Because today is Ascension Day, France, that bastion of sécularité, has, ironically, a public holiday, so that means everything is shut. The roads therefore only had very light private traffic on them, which contributed to making the road walking pleasant. The best bit was the 6kms or so through the forest. I have great app called BirdUp, so, because I am pretty useless at identifying birdsong, it is great to turn it on to discover who is commenting on the stranger disturbing their peace.

No complicated directions, so lots of time think and pray. I talk to myself quite a lot, in both French and English, with the French emerging from hibernation after Covid. Today I thought about turnings not taken, and about the way a walk like this underlines the unilinear direction of life.

While on a pilgrimage you can retrace your steps, but sometimes it is too complicated to do that, and you have to find another way through onto the true path. In life you can very rarely retrace or replay decisions, however much you may want to. So one has to find ways through, ways to acknowledge responsibility, ways to repair what has been hurt or broken. And where that is not possible, ways to live with pain, anger, regret, loss – all the difficult things – but without letting them embitter or derail one from life’s call onwards.

For me, the possibility of being able to live hopefully despite my misdeeds and missteps is absolutely dependant on the love of God in Christ. That love, flowing from the heart of the godhead, and therefore from the fount of all life, simply is, and is therefore an inexhaustible well of hope and possibility. The gospel of Christ is a demonstration that nothing can overcome or destroy this love; not carelessness, nor cruelty, nor outright evil. The love from which we came calls us onwards, and, eventually, home.

Pilgrimage also highlights the provisionality of life, our provisionality. It removes us, even if only for a while, from the ways in which we stave off that primal uncertainty.