Rusty Book Club Pick: A Pilgrimage to Eternity
Last year I launched the Rusty Book Club. It’s my book club for guys, with the hope of getting some guys to actually read.
Okay, maybe that’s too cynical. Let’s say it’s my book club for guys who carry a healthy dose of skepticism about the crap most publishers print.
Well, I’ve got a good book to recommend.
Some books feel like they were written to impress you. Others feel like they were written to keep us honest. A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith by Timothy Egan falls squarely in the second category.
Egan was raised in the Christian faith, and he had issues and questions. But he didn’t set out to defend Christianity in this book. He didn’t set out to burn it down either. He did something far more dangerous: he decided to walk 1,000 miles from Canterbury to Rome and confront the spiritual, emotional, and cultural history of Christianity.
And I mean actually walk it. The whole distance. Mostly by himself. Wrestling with his complicated relationship with faith along the way.
The book traces his pilgrimage from Canterbury to Rome. You may have heard of the Camino de Santiago. This is the less-known Via Francigena. It’s twice as long, more solitary, more culturally diverse, and far less commercialized.
Egan is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and a man with no patience for religious spin. He knows the Church’s failures well, and he names them without flinching. There’s no varnish here.
But instead of declaring the whole thing useless and walking away, as modern people are trained to do, Egan starts walking.
All good pilgrimages teach us something about the world, God, and ourselves. Egan shares his frustrations, anger, love, and hope. Perhaps most importantly, he share his doubts.
As he pushes himself physically, mentally, and spiritually — through sore feet, long days, and the occasional grumpy host — Egan doesn’t ask, “Is this belief system flawless?” He asks something better: “How has this faith carried people through centuries of plagues, wars, exile, and despair?”
Along the road he encounters saints, martyrs, reformers, and ordinary pilgrims whose lives weren’t tidy enough for modern spiritual branding. Christianity, in this telling, survives not because it’s pure, but because it stubbornly refuses to fit in a box. It keeps offering meaning to people who don’t deserve it and hope to people who can’t earn it.
Which, when you think about it, pretty well sums up our faith. Not as an ideal, but as a stubborn offering of grace, forgiveness, hope, and love to people who didn’t earn any of it.
Here’s what I really love about this book: Egan never suddenly becomes certain. This is not a conversion story. It’s a reckoning with the possibility that modern skepticism may not be enough when grief shows up.
Egan never neatly resolves his questions. He lets them walk alongside him. He prays awkwardly. He doubts honestly. He acknowledges the power of a faith tested over centuries without surrendering to groupthink theology or mindless certainty.
This is a book for anyone who is worn out by a faith that insists on absolutism. Or has walked away from belief but hasn’t fully stopped wondering. It’s for anyone who distrusts religion but quietly suspects that dismissal might be its own kind of laziness. It’s for people who have worked through all of these stages of faith, and are now wondering what truth awaits them around the next corner of the trail.
Our faith doesn’t always promise answers. It promises better roads.
Egan walks one of them in A Pilgrimage to Eternity.
And it’s worth walking.