Occasionally [a] Musing

The next few Sidetracked articles are focusing on a recent trip to France.  They are written in the form of a travel journal. One of the greatest things about being the executive director of Wonder Voyage is the chance to travel around the world. France is the 40th country I have visited.  I must admit that I had a few preconceived ideas about France and her people.  Boy, was I in for a shock.

June 21, 2010. You see her miles away; a castle in the clouds- a wonder of wonders. The 12^th century pilgrim had four major pilgrimages to choose from. The first was Jerusalem followed by Rome. The Santiago Trail in Spain was third and the fourth, my destination today, was Mont-Saint-Michel, in France. Over four million a year still visit the sanctuary though most for the sight and not the spirit. She is on a small island just off the shore and often surrounded by Europe’s greatest tidal flows.  As I move closer, her silhouette growing on the horizon, I feel like I am entering Tolkien’s Middle Earth, albeit a Middle Earth invaded by an army of people movers and tackily dressed tourists.  I especially cringe and the hefty man in the tiny baby blue 1970’s running shorts and skin tight purple undershirt.  (His wife, walking a good ten feet behind him, looks none too happy about his appearance either). Certainly no pilgrim I know would dress like that.

In Celtic mythology, this island was one of the sea tombs of the dead. Bishop Aubert of Avaranches built a tiny devotional chapel on the summit of the isle in 707 A.D. after receiving three consecutive visions from the arch-angel Michael. By the 10^th century, she was a center of study and over the next 200 years Mont-Saint-Michel developed into its current structure as an ecclesiastical fortress. The main building is named, appropriately, The Marvel; a perfect name to describe the island as a whole. To walk through the preserved medieval town below and enter into the church is a marvel.

Wonder is so rare in our lives.  When we see it and acknowledge it, it opens our hearts.  When we walk into it, our spirits are touched. But on rare occasion, when we are surrounded by it, our inner eyes are open to endless possibility, to the divine. To think that Mont-Saint-Michel is here all because a simple man of God said, “I must built a place to pray and hear God.”

Mont-Saint-Michel on the Horizon