The Tragedy and the Comedy of the Start

This pilgrimage that I am blessed to be able to go on is the Footsteps of St. Paul taking us to Greece and Turkey through the Bellarmine Jesuit Retreat House in Barrington. Once again, thank you to my friend Peggy Arizzi for connecting me to Bellarmine several years ago and also telling me about the pilgrimage. For the past six months, I've done a fair amount of study to prepare for the trip. I've listened to lectures about St. Paul, the formation of the New Testament, and Greek history, read the Acts of the Apostles, Paul's epistles, The Life of Sr. Marie Mandat-Grancey and Mary's House in Ephesus by Carl G. Schulte, C.M., and the very helpful book pictured above, In the Steps of Saint Paul by Peter Walker. As we visit the places I've studied about, I will include insights from these authors.

Obituary for Jim

This trip begins in sadness for me. My brother, Fr. James King, died on October 12, 2018 after a long illness. Ten days later, our good friend Mick Kenny died suddenly at home. Two great men, gone from this earth. It was hard to leave but the consensus seemed to be to go. My sister told me that I should take Jim and Mick's spirits along with me, so I will try to do that.

Obituary for Mick

Perhaps God knew the situation needed to start with some distracting comedy. When I was making my travel arrangements, I checked the Peoria Charter Bus website at least twice to confirm that the bus I would take to O'Hare was leaving at 1 pm. from the Bradley Student Center, allowing me plenty of time to make my 7:10 pm flight.

But then for some reason, I rechecked the schedule at 11:10 am, the day I was to leave, and this is what I found.

An 11:50 am departure time. Yikes! The bus I had to catch was leaving in 40 minutes. Normally, this would have been a bit of a problem, but I was pretty well packed. So the only shock was that I would have missed the bus if not for checking. 

John and I arrived at the Student Center before the bus.When it pulled up behind us, we got out of the car and walked with my suitcase to where the driver was standing. As we stood there, he looked at us for a few seconds and finally asked, “Can I help you?” in a disinterested fashion. We explained I wanted to buy a ticket and he processed the transaction for us. “Did there used to be a 1 pm departure time here?” I asked. He shrugged and said yes. As the driver went to help other passengers, John nudged me. “That’s the driver who had the major meltdown when we were returning from Spain," a trip we had taken a couple of years ago. I remembered: A bunch of passengers had surrounded the driver at O’Hare on a dark, rainy night and were clamoring for help when he completely lost it.”

Later when I called John from O’Hare, he told me that he had thanked the bus driver profusely for all of his good driving. It must have worked as he was very calm on the trip.

I had googled how to minimize jet lag. Drink water, exercise before and after flying, don’t eat on the flight. As I walked around the airport, I heard some passengers being paged as their flight was about to leave. Would Kanye West please report to the gate? Three times his name was repeated. A woman and I exchanged amused smiles. It couldn't really be him, could it.?

Why yes it could. A little while later I saw a guy in the photo above telling his little brother that he had seen Kanye West and was showing him this photo on his phone. He told me he was a big fan. As we stood by the gate, a couple of airline employees walked by and told us that Kanye was flying to Paris, economy class. 

The guy with the phone was traveling with the women below. 

The world will obliterate your preconceived categories for people, if you let it. 

I met my 27 fellow pilgrims at O'Hare. Nine of them had been on the trip John, Luke, and I took to Spain in 2016. We were flying on Swiss Air (though it says United above) to Zurich.

Here's our plane.

The last "funny" thing that happened was we sat on the plane for a half hour while a few men tinkered repeatedly with the wing. They had their screwdrivers out and were using them and pointing with them. After a third time up on the cherry picker, they were either finished or had given up and got down. Might have been better to be sitting on the other side of the plane.

We finally took off on a clear night over Chicago, bound for Zurich and then onto Athens.