Pilgrimages.

I have really mixed feelings about our trip to Annecy, and I thought I would hash them out before we went to Rome.

The Basilica of the Visitation was breathtaking. To take it in, I would have liked to sit there for a while, twenty minutes at least, contemplating the mosaic of Christ on the cross. Then slowly walk around looking at all the chapels. Maybe stop in and join the sisters for the Office (their chapel, though it is behind a grille on the church side, is open to anyone.) Pause at the ossements of the two great saints who rest, beneath gilded lids strung through with red ribbons and sealed each with a splotch of wax, in the chapels that flank the main altar: two saints whose writings I know well, giving me a feeling sometimes that they walk beside me on the way.

But instead I spent my time showing the chapels to my daughter who was positively starstruck by being in the presence of her name saint. I took pictures of her standing before St. Jane Frances, perhaps praying there, I don’t know, but she stood there quite a long time. I shepherded children around and looked for someone to ask the way to the bathroom for the 4yo. I helped children talk to the non-English-speaking sister who ran the gift shop, and chose a few mementos.

I am pretty sure I spent more time in the gift shop than in the Basilica.

Afterwards I read through my souvenir brochure that described the art and devotional objects in the Basilica and realized that I had taken hardly any time to look at them while I was actually there. I had not noticed the daisies (marguerites) and roses growing at the foot of the mosaic cross — although daisies are an unusual devotional flower — there to memorialize Ste. Marguerite-Marie and Ste. Thérèse, a detail that would have delighted me had I noticed it. (I love daisies.) My attention was focused on the children.

We picked up a paper brochure called “In the footsteps of Francis de Sales in Annecy.” It has a little walking tour that begins at the first House of the Visitandines, passes the second monastery (now occupied by Sisters of St. Joseph), the house of Mme. de Charmoisy who was the “Philothea” addressed in Introduction to the Devout Life, the house where St. Francis wrote Treatise on the Love of God, the church of St. Francis. I am just looking at it now. We did not try to follow it in the town. We needed lunch, the children wanted to spend time playing at playgrounds, and after a bit of walking and admiring the beautiful lake, it was time to go home.

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I need to adjust my expectations before we get to Rome. I knew I would have to expect a slower pace and a less ambitious itinerary because of the needs of the children. I didn’t realize that I would also have to expect less of myself, that interiorly as well I would only skip lightly over the surface instead of plunging in to plumb to the depths. I cannot stop being a busy and distracted mother of five, unless I have the chance to step away for a moment and breathe; and it takes time to shuffle out of that cloak and leave it at the door, and leave the heart barer, more exposed. Busy-ness, tasks, responsibilities, are a kind of defense against penetration.

I am not a solitary pilgrim. That paradigm will not work. I am some other kind. I must either find another way to clear aside the busy-ness from my heart, as I shuffle children from place to place, or else I must find a way to sanctify it.

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