Joanne's long walks: Road to Home 2023 Day 5: Tournehem-sur-le-Hem

“In each of us dwells a wanderer, a gypsy, a pilgrim. The purpose here is to call forth that spirit. What matters most on your journey is how deeply you see, how attentively you hear, how richly the encounters are felt in your heart and soul”.

—Phil Cousineau, The Art of Pilgrimage

Mick from Newcastle walked into the dining room as we were enjoying our dinner at the Hotel Bal last night. Fiona and I, both having met him before, introduced him to the rest of our group and moved over to make room for him at our table, and so we learned more about Mick's project over dinner.

Mick began his voyage with a weekend volunteering, assisting refugees in Calais with the organisation Care for Calais before setting off on a 2,200-mile - 3,500 kilometre - walk to Palestine, to raise awareness of the suffering of Palestinian refugees. Along the way he'll be meeting with trade unionists and campaigners and asking them to walk and talk with him for an hour or so.

Mick says in an interview with Care for Calais, "I believe that every human being should be able to live where their rights are respected, and have enough money to secure a decent life for themselves. We take that for granted in the UK, but for millions of people it's only a dream."

He says he's always admired the resilience and courage of the refugees he meets in northern France. This time, just before setting off, "I met an Afghan guy in his early 30s, an engineer, who had left Afghanistan two years ago and walked more or less all the way to Calais. He was so good-natured and self-deprecating, yet he was telling me about the things he'd been through, like living in forests in Bulgaria, and dealing with hostile police.

"It made me think of all the things I'll have that make my journey easy: legal status, a passport, phone with plenty of credit, and if anything goes badly wrong I can get home. We need to remember how privileged we are to have those things."

Mick's route will take him through France, Switzerland, Italy, Albania and Greece to Istanbul, which he's aiming to reach by mid-October. From there he has to fly over Syria to Amman in Jordan, from where he'll walk to the West Bank.

You can follow Mick's adventurous journey on his Facebook page, leave a message of support, share his page to increase visibility, donate here or perhaps invite him over if you live along his route! He has a tent, but he sometimes needs a place to take a shower and charge his phone 😄

The patron saint of the homeless

The patron saint of Mick's voyage ought definitely to be Saint Benoît Labres, whom we first encountered in the village church at Tournehem: the patron saint of unmarried men, rejects, mentally ill people, beggars, hobos and the homeless.

Born on March 25, 1748, into a wealthy family in Amettes, a village we will be passing through a few days from now, Benoît Labres attempted to become a monk, but did not appear to be cut out for the monastic life and spent the rest of his days as a pilgrim. He experienced a desire to "abandon his country, his parents, and whatever is flattering in the world to lead a new sort of life, a life most painful, most penitential, not in a wilderness nor in a cloister, but in the midst of the world, devoutly visiting as a pilgrim the famous places of Christian devotion." (Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). "St. Benedict Joseph Labre", Catholic Encyclopedia)

Labre joined the Third Order of Saint Francis, the first order being the friars, the second the nuns and the third order the lay members of the Franciscan congregation, and settled on a life of poverty and pilgrimage. He first travelled to Rome on foot, subsisting on what he could get by begging. He then travelled to most of the major shrines of Europe, often several times each. During these trips he would always travel on foot, sleeping in the open or in a corner of a room, with his clothes muddy and ragged. He lived on what little he was given, and often shared the little he did receive with others. He was also said to have cured some of the other homeless he met and to have multiplied bread for them. In the final years of his life (his thirties), he lived among the ruins of the Colosseum in Rome. He died on April 16, 1783 in Rome and was beatified on 20 May 1860 by Pope Pius IX.

The wooden carving of Saint Benoît Labre in the church at Tournehem is amazingly lifelike, down to the holes in his socks.

Across the aisle from the patron saint of the homeless and the mentally ill was the patron saint of pilgrims, Saint Roch. I expect we will be seeing more of them both in the days to come!

Before leaving Tournehem-sur-le-Hem we stopped by the Café de la Mairie to visit another supporter of pilgrims. The café had been shut the day before, as it is closed on Wednesdays, but its owner had brought us the official Via Francigena stamp and invited us to come to the café in the morning to sign her Livre d'Or, the "golden book" kept by pilgrim hosts on the pilgrimage routes of France. We did so, then crossed the square to obtain yet another stamp - our third from Tournehem - at the Mairie, the town hall, just across the square.

Pigrim passports well-stamped and bodies well-rested and well-fed from our hotel, we set off across the fields. Today's stage took us up and down a series of ridges and valleys, beautiful farming countryside, with a few villages here and there though there were no services open in any of them.

They'll be in Reims in a couple of hours;
we'll be there in two weeks!

Walk on

There was nowhere on the route to buy lunch, but we had pocketed hard-boiled eggs, cheese, bread and fruit from the breakfast buffet, and as a cold wind had come up again, we sat and ate them up against the wall of the church in Grand Difques, where the streets were empty of real people but decorated with stuffed ones!

A church with a port-a-potty in place of a door

Soldiering on

The day continued cold and windy, and it was beginning to rain by the time we arrived in Wisques. Sister Lucie the hospitalier welcomed us and showed us to our cosy rooms in the guesthouse at Abbaye de Nôtre-Dame. After a shower, a rest and a cup of hot chocolate, we crossed the courtyard to attend vespers in the church. We're all here - Mick has just rolled in and been assigned the last room - and will soon be gathering for supper in the abbey!