser’s The Geometry of Love contains strong echoes of American historian Thomas Cahill. There is, however, one vital difference: where Cahill is most comfortable with the grand sweep of history, Visser delights in minutiae, by focusing in this instance on St. Agnes, an “ordinary church” outside the walls of Rome. With the same ease and playfulness with which she has explored food and drink, Visser examines St. Agnes’ centimetre by centimetre, and in so doing illuminates design elements present in churches throughout the world.

The book is organized as a walk through St. Agnes, from the threshold through the nave and catacombs, altar and tower, finishing at the tomb of the child saint. No traveller is likely fortunate enough to have ever had such a skilled and informed guide as Visser. Every step yields secrets and insights about the church itself and, more significantly, the world outside it. Visser demonstrates great skill in shifting from close examination to a longer view, incorporating history, philosophy, legend, art history, and etymology. The book’s room-by-room structure also allows Visser to develop a measure of suspense. A narrative thread concerning the martyrdom of the 13-year-old St. Agnes is foreshadowed in the book, but is not fully revealed until the closing chapter.

Unlike McPherson, Visser abstains on the question of faith. Despite her own professed belief, Visser has written “a non-devotional book about a church,” and The Geometry of Love is stronger for her decision. Visser uses her intimate knowledge of Christianity to enrich her book (even when it brings her into conflict with accepted church dogma and belief), but never at the cost of academic or historical accuracy.

 

Reviewer: Robert Wiersema

Publisher: Novalis

DETAILS

Price: $27.95

Page Count: 208 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 2-89507-076-8

Issue Date: 2000-12

Categories: Sports, Health & Self-help

Reviewer: Robert Wiersema

Publisher: HarperFlamingo Canada

DETAILS

Price: $35

Page Count: 352 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 0-00-255739-8

Released:

Issue Date: December 1, 2000

Categories: Sports, Health & Self-help

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