The Unlikely Pilgrimage Of Harold Fry
Whenever I walk past Tweed View Care Home in my home town of Berwick-Upon-Tweed I make the sign of the cross. That is because someone I know is dying there.
This morning our curate Tom was missing at 8.30 am prayer: he had gone to minister to someone at Tweed View.
A few hours later I watched the film 'The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry'. I had read the book of that name which became an international best-seller. It is about a conventional, suburban married couple in Devon who had never really lived, and whose brainy, drug-fuelled university son whom they kept at arms length had years before killed himself of a drugs overdose. They are a parable of many of our conventional, half-lived, shut-in lives.
Until Harold receives a post card from a work colleague he last saw thirty years before. She is dying of cancer in a hospice run by religious sisters in my home-town of Berwick-Upon-Tweed. The film set for this hospice is Tweed View. As he is about to post her a card in his Devon suburbia 470 miles away something inside him clicks. He walks to the next post box, and the next and the next. He must keep walking. He must see her. She must stay alive, he declares in phone calls, until he arrives. A card is not enough. He must see her in person. A sister assures him on the phone that their patient wants to stay alive until he arrives.
On the way his feet swell and become bruised. He meets people who give him respite, food or a bed. They are changed. A social media afficionado takes his photo. He gets on the front page of newspapers. All sorts of odd or needy people - and a dog - join him. They march with him. He phones the hospice. She must stay alive until he arrives.
He has phone calls to his distraught wife back home. She tears down the net curtains as if to let in scenery for the first time. Her black, bereaved neighbour drives her to meet him at Berwick Upon Tweed. Something like a nervous breakdown hits him before he can enter the hospice. In a surgery or cafe - it is not clear which - he relives his son's suicide - the son whom neither he not his wife could reach out to because they never transcended their suburban cocoon - and he cries his heart out. Then he enters the hospice and 'angelic bells' ring in the ward where his former colleague, who had left their area with a message to his wife which she had never passed on, died happy with angelic lights floating over the the river often traversed by Saint Cutbert.
As they sit on Berwick's Spittal promenade overlooking the sea they allow the life-time's repressed love they have had for each other to be expressed for the first time. They feel and speak deeply. They find forgiveness. They live - as a couple - for the first time in their lives.
Those who follow the Way of Life of the Community of Aidan and Hilda commit to pilgrimage. Journeys to famous pilgrim sites are not everyone's cup of tea. This film (and the book) reveals a different kind of pilgrimage that we can all embark on - from the unreal to the real, from the repressed to the expressed, from the shut-in to the free.
