Visitations Not Happenstances

Less than ten min­utes after descend­ing from our hill­top perch with the Sacra­men­tine sis­ters, we ran into Hans the Swiss hiker again. Andrew had seen him last night while vis­it­ing with Mas­si­m­il­iano and his hik­ing crew (and from which peo­ple he learned, inci­den­tally, that a pil­grim to Com­postela is called a pel­le­grino, and a pil­grim to Jerusalem a palmiero, but a pil­grim to Rome a Romeo!). So Hans joined with us the next 21 km into Bolsena.

It was another rain­less rainy day, to our relief and delight, though the morn­ing sky sported dark gray clouds and chilly winds. We started out through unin­ter­est­ing fields but on the far side of San Lorenzo Nuovo we came to the north shore of the Lago di Bolsena, a lovely blue lake formed ages ago by a vol­canic erup­tion, just small enough to see to the far shore and with a few islands of craggy stone jut­ting out in the mid­dle. The rock along the road­side was either crumbly dark brown pumice or polyg­o­nal columns of basalt. The trail zigzagged along the east side of the lake, next to chicken coops and a few alarm­ingly pro­tec­tive dogs on and off leashes and once past a parade of eques­tri­ans. We got peeps of the lake now and then between the olive and chest­nut trees.

Bolsena is a kind of resort town, though gen­er­ally we were happy to see how untouristed the whole lake area seems to be. The town is all stone build­ings stacked ver­ti­cally with steep stair­cases mak­ing sharp switch­backs from the top to the bot­tom. At the cen­ter of town we said good­bye to Hans (though we may well meet up with him or the other hik­ers before it’s all over!) and then pressed on since the weather was fine and tomorrow’s stage to Viterbo as indi­cated in our guide book is unusu­ally long. After a short stretch on a bless­edly empty high­way, we turned back up into the hills, through lovely cool forests, until we had reached the south shore of the lake. Then we fin­ished off the last bit of high­way dur­ing the light Sun­day traf­fic, so tomor­row morn­ing we can start again in safety on the sec­ondary roads.

We are down to five days left now, hard to believe after 65 on the road, and I don’t know how many pil­grim lessons are left to us, but this one in par­tic­u­lar has been buzzing around my mind in the past week. While on pil­grim­age it feels like noth­ing ever hap­pens by coin­ci­dence. The peo­ple you meet are not just ran­dom peo­ple but some­how or other have been put in your path by God. Maybe they are the angels you are to enter­tain unawares, or maybe they are angels enter­tain­ing you unawares. Maybe they are peo­ple who have some­thing to offer that you need, and maybe they are peo­ple who need some­thing that you have to offer. One way or another, every encounter seems not like hap­pen­stance but like a vis­i­ta­tion, and you learn to receive these vis­i­ta­tions with an open heart atten­tive to what will be given and gotten.

It’s prob­a­bly too much for us to live our ordi­nary lives like this every day, but I would like it if I could carry back to nor­mal life the con­vic­tion that all the peo­ple I meet with day by day are not inter­rup­tions or acci­dents, but vis­i­ta­tions from God to serve or be served by.

Jen Rome says:
October 25, 2010 at 4:25 pm
Love this post. I hope you bring it home too. Lately in our jour­ney dis­cov­er­ing things we didn’t know before, I have had the same expe­ri­ence. Not much longer. Can’t wait to see you! Love, Jen
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paul sailhamer says:
October 29, 2010 at 9:50 pm
Your final two para­graphs are a great insight. Thanks for giv­ing me the vocab­u­lary to express some­thing I have sensed as well.
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