Title Page

Strannik

The Call to the Pilgrimage

of the Heart

Catherine de Hueck Doherty

Copyright Page

Copyright © 2000 Madonna House Publications. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the written permission of Madonna House Publications.

Cover painting by Patrick Stewart

Pilgrim drawing by Carolyn Desch

1st Ebook: August 2012

Second Edition

Second Printing, Feast of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, July 16, 2000

First Printing, Feast of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, July 16, 1991

First edition, Ave Maria Press, 1978

Printed in Canada

www.madonnahouse.org

Canadian Cataloguing in Publications Data

Doherty, Catherine de Hueck, 1896-1985

Strannik : the call to pilgrimage for Western man.

ISBN 978-1-897145-25-8

1. Doherty, Catherine de Hueck, 1896-1985

2. Christian life—Catholic authors. I. Title.

BX2350.2.D64 1991248.2C91-090366-2

I The Remembrance of Paradise

Strannik is the Russian word for “pilgrim,” and this book is about pilgrims and pilgrimages. The pilgrimages I want to speak about are not those made on beautiful ships with all the slick conveniences of modern travel, or on planes that bring you quickly from one place to another. No. The pilgrimage I want to talk about is the life-pilgrimage.

It is rather obvious that life is a pilgrimage. But what, really, is a pilgrimage? We can begin by taking the long historical perspective.

God evidently loves pilgrims. For to some, like Tobias, he sent angels as guides. To others, like Abraham, he just said, “Arise and go.” Abraham could be called one of the first pilgrims.

I wonder what happened to Adam and Eve when they left the Garden? They had been told to look after it and cherish it and yet they were taken out of paradise just the same. Although they didn’t know it, they had been given another paradise.

It is quite evident that they must have embarked on a pilgrimage. Above all, Adam and Eve must have embarked on a pilgrimage with a nostalgia for what had been. The audible, visible presence of God and his friendship must have been like a fire in the hearts of Adam and Eve!

Were they nomads? Were they hunters? Did they know about sowing and harvesting? It’s not really important. They were pilgrims. They were the first pilgrims of ‘the Absolute’: God. For they had known him. Yes, they had known the Absolute and this knowledge passed into all their children’s hearts.

Millions upon millions have been pilgrims in lost civilizations, in Christian times and in our times. The fire of nostalgia for paradise was something that could not be quenched, something that was hidden in a corner of the heart of every person. During the history of mankind some followed its call to “arise and leave all things,” and to follow—what or whom? A reality? Who can say?

Consider the prophets. They were told to “arise and go,” but that was because from their very childhood they had a dream, a dream of seeking the Absolute. Oh, they tried to squash it, to deny it, but they couldn’t. The Absolute called to them. Out of some depth unknown to them they heard that voice.

They may not have seen him who called, though some did, I think; yet they knew who it was who called, and they couldn’t resist. They had to arise. They had to go, leaving big cities, beautiful surroundings, rich houses with soft and downy couches, away from wine, song and carnal attractions. They had to go, and nothing could hold them back.

Neither relatives, nor pressure groups, nor businesses, nor anything human restrained them, for always those pilgrims had a strange way of listening. Why do I imagine that their heads were always a little tipped to one side as if they were trying to catch a voice that was indistinct? They were making sure, as it were, that they heard it. And hearing, they arose. Half the time they didn’t know where they were going, and many in the beginning didn’t even know why. For this persistent strange ‘voice’ of nostalgia that was no voice at all spoke distinctly, though it wasn’t audible.

But nostalgia isn’t the exact word. It was more a hunger that Adam and Eve experienced when they had to leave the friendship of God, the vision of God. This hunger came to them at eventide—a hunger for friendship, for oneness with God. That was what they cried out for. That was what the banishment was all about.

The bible says there were angels standing with flaming swords to guard the gate to the Garden, and I can imagine the scene. I can see Adam and Eve standing outside the gates of what we call “paradise”. There are thousands of paradises on earth too, but this was something special, and it was a place. It had to be a place because Adam and Eve were human; and they had experienced the unity of God, man and woman.

I have written a book called Sobornost; this is a Russian word meaning “unity”. In it I talk about the profound unity among the three persons of the Most Holy Trinity and how we human beings can experience this deep unity among ourselves and with God by becoming of one mind and heart with God and his will.

Just think of it: the unity or sobornost of the Holy Trinity penetrated and became incarnate in the unity or sobornost of the man and the woman—Adam and Eve. And then, by some incredible miracle, the sobornost of the Trinity and the sobornost of mankind, as represented by Adam and Eve, were one. This is beyond understanding, so let us simply bow low before this mystery.

No wonder that this moment was somehow captured for all eternity in the hearts of all men. They dreamt strange dreams of that unity, that sobornost. Some spoke of their dreams and were called sorcerers and heretics, although they were not. They did not give the apple to Eve. Nor were they necessarily Christians, who knew that God is the Lord of History and that he touches everybody.

They were people such as ‘the Three Kings’—the Oriental Magi (Mt 2), or the aboriginal or other ancient peoples. All men who have religion of some sort are dreamers, and dreamers of a very special kind. They dream of unity between God and men, in a total sobornost. It is the dream conferred upon, and handed over as a treasure to, Adam and Eve. Mankind can develop that dream or let it lie unrecalled.

Yes, we seek sobornost! For when all is said and done, what is man really seeking? Obviously he is often moved by the pleasure principle. But deep down, hidden under all kinds of emotional fears, lies the hidden dream of unity, of oneness with the God of all creation.

Perhaps it isn’t a dream at all. Perhaps it is a remembrance; the word “pilgrimage” in every language refers to a remembrance. Then the remembrance becomes a dream, and, for some, a reality. Pilgrims have to leave everything behind and follow this reality that is hidden in the midst of time.

Who is to explain the migration of peoples all over the world? Back and forth, back and forth. They didn’t move simply because they were nomads or farmers, though that might be part of it. I believe that in the collective hearts of all those tribes there was hidden the gift that Adam and Eve left to all of us: the remembrance of unity with God. Sobornost!

Angered because their dream never reached reality as they expected it to do, some people built Towers of Babel to reach God. But may one Russian who is in love with God say, without fear and trembling, that perhaps this was done and is still being done in pursuit of Adam and Eve’s heritage?

The hunger for God is growing in leaps and bounds all across the world, and it is especially visible and palpable in the Third World, whatever the beliefs of its peoples may be. Could it be in pursuit of a dream that is a reality, the only true reality that exists?

Well, all I can say is what comes to me in the dark of night, like a light: that this hunger might be the crying of humanity to God.

I have also written a book called Poustinia, in which, in a manner of speaking, I tried to meet the needs for prayer. “Poustinia” is the Russian word for “desert”, and this desert or poustinia may be a room, a shack, or one’s own heart. It is a place of encountering God in silence, solitude and prayer. But before one enters into the poustinia one must understand what sobornost is: unity among ourselves—all peoples, all nations—and God.

For it is on unity, on sobornost, that, ultimately, we meditate in the poustinia. It is for sobornost, for this unity, that we pray in the poustinia. For we were created to be one with God as Adam and Eve were, in paradise. That unity was restored upon Christ’s arrival, upon his incarnation.

Christ was the total pilgrim, the Son of God become man, who pilgrimaged from the bosom of his Father to the hearts of mankind. Christ, who lived among us as men do. Christ, who became the bridge between all mankind and God. Christ, who died for all men, no matter who they were, sinners or saints.

He is the Lord of History. He is the bridge between the Father and mankind. He invites us to a pilgrimage, the supreme pilgrimage. He offers himself as the path. “I am the way,” he said, “to the Father.” Christ offers himself as the path to the Father, giving us the opportunity to become one with the Father again, one with himself, and with the Holy Spirit. To be one with God! To know God as Adam and Eve knew him.

Yes, Christ was the Supreme Pilgrim, the incredible pilgrim who descended from heaven to earth and returned from earth to heaven, thereby making us free. Free to love and free to serve. Free to undertake a pilgrimage of love. Every Christian must make a pilgrimage of love to the Father, to God. And the Christian has to love himself before he can love anybody else. He has to walk that long road inward, take that inner journey, that interior pilgrimage that alone will make him touch Christ, who dwells within him.

There is another part to the pilgrimage. Namely, the pilgrim must love those who hate him and be good to those who are not good to him; he must even come to the point of giving away his clothing and his belongings. Then finally he has to enter into a pilgrimage of fire.

For there is a pilgrimage of fire since Christ came! It is a pilgrimage of passionate, incredible love that would give itself to be a path for Christ to walk on. To lay our life down for another is to make a red carpet for Christ to walk on. He made a red carpet for us to walk on, to the Father. His precious blood was spilled across the world. It was spilled abundantly. We too can spill our blood for love of him and of our neighbor, drop by drop. It may not be as abundant as his was, but it will be a road sign for pilgrims to follow.

Since the coming of Christ this pilgrimage of fire has always been offered. Some people completed it and some didn’t, but the dream was still in their hearts.

In the ‘poustinia’ of one’s heart, sobornost must be contemplated. Eventually, by God’s grace, you may enter what I call “the void of God”: that state of prayer that is beyond meditation and contemplation, when all senses are suspended and one rests in the peace of God and in his will. Then you will see that all things that are real belong to him, and things that belong to you will seem as mist. You will see that the mist is not worth turning your head to look at. Once this happens, by his immense grace, you will understand what it is that he is calling you to.

And so, contemplating sobornost in the poustinia, one must face becoming a pilgrim as the outcome. God the Father left a hunger in Adam and Eve, and God the Son brought us an image of his Father’s face, for he said, “Who sees me sees the Father.” Christ, the great Pilgrim who came from heaven down to earth and went from earth back to heaven, makes the dream of the pilgrim a reality.

There is no misty fogginess about that kind of thing. Now it is time to open the latch of your door, of your poustinia door, be it only the latch to the poustinia in your heart.

Once you have passed through the “void” you know that it is never really a void, for you have met God. Now that you know he is there, you take your staff and go, leaving all things behind you.

You go to preach the gospel with your life, person to person—to anyone, at any time. There is no rush. The person who comes from the void of God is never rushed, for he bears within himself not only the image of God but the seal of God’s peace that surpasses all understanding.

So we go to the poustinia to contemplate unity, to bring forth mankind’s dream that began with Adam and Eve. The dream intensifies now because Christ was incarnate in our midst and has returned to heaven. Now we know that we have to preach the gospel. A pilgrim preaches the gospel by living it day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute. For what is he really about, this pilgrim of mine? He is preaching the gospel with his life. His pilgrimage has to reflect this.

It’s a strange kind of pilgrimage, one that comes from the depth of a person. It is a new kind of pilgrimage, although it has been in man’s heart from time immemorial and will be there until man and God meet again in the Parousia.

II Following the Pilgrim Christ

Yes, it’s a strange and new kind of pilgrimage, although it is also as old as man.

We can escape this pilgrimage. We can easily forget it. We can put a screen in our heart between it and all the rest of our life. We can go after many things; we can go on pilgrimages seeking gold and silver, fame, power, and so on. But those are not really pilgrimages; they are shams. They are imaginary goals that, once attained, fall apart and are replaced by other goals that become dust again. Ultimately, we remain empty.

Everybody seems to be pilgrimaging, in the sense that human beings put one foot in front of the other all day long, resting a little at night. But one cannot apply the word “pilgrimage” to that sort of thing. There are only two pilgrimages in life: one to heaven and one to hell.

Perhaps the one I am talking about here is a pilgrimage to hell, if hell is properly understood. It is a word much bandied about. But, like love, hell is totally indefinite. Our hell is first and foremost of our own making, and our pilgrimage to it is also of our own making.

We want money. We want fame. We want this and that to satisfy our insatiable need for pleasure or for recognition or power. It is to satisfy this selfish need that we create our own hell and that we pilgrimage to it. It’s a pilgrimage that doesn’t lead us anywhere except around and around and around. We could almost say that one meets oneself on such a pilgrimage, for the circuit is very short. It is a small circle in which such a one walks, for he obeys his own will instead of God’s. He worships his will and he follows it. He worships emptiness and it leads him nowhere; because of that it is a hellish state to be in.

For a moment or two there is satisfaction, the satisfaction of having sensual pleasure or power or whatever. But it vanishes long before the dawn comes and, as time goes on, even the dawns disappear. They merge with the night and man moves onward, following his own will in the dark.

One can’t call that a true pilgrimage, for the Prince of Evil leads it. However, perhaps he relishes the word “pilgrim” being applied to his followers.

Pilgrimage—the real one, the one I want to talk about—is holy. It started in the hearts of men when the doors of Eden were closed. Since then man has gone in search of the key. He knew there was going to be a key.

Yes, at that moment he already knew the mercy of God, for, interestingly, the Lord provided a covering for Adam and Eve, as it says in the bible. He provided pelts, because it was going to be cold outside of paradise. It’s a seldom noticed sentence in Scripture but it is there (Gn 3:21). Thus man had hope.

It is out of faith that man decides to go on pilgrimage in search of God. Where there is faith, there is always hope. Where there is hope, there is love. As Adam moves across the centuries man is moved by faith and love to hope that somewhere, someplace, the key of paradise will be given to him again. Man’s pilgrimage described in the bible and in other holy books knew about the search for the Absolute, the search for the key that would open the door to unity with the Absolute.

Many religions reflect that type of pilgrimage, and our own Christian faith reflects it very clearly. We were pilgrimaging in search of a key which we knew God’s mercy would hand us. In some cases his command was audible; in other cases it was hidden deep down in the hearts of men: “Arise and go. Go to seek me. Go to find me. Go to give me to others.” That is the essence of the call to pilgrimage, even in the Old Testament.

Then Christ came and he was the key: the “Key of David” (Rv 3:7) that reopened the door of paradise. Christ restored unity because he was the Key of David. He reunited the Most Holy Trinity with mankind. Union with the Trinity was the goal of the heavenly pilgrimage that, throughout the centuries, men have undertaken.

The pilgrims couldn’t reach the goal alone. Man could not complete the journey without Christ. Even though the pilgrims’ faith was like a fire, lighting the whole horizon; even though their hope was burning, leading toward the goal; even though love made the feet of the pilgrims unfaltering, indefatigable, and impervious to heat and cold (referring to climates of soul), still they needed Christ in order to reach the goal of union with the Trinity.

But let us bring this idea of pilgrimage down to our everyday life of today. What role has pilgrimage in our technological world?

I have prayed over this question again and again, for it has taken root in my heart like the roots of a great tree. It seems clear and unmistakable to me that this pilgrimage must take place, if man and God are to walk together again in the twilight—or in early morning or on sunny days.

The thought often comes to me that, first, the pilgrim must pray, crying in the night like a child, sobbing like a woman. He must cry like men do, releasing unaccustomed tears out of eyes that haven’t cried since childhood. That’s what we must do. We must shed tears before the Almighty, asking for faith because we realize that nothing can happen in our relationship to God without faith.

Out of the depths we cry to God. Out of the depths and from the heights, from east and west, we truly cry out to God. But we cry to him especially out of the night, the night brought on by our technological society—the night in which machines continue to work 24 hours a day. In the city there is no rest from the noise of machines. There is no place to hide. We have to cry. We must cry to God to give us faith that we can again be one with him.

We don’t believe that we can be, you know. We barely believe in the Pilgrim whom we call Jesus Christ. That’s what I am talking about. We lack faith in the Trinity. The totality of love comes to us in the Trinity. “The Father so loved the world that he gave his own Son.” Listen to that! Listen and look! Look at that precipice on which the Father stood and from which he sent his Son to be crucified for you and me. Look how Love gave his only-begotten Son for us. Listen to the cries of the Son as he was flagellated and crucified. Here is a sea of pain the likes of which we cannot imagine, unless we too are flagellated and crucified. And all for you and me!

In his resurrection, Christ handed you and me the key to the goal of our pilgrimage. We call it the door of paradise, but there are many ways of explaining it. Still bloody from the wounds inflicted by his crucifixion, Christ hands us the key of reconciliation—reconciliation between God and man. That was the price of sobornost.

Will you please try to meditate on sobornost? The meditation is so tremendous that one needs to go apart, to be away, in solitude if possible, at least in the solitude of one’s heart.

Consider Christ the reconciliator. Christ the salvation of mankind. Christ the victim. Christ triumphant. Christ in our midst. Christ always present. Christ the key to the Father.

All this requires some thinking, in a poustinia. Whether one contemplates in the poustinia of one’s heart or in the poustinia of a cabin or room, it makes no difference. But it requires meditation, a deep and profound contemplation. For sobornost is the key to the survival of this planet, believe it or not. If we are united with God we will survive. If we are not, we won’t. So sobornost must be meditated upon and contemplated in the poustinia.

Why in the poustinia? Because the poustinia will strip away from us all that isn’t God. Just think: week after week in poustinia, I open myself to God, letting him do with me as he wills. I concentrate on my oneness with him and my oneness with my fellowmen. If I am one with God, I am one with men. Then and only then, when the poustinia has cleansed me totally, has opened me to God and to others, when I have committed myself to God—the Lord of History, the Triune God—then I can leave all things behind and move on the pilgrimage that God has called me to.

All people are called to pilgrimage, but not all answer; and not all are called to the same pilgrimage. The pilgrimage I talk about is for those called to follow, step by step, the footsteps of Christ.

These pilgrims are easily seen because they leave bloody footprints along the way. They are easily seen because there is a light coming from their footprints.

They are truly pilgrims because God called them to this and because they have contemplated sobornost, in poustinia. Now they are making this rhythm of sobornost, poustinia, and strannika (pilgrimage) their way of life.

It is an utterly unhurried pilgrimage. It is a pilgrimage whose only goal is the heart of God. It’s not a pilgrimage to shrines, or a pilgrimage of seeing other countries like so many young people have done lately. No. It’s a pilgrimage that has one precious thing besides its poverty. It holds a key, and every day that key goes a little deeper into the heart of God until one day—click!—it will open and man and God will be one. That kind of pilgrimage creates peace in order to give it to others, since man is in search of God and in search of peace from the raucous noise of modern technological society.

The pilgrimage of such people is formless. Now the pilgrim is here, helping somebody to build a house. When the house is built he moves on. He walks long stretches until—to use the image of Christ washing the feet of his disciples—God places before him another pitcher filled with the water of love and hope and faith, and the towel of joy and consolation. Then the pilgrim stops again, and again performs that service which someone is in need of.

It may take him weeks. He may appear to be settling wherever he is, but he never settles. He is always on the march. His particular task finished, he moves again; there is no settling down for such a pilgrim. It may take him years to do what God asks of him—if, for example, God asks him to create an apostolate and train apostles to serve in it. He may appear to be totally immersed in this work. Yet his heart is always waiting for the next call from the Lord, the call to ascend the mountain. Always the Lord invites him: “Come up higher. Friend, come higher!”

The pilgrim, being human, sometimes likes the spot where he has been placed. He wants to stay there. He wants to make a flower garden of that spot. When he hears, “Friend, come higher!” he turns and looks up the mountain of the Lord. He sees snow up there. He can hear and feel the cold wind. He clutches the key that was given to him by the resurrected Christ to go higher, to enter a little deeper into God’s heart, to enter a little more into sobornost, to do God’s will better, faster, more joyfully as a voyager. Climbing is not easy, but he responds to the voice which keeps repeating, “Friend, come on higher!”

III From Refugee to Pilgrim

Yes, God always seems to call a soul to “come higher.” I have often wondered: what kind of mountain does he call us to? Mount Sinai is the mountain of the Lord, for many biblical events happened on it. But I don’t think that is the kind of mountain that he is calling people to climb. Rather he calls us to a special mountain that grows according to his words.

I speculate on this because I myself am a pilgrim. This statement needs qualification, but I believe that God has guided me in some way to be a pilgrim. Let us consider a little bit of my life; I must tell you about it in order to pass on to you the idea of pilgrimage.

I was born in Russia. I received no special revelation that I was going to be a pilgrim. Nothing even remotely resembling such a calling came to me. I was firmly planted in the soil of Russia and the soil of Russia was firmly planted in me, in my heart. As I grew up I visualized marriage, children, and farm life in the country, for I come from farming stock.

But all this suffered a tremendous blow, first with World War I and then with the Communist revolution. You might say that in the twinkling of an eye I was transplanted. I was thrown out, separated, torn away from my homeland; I became a refugee. To have been planted in one’s own country, to have known that one’s family has been there for 800 years or more, and then suddenly to become a refugee, well, this was almost unthinkable. To me, it was unthinkable.

And when my husband and I escaped across the border into Finland (which had appeared to be a little more peaceful than Russia), Finland didn’t prove to be very friendly. Eventually we escaped from Finland and finally came to Britain, onto what you might call “free soil”.

One day I sat down on the top of a large building, the YMCA of Edinburgh. The YMCA had very generously given us a room; for Boris, my husband, had pleurisy and was just out of the hospital. Anyhow, I sat on a chair on the very top of that YMCA building. Boris was sleeping. I suddenly got hit with the word “refugee”. It seemed that with my first breath in a free country, I realized I was a refugee.

Do you know what saved my sanity at that time? I thought of Jesus Christ, of Mary and of Joseph. They were refugees. An angel had told Joseph to take Jesus and his Mother to Egypt. I said to myself, “Why do you use the word ‘refugee’? Why don’t you use the word ‘pilgrim’?” For I realized that Jesus Christ had been a pilgrim too, and that he had been a refugee as well, even at that early age, in the natural order of things. Somehow I felt comforted.

In that upstairs room in the city of Edinburgh I found the root idea of pilgrimage: God had pilgrimaged, so why shouldn’t I? He fled from his enemies; why shouldn’t I? God had blessed the land of Egypt by his presence. Why couldn’t I follow in his footsteps and be blessed by his resurrected presence in any land at any time? I felt comforted.

I now see that God had made preparations for me to become a pilgrim, and it’s time for me to tell you about them. For God prepares us for these things.

When I look back on my childhood and youth, the first thing I see is that my mother was a pilgrim. She went to visit monasteries, convents, and holy places. She would go to see an icon that was renowned for its miracles and its “compassion”, as she used to say. The preparations for those pilgrimages were very simple. A week or a few days before she planned to leave for this or that place, my mother would say to me that I should make ready to do likewise.

She meant that I should see to it that my rough linen shift was in good shape and clean, that the lapti (birchbark shoes) were soft and fitted my feet. (Usually, before a pilgrimage, you had to ask a skilled man to fit you with birchbark shoes.) Then you also had to get a bag made out of linen. It crisscrossed your shoulders from left to right, very much like water bags. In it would be a loaf of black bread and a bit of salt. On the other shoulder, crisscrossing from right to left, would be a gourd of water. Then there would be an icon on a cord hanging in front. Also there was something for your head. The men wore hats of some sort; the women kerchiefs, also made of linen.

I can’t remember wearing anything else, for when it rained I remember being wet and mother saying, “Walking dries out the rain.” But usually we could go and hide from the rain in a barn someplace. Those are my recollections of true pilgrimages where we put one foot in front of the other. Most of the time we went barefoot. Laptis were for rain.

I remember something else. I remember that sometime around the age of 11 or 12 I decided to become a “holy pilgrim” myself—without my mother! I too could go and pray in some convent, monastery or such. So I put on the garb of a pilgrim. It was autumn, and in the fall you could, of course, change your garb. Women could wear a black skirt, a black blouse, a heavy sweater, and a cape if the weather was inclement. And always the icon on your breast. Your head was covered with a black kerchief, sort of nunnish-looking. Anyhow, that’s how I dressed myself and proceeded to go on a pilgrimage.

I made my way down the main avenue of Petrograd (later Leningrad), crossing innumerable bridges. Petrograd has many bridges because it is built on islands. I finally got to the big highway outside the city. As I was walking up that highway and wondering whether I should knock on somebody’s door and ask for shelter for the night, a vehicle drawn by two horses stopped and a policeman got out and asked, “Are you Miss So-and-So?” I said, “Yes.” “Well,” he said, “your father would like you to come home.” So I climbed in the vehicle and they brought me home.

My father merely said: “Catherine, you always wanted to be a pilgrim, but how can you be a pilgrim without the blessing of your parents? You just walked away without saying anything, and certainly without a blessing.” That was all he said. I felt sorely ashamed and miserable. Of course you couldn’t walk out of your parents’ home without a blessing. (In fact you should have asked for the blessing of your parish priest also.) But I had walked out by myself, slightly arrogant.

Nevertheless, you see how I had been a pilgrim even before I was a teenager; the idea of pilgrimage had already taken shape in my heart.

Years later, as refugees, my husband and I left Scotland for England, and then left England for Canada. When I arrived in Canada I felt like a pilgrim indeed, although I had not chosen this particular pilgrimage. I was a stranger in a strange land—although a pilgrim is never a stranger to any land because he lives in the resurrected Christ and all the earth is his. Somehow or other it was a real pilgrimage, but the word “refugee” was more suited to me at that moment. I think that’s the way God planned it. One has to cut out some roots to make room for others.

All Christians must make a pilgrimage, a journey inward to meet the God who dwells within them. May I share with you this poem I once wrote about pilgrimage?

Journey Inward

My soul hungered for God

Before it was clothed with flesh.

But when it became imprisoned in the flesh

It fell asleep, and those who sleep,

Know hunger not.

Somewhere along the road of life,

By the grace of God, my soul woke up

And its hunger now became a fire,

A fire that consumed me, ate me up,

With its intense, devouring heat.

I could not rest anywhere except in motion…

In a motion that led me to God.

That is how I began the journey inward,

That long, endless journey

That every soul must undertake

If she is to meet her God.

It is a strange journey across arid plains

And verdant valleys, deserts…

A journey of many crossroads

And endless sharp turns

That confuse and clamor for a rest.

But the hunger for God knows no rest,

So I go on and on and on.

Yes, it is a strange journey that slowly

Makes me shed all the baggage I took for it…

The baggage I took for it before I knew

That it was too heavy a load

For this kind of journey.

I don’t know where I left it—

Somewhere back there by some crossroad.

Now I am baggage-less but somehow

Still too heavily burdened.

My hunger drives me on.

But now for speedy traveling it demands

That I start shedding my clothing.

There on this stone

I must lay the cloak of selfishness

That kept me warm.

I am cold without it,

But I can walk faster,

As my hunger urges me to.

Here, on this branch

I must hang my dress of self-love

And compromise with the world.

I shiver now in earnest

But my feet seem to have wings.

Yet this sheltered rock

Begs for my underwear.

Slowly, reluctantly

I shed one by one my undergarments.

Here goes self-indulgence.

Tidily, next to it, I lay greed for possessions,

And love of ease and comfort.

Next, not so tidily, go, helter-skelter,

All the things in me that are not God’s.

Lord, behold I stand naked before Thee,

With wings on my feet…

With wings on my feet.

Now my journey inward will be swift.

But it is not.

For I still stumble and fall,

And walk haltingly inches, instead of miles,

While the hunger for God flays me

And urges me to make haste.

Oh, I had forgotten my shoes—

The heavy, comfortable shoes

That have shielded my feet…

Shielded my feet from the cutting stones,

From the sharp pebbles.

I must unlace my shoes,

My comfortable stout shoes,

The last covering of my naked body.

The last stronghold

Of my non-surrender to God.

I hesitate.

The narrow path upwards is so hard.

It has so many, so many sharp stones.

So many knife-edged pebbles.

But the hunger for God flames in me,

A furnace of fire unquenchable:

The fire of love, of passionate utter love of God.

I must go on, on that journey inward

That alone will bring me face to face

With him for whom I hunger constantly,

Without ceasing.

Quickly I bend.

With hasty, clumsy fingers I unlace one shoe,

Then the other.

My eagerness is becoming part of my hunger.

Recklessly I throw one shoe this way,

The other, that,

Not caring whither which falls.

And now I am free.

I am free and naked,

And my feet have huge wings,

Huge wings that carry me

Across the sharp stones

And the knife-edged pebbles, without harm.

Now brambles and thorns that edge the path

Open up and point the other way.

I am a naked Soul,

Free and untrammeled,

Driven by the hunger of my love for God.

Driven by my love for God… on and on…

On this journey inward.

I did not know it was going to be so easy,

Now that I shed all my garments.

But now I know.

For my hunger is being assuaged,

Satiated, filled,

Even as I fly on my winged feet

Along the steep path upward.

It is being filled, that hunger of mine,

So much, so well,

That I can feed others with the surplus

Of the food given to me so abundantly.

Yes, my soul hungered for God

Before it was even clothed with flesh.

God meets halfway the soul

That starts on its journey inward,

Provided that the soul,

Driven by its hunger of love for him,

Strips itself naked.

That is the secret of his love

And of his kingdom

That begins even on this earth.

But the price, I repeat,

Is nakedness complete—

Even unto discarding

Shoes….

IV The Soles of My Feet Were Bloody

The poem in the previous chapter presents the pilgrimage of the soul toward the God who dwells within it. I entered into that pilgrimage.

But I also entered into the pilgrimage of service. It seems as though God was shaping me to serve. I worked as a waitress, a laundress, a sales clerk, a nurse, a maid in a private house, all jobs that entailed walking. Always walking. I realized at the time—and that consoled me much—that all this walking was following God’s example, for Christ had said, “I have come to serve.” If he had come to serve, so had I. Waiting on customers and being a maid and a laundress meant service.

Pilgrims in Russia pray all the time, both in silence and in vocal prayer, psalms and song. The songs, of course, are holy ones. You walk together, barefoot; you pray together, you sing together, and you are silent together. So I ‘sang’ this journey inward, side by side with the journey of outward service; and I was seemingly fulfilling God’s command to “Pray always,” which is in itself a preparation for pilgrimage. I had to pray always because my pilgrimage was one of pain, deep and profound.

There was the loss of my husband, Boris, first through the annulment of our marriage, then through death; but especially through the annulment. There was loneliness, and the feeling, more than ever, of being a stranger in a strange land. Being a Polak didn’t help, in a land which, in those days, kowtowed to the rich and the ‘WASPs’. All this created an atmosphere for that true pilgrimage inward that every man must make to meet his God. The pilgrimage of pain is a pilgrimage of prayer and a pilgrimage of service.

Yes, I began to really understand what pilgrimage means. Eventually I got a position which paid very well, $20,000 a year. It didn’t require walking as before, and I got over the pain a little, and things quieted down. But though the pilgrimage of pain subsided, I was still walking the journey inward, for you walk the journey inward all your life to meet the God who dwells within you.

A new idea came to me when my pilgrimage of service changed, due to a change of jobs and position. First I was lecturing, and then I became an executive in a lecture bureau—work which took me across America and Europe. As I lectured, a strange thought kept coming to me.

I usually had a bible—a small one for travel and a big one at home—and whenever I opened those bibles, or any other bible, for some reason they always opened to these words of Christ: “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.”

Well, I used to meditate on that; and periodically I wrote down on little pieces of paper, envelopes and such, this and other thoughts that came from the bible, or just from my own mind. As I traveled, I would drop them into my purse. Then one day I got to thinking, “Why is it that when I open bibles they always open at the same passage?” “Well,” I said to myself, “they are worn, so they automatically open at that place.”

I went to a friend. She had a bible. I opened it. It was new, but behold, there was the passage! I got a little frightened and said, “I’ll go to the library in New York.” They have illustrated bibles, about two feet wide, hard to handle but beautiful. I found one, closed my eyes as usual, and then opened it. Bang, the same passage! Well, that made a girl think!

I returned home. I gathered up all the little notes on thoughts that I had jotted down. Lying flat on the floor, I placed them in some sort of order, and they came out like this:

Arise—go! Sell all you possess. Give it directly, personally to the poor. Take up my cross (their cross) and follow Me, going to the poor, being poor, being one with them, one with Me.

Little—be always little! Be simple, poor, childlike.

Preach the Gospel with your life—without compromise! Listen to the Spirit. He will lead you.

Do little things exceedingly well for love of Me.

Love... love... love, never counting the cost.

Go into the marketplace and stay with Me. Pray, fast. Pray always, fast.

Be hidden. Be a light to your neighbor’s feet. Go without fears into the depths of men’s hearts. I shall be with you.

Pray always. I will be your rest.

I typed it out. I looked at it and said to myself, “This is biblical!” I felt fear, a tremendous fear in my heart, because it seemed that God’s hand was in this. When I say “fear” I mean “awe”. I called it my Little Mandate.

Then I started on a pilgrimage to priests, asking for advice on how to follow the vocation I felt God was calling me to, but they were unable to help. For it seemed rather clear to them what I should do, because I had a son who was still small.

Yet I felt called to sell all I possessed and go on a real pilgrimage, a lifelong pilgrimage, a pilgrimage on which there is no real earthly home. Everybody who needed me would be a “home”.

I remembered that my mother and father had said: “Whenever you are in real difficulty spiritually, go to the father of your soul who is the Ordinary of the diocese, be he a bishop, archbishop or cardinal. Go to him and ask advice. He has the fullness of the gifts of God.” So I went to see Archbishop Neil MacNeil of Toronto. He listened very carefully and did not doubt my desire, but said to wait a while, which I did.

Sometime afterwards the Archbishop agreed, so I literally sold all I possessed and gave the proceeds or the goods themselves to the poor. With a small suitcase I went down to Portland Street in the slums of Toronto where I rented a room in a humble place. My idea was to pray and serve the people there. At the time they were Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian immigrants, very poor people; it was depression time. So I had fulfilled the first part of the Little Mandate. Namely, I had sold all I possessed, I had taken up my cross, and I had followed Christ.

It appeared to be just exactly what I felt sure God wanted, for he was sending me on a pilgrimage that would grow. I felt that I would someday leave that room and start walking, perhaps hitchhiking (for this is a different part of the world than Russia) and stop at places where I was needed. I would travel without money, just as pilgrims should.

To understand the situation of the pilgrim it is helpful to read The Fourth Wise Man by Henry Van Dyke. In this story four ‘Wise Men’ undertook a tremendous pilgrimage to see a Child in a manger. The fourth wise man didn’t make it to their destination, so the legend says, because he kept serving the poor and needy while pilgrimaging. That’s what I thought pilgrimage would be for me, too.

Now, God directs a pilgrim quite differently than would his own thoughts. This is why you always have to “fold the wings of your intellect,” so to speak, and open the door of your heart. This is why you always have to listen, and listen well, to the voice of God, for in the twinkling of an eye he may bid the pilgrim to stand still. Then the pilgrimage of movement, of traveling in the resurrected Christ, is somehow encompassed in a strange stillness, in learning to listen and in learning how to be still.

As I will explain later, the Lord obviously intended that, although I would still be a pilgrim, I would not travel alone. There came three women and two men who desired to join me, and the bishop suggested I take them. This I did.

Thus was begun Friendship House and what is today Madonna House.

I must admit that it took me quite a while to recover from this change in plans, for I had so beautifully arranged everything—my prayer life, my serving life. Suddenly, God mixed it all up.

Then he called, “Friend, come higher.” I must also admit that at that time this invitation didn’t sit too well with me. My life of poverty, with the poor around me and the prospect of further pilgrimages—all this surrounded me like a green valley. I had no wish to climb any mountain of the Lord. I could feel the cold of the place to which he was calling me and the snowflakes were already melting on my face. I didn’t want to go up. I would have preferred to go down but he said in his inimitable fashion, “Friend, come up higher.”

And so up I went into what was, symbolically, a turbulence of snow and ice and cold wind. It took me a long time to realize that even then I was on a pilgrimage (although my heart always pilgrimaged, and so did I). I was crisscrossing the continents of Europe and America, lecturing. Well, that’s just a nice way of saying that I was preaching, in season and out of season, the gospel of the Lord.

First, in the 1930s, I preached on behalf of the silent ones, those who had no jobs, those who were crying out for social justice; later on, the issue was interracial justice.

The pilgrimage was hard. I wanted desperately to be alone. I wanted the poustinia. I wanted a union with God that would make me united with men. I was united with them but they somehow were not united with me in social justice. Rotten eggs and tomatoes were thrown at me as I lectured on interracial justice. But the pilgrimage continued. It was a difficult one.

As I said, I crisscrossed the continent, lecturing. Six times I crossed the U.S.A., for one reason or another; and three or four times I traversed Canada, from Halifax or Sydney to British Columbia.

I was not a very welcome pilgrim. Oh yes, they made arrangements for my coming. They paid me the money they said they would, but I was unpopular. Sometimes pilgrims have to be unpopular. In The Way of a Pilgrim it is related that one time the pilgrim was preaching the gospel in his own fashion and somebody got angry with him and took him to the police. He was beaten and put in jail for 24 hours. Well, he was holy: he rejoiced in that.

I wasn’t a Russian pilgrim in that sense. I just kept putting one foot in front of the other because I knew I had to preach the gospel to people who didn’t really want to hear it. That was a strange pilgrimage.

God again said, “Come on higher,” and I thought I was going to an even colder place than before. But it wasn’t. It turned out to be a desert. In this desert there were strange figures that kept ‘stoning’ me. But I survived.

It was a strange pilgrimage. I thought of my mother and her bare feet and, in a manner of speaking, I imagined that I was walking my deserts with bare feet: the desert of Tennessee, of Alabama, of Kentucky, of Florida and of other southern states.

I traveled. I spoke. I did what pilgrims have to do. A pilgrim is always preaching the word of God. You preach the gospel with your life, not necessarily with your mouth. But at that time I spoke it with my mouth. There are no words to describe the weariness I experienced. Preaching interracial justice in the South in those days was a wearisome thing. I don’t blame those people for their opposition. They were victims of their social conditioning.

Cold and deserts: I lived in them quite a long time. It was a true pilgrimage because it was directed by God, and I walked toward the goals that God meant me to have. My pilgrimage brought charity, social justice—in a word, it brought the gospel to a lot of people. Whether they accepted it or not I wouldn’t know. All I know is that “the soles of my feet were bloody.” All the time I walked on pavements. I had lovely rooms in beautiful convents and monasteries and hotels, but somehow or other the soles of my feet were bloody. That, my friends, is also part of a pilgrimage.

V Pilgrimage to the Hearts of Men

Yes, my feet were bloody because I was still pilgrimaging. I was on a pilgrimage that was both outward and, as I wrote in my poem, inward. I had unlaced my shoes. I had thrown away everything that was not God’s, as the poem says: my undergarments and my cloak of selfishness and all the rest. So I thought, anyhow. But I knew for sure that all this lecturing and all this standing still in Friendship House and in Madonna House was a pilgrimage.

When I read and re-read the Little Mandate I understood why my feet were bloody: I was going into the depths of men’s hearts. That is a precipitous pilgrimage. The depths are stony and they wound your feet. You walk on sharp gravel. You try to hold on to something but there is nothing to hold on to. Going into men’s hearts is a precipitous descent because men’s hearts are deep. I suddenly realized that there was something much more profound in this pilgrimage than just bloody feet.

It was the taking upon yourself of the pain of men. It was the carrying of another person’s cross. Crosses have a way of biting into your shoulders and into your back.

That’s when I realized that I was still on pilgrimage even though it wasn’t the way I had thought about it. It was the way God had thought about it! I was fulfilling the Little Mandate as God wished me to, though it seemed to be in a strange sort of way, and I felt that I was like a ball being bounced in his hands.

The whole Mandate was there in my heart, as far as I was concerned. I had given away everything, as he had asked me. I had gone to the poor; I had lived in the marketplace; I was poor with him and poor with the poor. I hoped that all parts of the Mandate were at least germinating in me even if they hadn’t attained full flowering. It takes a long while to attain such flowering. But I had begun.

The Mandate says, “Go into the depths of men’s hearts—I shall be with you.” Well, this is an important aspect of pilgrimage, one that applies to all Christians, and perhaps even to non-Christians, for God is the Lord of History.

Why did this strange idea come to me, this pilgrimage into men’s hearts, and its application to everyone, especially to all Christians? Because such a pilgrimage can be undertaken only with love—and not with any ordinary human love. Human love doesn’t want precipitous descents into men’s hearts. It doesn’t want to have bloody feet. It doesn’t want to carry other people’s crosses. We humans don’t want that, but God does. And we who are in love with God can’t help ourselves: we have to embark on this pilgrimage because God has given us fantastic gifts, though we do not understand them completely.

We have the gift of assisting Christ in his saving work. We can assist him because he invited us to do so. “It makes me happy to suffer for you, as I am suffering now, and in my own body to do what I can to make up all that has still to be undergone by Christ for the sake of his body, the Church,” says St. Paul (Col 1:24).

We also have the gift of miracles, for Christ said, “I tell you most solemnly, whoever believes in me will perform the same works as I do myself; he will perform even greater works because I am going to the Father” (Jn 14:12).

I stood before that revelation, in my heart. It was as if something were made clear to me, as if the Holy Spirit had shed his light on me. He flashes his light suddenly on one word or one sentence of the gospel, of the Scriptures. And what was unfamiliar yesterday becomes familiar today. It becomes a whole new gift of God. We often take this word for granted, but there is nothing in the gospel that should be taken for granted.

I believe we should be quite simple and childlike about miracles. If we have faith, we can encircle with our love anyone we meet on the road who is in need of a miracle; and we, in the same faith, can perform that miracle.

We can say, “Thy faith and the blessing of Jesus Christ have made thee whole.” We can say that because, as any pilgrim of Christ knows very well, without God he is nothing; he can never attribute to himself anything at all. All that he does, he does through God. Somehow or other the pilgrim becomes a path through which the fire of God travels and which tries to ignite a responsive fire in men.

So some clarity had come to me about these sayings of Christ. I understood a little better the pilgrimage that every Christian had to undertake to meet the God who dwells within. It was a pilgrimage that went outwards, barefoot, to worship the face of Christ someplace: to pray in a monastery that was holy, or to go to a shrine that was renowned. These were pilgrimages, yes, but there was much more to the pilgrimage of life. Who probes the depths of that pilgrimage? Who knows its pains and its joys? Very, very few.

Yes, I have thought much about pilgrimages. Deep down in my heart—call it a dream—the desire for an outward pilgrimage persists even now; I desire to be of service and to pray somewhere else than where I am. At this point in my life, however, nothing will change for me. But it may be that those who read this book have heard in the night the voice of Christ saying, “Arise. Take up your cross and follow me.” They may become actual pilgrims. That’s up to God, and up to the heart that is open to him.

I realize many things as I grow older. I realize that the pilgrim is one who also stands still. It’s not easy to stand still! Stillness is beautiful and silence is delectable, but they require a tremendous amount of patience, and a faith in God that is almost unshakable. Hence they require constant prayer: “Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief!”

Yes, a pilgrimage is also standing still. I’m talking about a strange form of pilgrimage that is hard to explain. It’s so hard to explain what happens between a human heart and God. Because he who said, “Arise, come, take up your cross and follow me” suddenly turns around and says, “Stand still—completely still—as I stood still before the Sanhedrin, before Pilate, before the Roman soldiers and even through my flagellation. And know that there will come a day when you will learn the goal of this pilgrimage that I ask you to undertake.”

Yes, you will stand in perfect stillness because your hands and feet are nailed; you are unable to walk. That’s a pilgrimage too. In fact, it is a supreme pilgrimage. In a way, the crown of pilgrimages.

God requests the pilgrim to stand still, but not for the sake of silence alone, or for solitude. It is so that people may come to the pilgrim. God asks him to stand in the middle of a road.

People who approach him will know that he is a pilgrim. His hands are empty; his feet are bare, in a manner of speaking. He has a little pack roll on his back: a cape that he will sleep on. He carries a linen bag filled with bread and salt, and he carries water. All this is there to be envisaged. But there is something more, something that may not be seen by men’s eyes, for the pilgrim lives by the Eucharist and he drinks of the living waters of Christ. How do people know he is a pilgrim? His face reflects the ‘pilgrim-icon’ of Christ.

He stands still and lets others come to him and he answers their questions. This is hard, for questions are now shouted at the pilgrim, now whispered to him, now spoken to him! It’s astonishing that the pilgrim doesn’t die or go insane under the barrage of questions. But that doesn’t happen, because he is in love with God. And since the questions are always about God (for nobody asks a pilgrim a question that does not deal with God) he gets the grace to answer them.

The pilgrim is wide open. People can look behind him, in front of him, at his side. There is little to see. There is the crust of bread and the gourd of water. That’s all. So people begin to believe that maybe he can answer their questions. Above all, they begin to experience that they are not as lonely as they were before. Though pilgrims are lonely people, walking alone most of the time, they can create an atmosphere among people of joy, of friendship and understanding. The pilgrim doesn’t do it of himself; he has discovered how to allow God to do it all. This is another form of preaching the gospel without compromise.

So pilgrimage embraces also that strange pause which God seems to demand of all pilgrims. The pause of total stillness and of being available to anyone. (I’m saying this in a symbolic way, for it is hard to explain things that exist between God and man, between God and myself. I try to explain them simply.)

Pilgrimage can be seen as symbolic; it’s not a question of standing on a road and blocking the traffic or something like that. Not at all. It is fulfilling the Little Mandate, living in the marketplace; for the marketplace is a place where men gather. This stillness exists or takes place in the marketplace; there the pilgrim touches the depths of men’s hearts.

As one listens to all those screaming, whispering cries of despair, to those cries for hope that men bring to a pilgrim, one becomes cognizant again why one’s feet are bloody. Because he who enters the hearts of men enters a new world. One cannot describe it geographically. One can describe it as an immense, new—totally new—land: the land of God. The land where the battle of Jesus Christ and Satan in the desert is sometimes repeated (Mt 4:1–11).

When you enter the hearts of men, you might possibly be entering at a moment when Satan is tempting the person in the same way that he tempted Jesus Christ. So vast is the land of souls, so immense is the land of hearts, that a pilgrim must enter them in the spirit of the gospel. No wonder the feet of the pilgrim are bloody, for the hearts of men are often stony, and the stones are fragmented, not easy to walk upon.

Pilgrims must be totally defenseless and absolutely open. There must be about them a very childlike simplicity. A pilgrim cannot pilgrimage if he hides anything in his heart. He must be totally open to anyone.

I remember the days when everything I did and said was questioned. I was, in fact, a persona non grata for many, many years of our apostolate. It was only after Vatican II that some modicum of acceptance came. But I am talking about pilgrimage.

The pilgrim is totally open; he is not afraid of persecution. He accepts persecution because he is a follower of a persecuted God. A pilgrim is a person of pain. If he is not ready to accept pain he cannot be a pilgrim. Pain walks with him night and day. But strangely enough, joy does too.

Yes, there is a secret about pilgrimages: the acceptance of pain. The very sentences: “Arise and go” and “Take up my cross and follow me” spell pain. “Arise. Leave everything that is around and about you, everything that is familiar, and go, not knowing where or why. Take up my cross and follow me.” The mere thought of taking up Christ’s cross and following him somewhere, to some unknown place, is frightening. But when that fear gets hold of you your pilgrimage ceases.

Fear is conquered by faith. Because your heart is faith-full, and because you love the God who calls you into nowhere, you go—contrary to every half-inch of your intellect, contrary to everything!

When you stand in front of the cross that he has allotted you, it always looks heavy. But God is generous; he makes the cross grow or shrink, depending on the person he has called. Looking at his own cross, the would-be pilgrim wants to run away, but he can’t. He just can’t, because love holds him tight. So he bends down and he puts that cross on his shoulders and he goes, not knowing where, because he trusts, as Abraham trusted when God asked him to sacrifice his son, Isaac.

We have to show the way to other believers, and so we go, those of us who are called to this pilgrimage. We go, filled with a burning pain that seems to eat our very entrails, a pain so annihilating that when we look at ourselves we seem to be a shadow walking. And yet joy floods our soul.

The pilgrim stands straight and carries the cross for others as if it were a feather, because he has heard the song of the Holy Trinity. He dances to its tune with little steps, walking onward to the nowhere to which God calls him. Pain and joy intermingle in pilgrimages.

Remember that pilgrims pray all the time. Having passed from the prayer of petition, to the prayer of meditation, to the prayer of contemplation, it is possible that the pilgrim might enter, as I said earlier, into the ‘void’ of God where all senses are suspended. Then, of course, he doesn’t feel the cross, although it is still there. He is united to the Most Holy Trinity. And it seems to him, as he walks on, that now and again he can hear the footsteps of God at eventide.

Now his sense of pilgrimage becomes clear. Even if his prayer has not yet brought him to this ‘void’ where all senses are suspended, it has brought him to contemplation of God whom he loves. Love will urge the pilgrim on, no matter what. Love is like that, and the reason why he started on pilgrimage is because his Divine Lover told him to do so.

You see, he has been schooled in the school of sobornost. Remember? He has spent much time in the poustinia, meditating so as to understand the sobornost that must exist between God and man, and between the pilgrim and his brother. And then God has come to the pilgrim and said, “Arise and come. Take up my cross and follow me”; and the pilgrim has done so.

Because the pilgrim started with sobornost, even while he is yet in the states of meditation and contemplation, his faith hears the footsteps of God in the cool of the evening; and the ancient remembrance, the ancient dream, becomes a reality.

VI Leaving the Poustinia

Yes, the pilgrim hears the footsteps of God as he passes by at eventide, even as Adam and Eve heard them.

A pilgrimage has strange depths that are hard to explain. To go on a pilgrimage in the old days was what the old-timers called it: an act of devotion; it was virtuous. You gave alms to the poor as you walked to the holy places. That was a simplification, a beautiful one, of the fullness of pilgrimage.

But pilgrimage is so much more, so terribly much more. I myself have to constantly go over the ‘rosary’ of the different facets of pilgrimage.

As I said, in order to begin pilgrimage, sobornost is required. And to internalize sobornost, the poustinia is necessary, in order that sobornost really takes hold and reunites you to God and man (which is what sobornost means). The silence and solitude of a poustinia are required for this to happen. It doesn’t matter very much whether it be a real poustinia or the poustinia of your heart. There must be an entry into one’s own depths, depths that lie unsuspected in the heart of every person.

Yes, pilgrimage requires poustinia and sobornost, and a real steeping of oneself in that union. One has to steep oneself in it. Factually, one must become totally immersed in that union, for sobornost is a unity that must not be broken.

The grains of that funny ‘rosary’ slip through my fingers, one by one. So far there have been only two or three familiar grains. Now I come to a rather large one.

The poustinik has immersed himself in sobornost as far as he can, he has solitude of heart, and now he arises from his chair or bed and moves toward the door of his poustinia. He moves to the door of his heart because he hears, faintly yet clearly, the voice of God saying, “Arise and come into the marketplace and preach the Good News to all you meet.”

The poustinik is unsure for a moment or two. He has spent so long, it seems to him, absorbing or being absorbed in sobornost—the unity that, from the beginning, God meant to exist between man and God, and between man and his brother. It has taken such a long time for that immersion, and all of it was spent in poustinia, for, I repeat, sobornost needs silence and solitude and a deep listening heart.

Now quite unexpectedly, God calls and says, “Come into the marketplace and preach the Good News.” No wonder the pilgrim hesitates. He knew that he would be called to a pilgrimage but he did not know what kind. The pilgrimage into the marketplace was the furthest from his thoughts. He had visualized a lonely road—city pavements and city streets, yes. But he pictured himself passing by, as it were, bearing the icon of Christ on his face and in his heart. He saw himself as leaving the city, going into the country places, onto rural roads, little paths, to little people, not to crowds. Yet he hears the voice: “Come into the marketplace and preach my gospel with your life.”

It is no wonder that the pilgrim hesitates, for he is somewhat new to this accent of pilgrimages. Now he really enters into the land of faith. He does not know where it leads or how he is going to walk it. Will it be hard or easy? What is meant by preaching the gospel with his life?

All this is perhaps not exactly a jumble in the mind of the pilgrim, but it is something that he has to pray about. He has to make a leap into a new aspect of faith. Always he must “Come up higher.” These words of Christ do not really refer to climbing a mountain like Mount Sinai, but the mountain of faith. It is so difficult these days to have faith.

At the beginning of his pilgrimage the pilgrim stops at the door of his heart or his hut to ponder, for the marketplace is a threatening place. Nevertheless, the voice of the Lord in his heart is clear, “Come out and preach the gospel with your life.”

It reminds me of a little story told about St. Catherine of Siena who was a contemplative and a mystic. She used to live in a corner of the basement of her house; she was allotted that spot because her mother didn’t like her being so religious. Catherine spent her time praying to God and being close to him. God was with her in that basement cell. One day he said to her, “Come. Arise and go” (into what amounted to the marketplace of that day) “and nurse the sick and help the poor.” She wouldn’t do it, for she was very comfortable with him in the basement. Then he said to her, “If you don’t go, I won’t be here.”

Well, that may be just a legend; I don’t know. But the point remains that the pilgrim understands that he has to go, because if he doesn’t go God will turn his face away from him, in a manner of speaking. Or, to put it another way, the pilgrim will sadden the heart of God.

So he goes. He is new at this. He doesn’t know how to preach the gospel with his life. He just keeps on being poor, chaste, and obedient. He may take a menial job of some sort for a while, but wherever he goes something happens. People change. At first he doesn’t understand that he is now pilgrimaging, not in the marketplace, but into the hearts of people. He has gone into the hearts of men, as God bade him to, to preach by being silent and by carrying the cross of others.

Gradually he comes to understand his role in the marketplace, or wherever he goes, whether on little grass roads or the pavement of big cities. He has to enter the hearts of others, and the only key that allows one to enter the heart of another is identifying oneself with that person. This identification is excruciating. It takes faith to identify oneself with another.

The pilgrim slowly masters this. He is like a novice, he has to be taught, and God is his teacher. Once the pilgrim masters this going into the hearts of others he may hear the voice saying, “Stand still. Take off your shoes, for the place is holy.” He takes off his shoes, figuratively speaking, and prepares himself for the next step in his pilgrimage.

This next step does not happen to very many pilgrims, only to a few, for the Lord is merciful. Those who have taken off their shoes and who have realized that the place is holy have now come to understand the width, the depth, and the height of what is meant by “preaching the gospel with your life.”

Now God is no longer calling the pilgrim to a marketplace of unbelievers who do not care, or of believers who are very weak, or even of true believers. Now God speaks to the pilgrim of a total identification with himself. For identification with his brethren has already taken place.

Gently, yet compellingly, God calls the pilgrim to come to his supper, to partake of his bread and wine, and to follow him to Gethsemane, along the way of the cross, right unto Golgotha. He presents the pilgrim with the sight of a cross on which he will have to lie and on which he will have to be crucified. It is no longer the carrying of somebody else’s cross that breaks the skin of his shoulder. Nor is it experiencing the whips of Pontius Pilate’s Roman soldiers. It is none of those things.

It becomes clear to the pilgrim why he had to be immersed in sobornost in the poustinia. He had been called to go into the marketplace and preach the gospel with his life. Now his immersion will be in the heart of God, totally. He enters into it and begins the ascent of the mount of faith to become one with Jesus Christ in Gethsemane, on the way of the cross, and at Golgotha. This, as far as the pilgrim can see, is the goal to which he is being led.

Now the pilgrim knows what is in store. He has heard the voice of the One who was hidden in the burning bush (Ex 3:1–6). The pilgrim has a choice: yes, or no. Because his faith has grown, his love is passionate, and his hope is assured, he follows Christ. All along the line he follows. Although the pilgrim doesn’t know it, a fire radiates from him, a fire that the Lord sent into his heart. Why does the Lord send fire except to enkindle the hearts of men!

The pilgrim has become, in a sense, a torch: he is light and he is fire. Wherever he passes his footprints remain. There is no need anymore to discuss with him the preaching of the gospel with his life. He is the gospel! He is fire and light. He is the icon of Christ. He is the gospel and he comes to the cross and meekly lies down on it.

At this point a miracle happens! The cross, the crown of thorns, the nails, the hammer—all disappear. The Lord embraces the pilgrim and says, “Well done, my friend. I tested you and you came through. I tested you to see what you could do, with my help. Now you must begin ‘the pilgrimage of daily reality’: the pilgrimage of simplicity, of docility and true obedience, of chastity and of poverty.

“All the gifts of the Holy Spirit are yours, as are my heart and the blessing of my Father. Now, pilgrim, you are truly blessed, not only by your natural father and mother and the priests, but by Us. Now you can begin!”

VII Pilgrimaging in the Resurrected Christ

As the Lord says, now the pilgrim is truly blessed. (In Russia a pilgrim is blessed by his father and mother and parish priest before he sets off on his journey.) The blessing of parents and priest is a tremendous thing, but how much moreso is the blessing of the Most Holy Trinity! And one can also ask the blessing of Our Lady.

The pilgrim has followed Christ through his incarnation and his passion, and he has become ready to be crucified because of his love for God. Then the pilgrim sees that crucifixion is not what God means. He considers Abraham, who was asked by God to sacrifice his only son, Isaac. In the end God holds back the hand of Abraham so that his son is not hurt. In a similar way the pilgrim knows that God doesn’t want him to be crucified in the reality of a cross and nails, but crucified in the pilgrim’s own will, and because of a passionate love of Christ, who desires this.

But is it only a pilgrim who should experience this crucifixion, and not every Christian? Well, every Christian should have the inclination and the desire; but a pilgrim must incarnate them because he must walk as a gospel among his brethren.

God calls the pilgrim to enter the stream of his love story, the love story between God and man. Now the pilgrim’s heart expands, for it must encompass the world. He realizes that Christ is with us, and that the miracle of Christ’s presence is the eternal miracle of his resurrection. The pilgrim now lives and breathes and has his being in Christ’s resurrection.

Let us review the reality of pilgrimage. The actual pilgrimage is one thing, that pilgrimage in which a man leaves his home and family, receives his blessings, and conforms to the general image of a pilgrim. But it is another thing to pilgrimage within oneself and meet the God who dwells within. Having met him, the pilgrim understands that from that moment he does not belong to himself at all. This is a strange state of affairs.

A pilgrim can be anybody. As I’ve tried to explain, a pilgrim is a person who puts one foot in front of the other to traverse the world if necessary. Or he may not go very far from his home, yet he fulfills the function of being a pilgrim. Or, he may stand absolutely still.

This latter kind of pilgrimage is first and foremost a kind of poverty, a poverty that isn’t inclined to drastic or hurried changes of life. It is essentially a poverty of the heart, the humble heart. Humility and poverty of heart are twin companions of the pilgrim.

The pilgrim views everything he has and is as belonging to God and his brethren. There is a strange bookkeeping going on in his head: the least for himself, the most for others. His motto is “I am third”: God is first, then neighbor, and lastly myself. Yes, that’s the reality of a pilgrimage in the resurrected Christ.

The pilgrim in the resurrected Christ preaches the gospel without ceasing, night and day. He lives it. It is this pilgrimage of living the gospel day by day that he embarks upon, after he has ‘passed the test’ and entered fully into the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

What does that mean in daily life to you and to me, who are not experts in theology or spirituality or anything of that type, but whose hearts yearn to love God, to come closer to him, to be one with him? We know that the only way to come closer to him is to come closer to our brethren. If you say to your brother, “I want to touch God,” all he need reply is, “Touch me.”

The reality of pilgrimage in the resurrected Christ demands a total surrender of one’s will to God. It demands that we do the most ordinary things, which some spiritual books call “the duty of the moment”—for that is God’s will. All the time we pilgrimage we attend to our duty of the moment.

Let us pause and look again at how this applies to daily life. If you are a youth, your duty of the moment would probably be studying, doing your best in school, helping your parents in any way you can. It is walking in the midst of your peers and not saying “yes” to anything that they might suggest which is not of God. Even if you are ostracized by your peers you still say a resounding “no”. They may eventually understand that you have preached the gospel with your life.

Yes, it is very difficult for a youth, a teenager, to defy peer opinion. But if you love God and you realize that you have been called on a pilgrimage of preaching the gospel, that is what you are going to do.

A wife will attend to her duty of the moment, whatever it might be. Washing diapers, washing dishes, cooking and cleaning may be her lot, and she is not going to rebel against it, for she is a pilgrim and she knows that she is only stopping in that house temporarily. God brought her there. Death will make her free, though she doesn’t crave any particular kind of freedom since she possesses the immense freedom of the children of God in uniting her will to God’s will.

Funny, isn’t it, that the duty of the moment might be just scrubbing a floor? Of course, you may go to a psychiatrist and tell him your problems. If he finds out that your problem is anger, he might suggest that you scrub a floor, since manual labor helps to drain away anger! But you are not going to scrub it because a psychiatrist tells you; you are not interested in the psychiatrist but in God’s will. You do it because it is the duty of the moment. And, with God, every moment is the moment of beginning again!

There can be excitement and joy in doing things over and over and over again! The floor shines brighter. The windows are clearer. But it’s not only that the floors are shinier or the windows cleaner; it is you who shines, resembling closer and closer the icon of Christ. And the people who know you and talk with you see your eyes made clear and beautiful because they reflect God.

This pilgrimage that is concerned only with the duty of the moment may sound drab and uninteresting, presented this way, but it isn’t. For the person who pilgrimages in the resurrected Christ knows that every moment lived in God is the moment of beginning again. Isn’t that freeing and liberating!

A pilgrim is poor and humble of heart. His poverty is always covered over by what the gospel calls “oiling one’s hair” (Mt 6:16–18), which was done in those primitive days of Christianity to hide the fact that one was fasting. What we mean by this is a very simple thing—that the pilgrim dresses normally, and that he appears not to be fasting. But he gives away things he doesn’t truly need.

Perhaps a little story will help to clarify this. I had a friend in New York who was a fashion buyer for a big store. Twice a year she went to Europe, to Paris and other centers, to gather the latest fashions. She had a lovely apartment on 73rd Street. It was filled with all kinds of knickknacks that she purchased on her trips abroad.

In the hallway of her apartment was a huge closet filled with dresses for every occasion. She had fine taste in costume jewelry. As a handsome woman in her 30s she looked magnificent.

One day she went on a Dominican retreat. After the weekend she came out, called me up and said, “Catherine, I have to talk to you.” It turned out that the Dominican retreat master had connected bourgeois living with a lack of surrender to God’s will, and had made a profound impression on my friend.

She said, “I am going to clear my place out,” and she did. She gave away all her lovely knickknacks to workers at the department store, especially those who could never afford such beautiful things.

She gave away most of her clothing in the same way, keeping a few dresses that she made over. She was an excellent seamstress and would show me how to change a dress just by putting a piece of lace or costume jewelry on it.

She redid her apartment, painting it gray. She had a red sofa bed and two red armchairs and explained that “I made them red so I will remember the wounds of Jesus Christ.” The colors matched very well. She kept only one picture, a large and beautiful painting of St. Francis. And that was all.

Then she opened her home: if anyone was lonely or recuperating from illness she would invite them in. She had an extra bedroom and let them share her house. And all the time she was the best-dressed woman in her work place, looking chic and smart. Nobody suspected her inner and deep poverty.

Well, a pilgrim who understands and who walks the road of inner poverty, also walks the road of fasting and praying. Again, nothing shows on the outside. Especially in our time of diets, it’s easy to say, “I’m on a diet” (without adding, “a diet for God and for other people”!). That’s the road the pilgrim walks, the pilgrim in the resurrected Christ. For if he is to be the gospel—to preach it both with words and with his very being—he will have to pray constantly, and serve constantly, and fast constantly.

The pilgrim has to face the road of pleasure. Obviously a pilgrim is not going to indulge in a lot of pleasures, even ‘legitimate’ ones like smoking, for instance. Smoking is injurious to health, but that is not the main point for the pilgrim. What is important is not giving in to desires that are not blessed by God.

The pilgrim has to walk the road of self-denial and self-discipline. Smoking, liquor, gambling—these and other cravings need to be controlled. He realizes that he walks the road of self-discipline and of surrender of pleasures because he loves God.

This does not mean that pilgrims don’t marry. It doesn’t mean that they don’t drink occasionally. It doesn’t mean that they don’t play bingo. No. It means that the self-discipline is deep and profound because the pilgrim sees the road he has to travel. He knows that it is the road of Christ. He knows that he must be interiorly free to travel it, and that these so-called “passions”, as they were called in the old spiritual books, restrain and crush him.

The person who pilgrimages in the resurrected Christ must practice poverty, and his poverty must bear fruit. It bears fruit in his giving away all the surplus he has, and whenever possible, some of his necessities as well.

His fasting is not for himself alone. As with all gifts of God, it is for others, to atone for those who give in to all kinds of excesses, be they drinking, smoking, or eating. Yes, he understands very clearly that his role is helping Christ.

Poverty and humility of heart keep him walking the paths of self-denial and self-discipline.

Then there is obedience: the pilgrim is obedient unto death. He has been led to a cross, and he has surrendered his life. For one split second he has surrendered and been ready to be crucified. At that moment the Lord took away his pain (though he didn’t take away the memory of it). The pilgrim has to walk the road of obedience because the God he loves was obedient unto death. There is no way out.

To whom shall he be obedient, this pilgrim? To the authorities of the Church, to those who have a right to his obedience, be it the boss of a department store, or a doctor, a superintendent, anyone who is over him. He has to be obedient to the laws of his country and to the laws of any country he encounters.

But above all he has to be obedient to that inner voice of his conscience that eternally tells him what is right and what is wrong. He always checks the inner voice of his conscience, of course, with his spiritual director or in confession. A pilgrim has to be close to his spiritual director above all, and obedient to him. It is humbling to be eternally obedient, but that’s what God wants, so that man does not do his own will but God’s.

I have a little story. I was a salesclerk in a department store and I was making a lot of commissions; in fact I was making the highest commissions in the whole store. Whereas my salary was only $12.50, the commission was twice as big. So the personnel manager called me in and asked, “How is that you are such a good salesclerk?”

I said, “Well, I don’t do anything special. I like selling, but that’s not the point. The point is that I made a contract with your company to be on the job eight hours a day. There is my lunch hour, and there are moments when I have to depart from the floor—nature calls! But I consider all the rest of that time to be yours. I do not consider it as time to chat with the other salesclerks, or to go and powder my nose again and again. I consider a contract to be a moral affair, the moreso because I also made it with God.”

Well, the personnel manager swallowed twice and said, “Pardon me?” I said, “You see, any contract that a person enters into has a moral connotation, and anything that is moral has something to do with God, too.”

“Hmmmm,” he mused, “I don’t think that you could explain that to our salesclerks, could you? I had been hoping that you could give a talk on it.” “Oh,” I replied, “Probably I could, but it might present some difficulties.”

Now that gives a picture of the pilgrim that I am trying to present. A pilgrim knows that he has to walk on this road of obedience to his superiors, whoever they are. I had a moral obligation to spend eight hours a day selling. If I didn’t want to sell, I could quit, but I couldn’t fritter away the time, for that would be wrong. The pilgrim knows that he walks the road of moral obligation which is, after all, the duty of the moment. My duty was selling.

VIII The Heartbeats of God

I have tried to explain what a pilgrim is, as I see it with my Russian eyes. I feel that I haven’t really said very much. My heart tells me that there is much more to say, though I’m wondering what it is.

My idea of the best way to find things out is to rest upon Christ’s breast, like St. John did, and hear his heartbeats. Somehow, hearing the heartbeats of God clarifies everything. And then again, it clarifies nothing yet it leads you into a mystery beyond reckoning.

As I try to share with you what, to me, is a pilgrimage, I come to the mystery of Christ’s heart. There are moments when he lifts a corner of the veil of his mystery and allows you to see a part, one little part of it. For a moment the view stops your senses and you lose all contact with yourself and everybody else. But it’s only for a moment. When God reveals his mysteries, even a little of them, he does this so that those who have seen them might pass them on to others.

There is an immense mystery in the pilgrimage that I am trying to tell you about. I have studied theology and philosophy and have found, over a period of long years, that they are like dust in my mouth. I agree with St. Thomas Aquinas: he wanted to burn his writings once he beheld God. He was praying before a crucifix and suddenly saw the arm of God—a wooden arm—reach down and touch him. After that he didn’t even want to read what he had written. His innumerable theses that we all study seemed like dust to him.

There are many books on theology. Some of them should never have been written! Some of them are beautiful. But, my friends, the pilgrim gets his knowledge directly from the heartbeats of God, by beholding a tiny part of God’s own mystery when the Lord deigns to lift its veil. This is where the pilgrim really learns the science of God. God becomes the teacher, and only God can really explain himself.

So the pilgrim comes to a point where he has to rest, not in the depths of men’s hearts, but in the heart of God. He has to listen to the heartbeats of God and become “suspended”, as it were. The Lord in his immense goodness and mercy lifts a little corner of his own mystery so that the pilgrim can really preach him in the marketplace, so that he can really become a gospel, really become fire, flame, and light! This process, this encounter, this revelation of God to the pilgrim, may take quite a while.

The pilgrim continues to be and do what God asks. But something new has been added to him. Now God has decided to bring him really high up the mountain of faith. That requires a wind to get him there, the wind of the Holy Spirit. While the pilgrim preaches by his life, his words and his presence, and while the windows of his eyes become almost totally transparent so that men can see God reflected in them, at the same time the pilgrim is taken up by the Wind! It might be a tornado, a very powerful wind. Or it might be a breeze. That is up to God.

But it is to be remembered that, while the pilgrim is taken up by the Wind, he never ceases to be available, to be at the service of everyone, to be in fact what he should be: a living gospel in the marketplace.

The pilgrim ceases to be a novice. He enters into God’s friendship, for the Lord says to him, “I shall not call you servant anymore, because a servant does not know his master’s business; I call you friend because I have made known to you everything I have learned from my Father.”

The gifts of the Spirit are becoming more clearly defined in the pilgrim. Perhaps in the Wind he will receive the gift of prophecy, of healing, of discernment, as well as the traditional seven gifts of the Holy Spirit. The pilgrim is entering an entirely new aspect of his pilgrimage.

Accustomed as he now is to doing the will of God, and passionately desirous of doing it, he is nevertheless awed that he has been called to so strange a pilgrimage: totally human, and strangely divine. But then, as it is said in the Scriptures, “In giving these gifts, God has given us the guarantee of something very great and wonderful to come: through them you will be able to share the divine nature and to escape corruption in a world that is sunk in vice” (2 P 1:4).

I face my heart and realize that more has to be written about pilgrims and pilgrimages. There is another whole aspect to it, one that in the West would be called “mystical”; it is simply a mystery. All contacts between God and man are mystical. To me they are simply God’s mercy and God’s love which encompass me and you and all other pilgrims, and lift us up high, high onto the mountain of faith.

All the gifts given by God to a Christian through baptism in the death and resurrection of Christ, make him part of Christ’s body, of which Christ himself is the head. From that moment on, everything the Christian receives is for others. At no time is any gift of the Holy Spirit or any gift of the Trinity for himself. Always it must be for others. In that lies the kenosis (self-emptying) of the pilgrim, of the Christian who is such a pilgrim.

Having given everything away, as all pilgrims must, he now is faced with gifts that are showered on him through the Wind, through the heart of the Trinity. And now begins the temptation of the pilgrim. His hands may slowly form themselves into fists so that he can hold onto the gifts for himself. This is one of the most subtle temptations that Satan can produce.

The gifts showered by the Spirit, by the Wind, by the Trinity, that bring us up almost to the summit of faith, are known to Lucifer. He arises out of his depths to come and tempt the pilgrim with virtue. Satan tempts by virtue too. He whispers to the pilgrim as if he, Lucifer, were part of the Wind. Lucifer says to the pilgrim: “Look! Don’t you see you are being given the gift of healing? Isn’t that wonderful? You are going to heal people! Thousands will come to you. Perhaps more than thousands. You will be able to help everybody—everybody! See how the Wind is about to give you that gift of healing.”

Here the pilgrim must stop. In the very Wind of the Spirit and the embrace of the Trinity the pilgrim must stop and pray, crying out to God, “Help me to get rid of the Tempter!” He has to, because otherwise he might listen. Lucifer can imitate the Wind for a second or two. One can make a mistake, can falter. If the hand of the pilgrim clutches onto the gift of healing because he thinks he can do it by himself, or because he thinks that God means it for himself, suddenly he can fall back from the mountain of faith. He doesn’t hear the real Wind anymore, and a total darkness envelops him.

These are the moments when one must stay close to one’s spiritual director. One must stay close to God. These are the moments when Our Lady comes to the forefront of the pilgrim’s life because God promised that her heel would crush the voice of the Tempter, and even the Tempter himself.

Yes, the pilgrim has entered another phase. He has become the friend of God. He has also opened himself to being tempted as Jesus Christ was tempted. All this knowledge, all this beauty, and even the breath of evil that is trying to come in—God permitted all this so that the pilgrim might bring the gifts of God back to the marketplace. In his cupped and open palms the pilgrim brings them back. He is totally immune to any false humility or presumption, totally immune.

The pilgrim stands in the marketplace radiating more and more fire, although he isn’t aware of it. He is steeped in joy, humility of heart, and docility. At this point he becomes a child.

He preaches the gospel with his life, and now people know that he belongs to Bethlehem and Nazareth. People know that he has the heart of a child. His prayer is: “Lord, give me the heart of a child and the courage to live it out.” Already God has given him the courage to do so and he lives it out in the marketplace.

The impact of his life is fantastic, for now he constantly reproduces in his life the incarnation, the preaching, the suffering, the death and the resurrection of Our Lord!

Do you see what my heart told me?

About the Author

Catherine de Hueck Doherty was born into a wealthy family in Russia in 1896. Many different strands of Christianity were woven into the spiritual fabric of her family background, but it was from the liturgy of the Russian Orthodox Church, the living faith of her father and mother, and the earthy piety of the Russian people themselves that Catherine received the powerful spiritual traditions and symbols of the Christian East.

At fifteen Catherine was married to Boris de Hueck. Soon they were swept into the devastating battles of World War I, where she served as a nurse. After the Revolution of 1917 they endured with all the peoples of the Russian Empire the agonies of starvation and civil war. Eventually Catherine and Boris escaped to England. At the beginning of her new life in the West, Catherine accepted the teachings of the Catholic Church, without rejecting the spiritual wealth of her Orthodox heritage.

In 1921 the couple sailed to Canada, where Catherine gave birth to their son George, soon after their arrival in Toronto. As refugees, they experienced dire poverty for a few years but soon Catherine’s intelligence, energy, and gift for public speaking brought her to the attention of a large lecture bureau. Her talks were popular all across Canada and the United States. Within a few years, she became an executive with another, international lecture service. She became a North American success story.

In the 1930s, after several years of anguish, Catherine and Boris separated permanently; later the Church annulled their marriage. As devastated as Catherine was, she knew that God wanted something new from her now, but she did not know what it was. The words of Christ haunted her: “Sell all you possess, and give it to the poor, and come, follow Me.”

Catherine took a room in a slum section of Toronto and began to quietly love and serve her neighbors, becoming their friend, and praying, hidden in their midst. But when others saw her and heard her speak, they wanted to join her. There was an intensity to her faith and love that lit a flame in the hearts of many men and women. Catherine had not envisaged a community, but when the Archbishop told her that, yes, Christ was calling her to this, she accepted, and soon Friendship House was born.

The works of Friendship House were modest—a shelter for the homeless, meals for the hungry, recreation and books for the young, a newspaper to make known the social teachings of the Church. Catherine initiated an interracial apostolate in Harlem, living with and serving the African-Americans. This work expanded to other cities: Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Portland, Oregon. Friendship House became well known in the American Church.

Catherine shared with her friend, Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker, the intense struggle to move the Gospel out of books into believers’ lives. Even if a few friends, such as the young Thomas Merton, recognized in her the power of the Holy Spirit and an unwavering fidelity to Christ’s Church, many others were frightened by her Russian bluntness. Others simply could not grasp the largeness of her vision, especially because her experience of the ways of God were so foreign to them. Finally after a painful difference of opinion over the nature of the Friendship House Apostolate, Catherine found herself pushed again into the chartless waters of the Lord.

This time Catherine did not have to start alone. In 1943 she had married Eddie Doherty, a celebrated newspaperman, after he convinced her and her bishop that he wanted to share and support her vocation. In 1947, then, Catherine and Eddie came to Combermere, a small village northeast of Toronto, where the Bishop of Pembroke had agreed she could work among the rural families.

Again others came to join Catherine, and this time priests came to stay as well. The apostolate, now called Madonna House, grew slowly, but now has foundations around the world. The training center in Combermere, Ontario offers an experience of Gospel life to hundreds every year.

As Catherine’s inner life deepened and the community matured, she shared the fullness of the inner vocation Christ had formed in her. On the eve of the Second Vatican Council in 1962, Catherine established the West’s first poustinia—a desert place of fasting and praying for unity, in, with, and through Christ, a unity “that could only be the fruit of love.” Her book Poustinia was awarded the prestigious Prix Goncourt of the Academie Français, and has been translated into dozens of languages; it witnesses to her spiritual depth and passionate zeal to pass on her faith in God.

Catherine died in 1985, a woman who had become a spiritual giant by responding to grace.

If you would like to learn more about Catherine Doherty and Madonna House, please visit our website at:

www.madonnahouse.org

About the Cover Painting

The scene is the island on which Catherine lived during most of the years in which she was founding Madonna House, in Combermere, Ontario. This island gradually became for her, and for those who knew her, the symbol of her interior life. It was in this setting that Catherine dug deep into her Russian roots to articulate the Eastern spirituality she had experienced as a child.

Her cabin (hermitage, or poustinia) is portrayed in the foreground of the illustration. It had been designed and built by Nicholas Makletzoff, Russian architect and artist. Her hermitage, typical of Russian poustinias, was a simple building. A large cross dominated the interior; an icon of the Holy Trinity hung on the wall; the bed was made of plain boards, with a minimum of padding.

In Strannik, the hermit or poustinik is depicted as leaving the poustinia, staff in hand, to become a pilgrim. He is filled with light, having encountered the Trinity in poustinia and having been restored by them to unity with God: sobornost.

The bridge is a crossing point. Over it the poustinik, now turned pilgrim, must walk to bring to others the fruit of his intimate encounters with God: unity with the Most Holy Trinity.

The painting was created in 1993 by Patrick Stewart, a member of the Madonna House Apostolate.

Other Books by Catherine Doherty

Available through Madonna House Publications

Apostolic Farming

Beginning Again: Recovering Your Innocence through Confession

Bogoroditza: She Who Gave Birth to God

Dear Father

Dear Seminarian

Dearly Beloved: Letters to the Children of My Spirit (3 Vol.)

Donkey Bells: Advent and Christmas

Fragments of My Life

God in the Nitty-Gritty Life

Grace in Every Season

In the Footprints of Loneliness

In the Furnace of Doubts

Light in the Darkness

Living the Gospel Without Compromise

Molchanie: The Silence of God

Moments of Grace (perpetual calendar)

My Russian Yesterdays

Not Without Parables: Stories of Yesterday, Today and Eternity

On the Cross of Rejection

Our Lady’s Unknown Mysteries

People of the Towel and Water, The

Poustinia: Encountering God in Silence, Solitude and Prayer

Season of Mercy: Lent and Easter

Sobornost: Unity of Mind, Heart and Soul

Soul of My Soul: Coming to the Heart of Prayer

Stations of the Cross

Strannik: The Call to the Pilgrimage of the Heart

Uródivoi: Holy Fools

Some books available in electronic format at

www.madonnahouse.org/publications

To request a catalogue of our current publications, please call (613) 756-3728, or write to us at:

Madonna House Publications

2888 Dafoe Rd, RR 2

Combermere ON K0J 1L0

Canada

You can also visit us on the Internet at:

www.madonnahouse.org/publications

“...for all those who yearn for a deeper spiritual walk with the Living God. ... Very spiritual, without pretense, this is a concise and earthy book.”

— Carol J. Phipps, Southern Baptist Home Mission Board

“[Strannik] is my favorite: in it, the author blends her own experiences smoothly with the abstract lessons which they have taught her. For Doherty, her own life has obviously been full of salvation history. The fact that she shares it—and in such a memorable writing as this—is a great gift to those who read Strannik.”

— Edward C. Byrne

“Mrs. Doherty’s books are always best sellers and with good reason. Her writing is clear, to the point, so that it is hard to miss what she is saying. ... Rich in anecdote and allegory, Strannik is the kind of spiritual and readable book that many will want to give as a gift as well as own. ”

— The Crux of Prayer

“One of the most hauntingly evocative passages in Strannik is: ‘You will stand in perfect stillness because your hands and feet are nailed. You are unable to walk. That’s a pilgrimage too. In fact, it is the crown of pilgrimages.’ The style is simple, the message profound.”

— Elizabeth Moberly in Sobornost magazine

“Reading Catherine de Hueck Doherty’s writings has always been both a pleasure and an enriching experience. [Strannik] has been no exception. ... The final chapter, ‘Heartbeats of God,’ reveals the author’s preference for emphasis on the ‘heart’ rather than the ‘head.’ This approach has produced a book well worth reading for its many insights...”

— Joseph E. Bidwill, O.P. in Spirituality Today

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

I The Remembrance of Paradise

II Following the Pilgrim Christ

III From Refugee to Pilgrim

IV The Soles of My Feet Were Bloody

V Pilgrimage to the Hearts of Men

VI Leaving the Poustinia

VII Pilgrimaging in the Resurrected Christ

VIII The Heartbeats of God

About the Author

About the Cover Painting

Other Books by Catherine Doherty

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

I The Remembrance of Paradise

II Following the Pilgrim Christ

III From Refugee to Pilgrim

IV The Soles of My Feet Were Bloody

V Pilgrimage to the Hearts of Men

VI Leaving the Poustinia

VII Pilgrimaging in the Resurrected Christ

VIII The Heartbeats of God

About the Author

About the Cover Painting

Other Books by Catherine Doherty