A Case for Suffering: What is Real
Updated: 2 days ago
Dear Friends of the Three Hearts,
I recently had a long conversation with a priest, and some of what he shared was difficult to hear. He spoke about despair among young people, growing confession lines, and increasing addiction troubles of every kind: substances, pornography, social media, and the endless, quiet pull of the phone. We kept circling back to the same root cause: people are losing their grip on what is real.
Then he said something I have not been able to stop thinking about:
He said the Three Hearts Pilgrimage is very difficult, but the pilgrimage is necessary, because it is the antidote. The world is not starving for more information. It is starving for men who know what is worth suffering for.
An antidote is not an argument. You cannot reason a family out of a life lived through a screen, and you cannot compete with an algorithm by explaining to a fifteen-year-old that it is bad for him.
You can only put something better in front of him, and let him walk into it.
I have seen it happen.
Near the end of the 1st day of each pilgrimage, there are always a few boys barely moving. Barefoot. Bleeding. Covered in dust. One year I watched a boy of maybe fifteen, who simply could go no further. He was limping, and he was alone.
Up ahead, two other boys turned around. They walked back to him, took him arm in arm, and carried him forward. Not for ten feet. Not for fifty. But for hundreds of yards, barefoot themselves.
I was standing there watching it, and so was Terry.
Terry drives one of our buses and follows at the back, which means he spends 3 days watching the people who are struggling the most. He is not affiliated with the Church, and has seen a lot in life.
He was weeping. He had pulled his bus up next to me, opened his window, and said:
“Sir, I've never seen anything like this. I knew this kind of thing once existed. I'd heard about it, in stories about WWII. But I thought it was gone."
And then he said something that has stayed with me ever since:
That is the whole argument. Not that the pilgrimage is moving, or good for the kids. But that a man at the back of the formation, looked out of a bus window and recognized something he gave up on ever seeing again.
It is not gone, but it cannot survive on its own; thirty-five miles of it has to be built, by hand, every single October.
From the road it looks simple. It is not.
Water is $2,500 a day. Portable facilities are over $20,000.
Fuel for support vehicles costs thousands - before we’ve fed a single person.
None of it is glamorous. Water, diesel, sanitation, storage.
It is the unremarkable work of moving three thousand people across thirty-five miles of Oklahoma.
But it buys something that cannot be bought any other way.
God did not make us angels. He made us men, with feet, and men only arrive somewhere by walking there. Sore feet, sunburn, thirst, two nights on the ground. That is not the cost of the pilgrimage. That is the pilgrimage.
And it ends at an altar. This year we will need nearly 6,000 hosts for Communion, and over 3,000 roses, one for every pilgrim to carry and lay at the feet of Our Lady.
Most of you reading this have already given something to this pilgrimage. Your feet. A week of your life. A check when we needed one. I am asking again because you already know what Terry saw.
And you already know what I am asking you to protect.
I've sometimes wondered what it was like to stand in a room when donors were funding the building of the Chartres Cathedral; whether they understood that what they were giving would outlive them by centuries. I doubt any of them thought of it as a transaction. I think they thought of it as a stone.
Laid quietly into a foundation, for a thing they would never see finished.
It began with twelve boys and three fathers walking. This October, three thousand people will come from across the country and beyond to walk it with us. Not one of us built that. We just kept laying stones.
Between now and October 10th, every stone you lay counts twice.
A friend of the pilgrimage has put up a $20,000 challenge grant. Every dollar given between now and October 10th is matched, dollar for dollar. We have raised $8,600. We need $12,400 more to capture the full match.
In the Three Hearts,
Marcus Robinson
Director, Three Hearts Pilgrimage
Comments