Fabulous reads – Journey with Stagg on long and winding road

The Crossway, Guy Stagg, Pan Macmillan

READING about a pilgrimage can be an amazing way to while away the hours while stuck in a hospital bed. I was fortunate to be able to do just that with this book, and since it was written by a man who had struggled with illness, it felt fitting to be reading it while convalescing.

In The Crossway, Guy Stagg writes about a 5 500 km pilgrimage he made alone from Canterbury to Rome and then on to Jerusalem, in 2013.

Stagg embarked on his quest after suffering years of mental illness in the hopes that the ritual would prove a healing experience for him.

While others might well have perished hiking alone across the Alps in midwinter, he journeyed through.

People along the way said he must be crazy to have left home just after New Year’s Day and set out on what would be a challenging and enlightening trek.

When people told him winter was the wrong time to cross the Alps, he, like the Johnnie Walker man, carried on walking, determined to get to Rome in time for Easter and the expected announcement of a new Pope.

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The story tells how he relied on the kindness of strangers, and although not religious himself, acted with faith in humanity in striking out the way he did without a support team to back him up.

In return for his trust in the trek, he learned about how many who have travelled a similar path in history grew in strength and faith through the process. His account of the walk is both something like an epic story, but also very personal, almost intimate, as he gives detailed descriptions of people, places, and even small items he notices along his way.

It is a read I would gladly recommend it to anybody interested in the histories of religion, even if they aren’t very religious at all. At its heart it is a story of perseverance, health seeking and life itself. Stagg even says at the beginning of the book: “I’m not much of a walker!”

“Though I hoped to walk free of my sickness, its memories still haunted me,” he said, describing all the good and bad that happens to him on the way.

In his journey and through the story, Stagg shares how he struggles with his physical as well as mental limitations, ultimately facing up to his own moods in a way that can’t help but ring true for anyone living with a mood disorder, or knowing someone who suffers from depression.

That he manages to go this without ever becoming boring, or too melancholy as a storyteller is a testament to the narrative skills that Stagg has honed over the years he spent as a journalist.

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