To be a pilgrim

A retired man is on a mission to walk from Devon to Northumberland

HE may start off looking like an unremarkable man, but, in director Hettie Macdonald’s eyes, the retired husband and father at the centre of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry –released at cinemas yesterday (Friday 28 April) – is ‘an extraordinary hero’. She says that ‘in bravely stepping out into the unknown, he shows it’s possible, by taking a leap of faith, to heal’.

Faith of various kinds makes appearances throughout the film – an adaptation of Rachel Joyce’s novel – from the moment when a chatty checkout girl tells Harold (Jim Broadbent), who is worried about a terminally ill friend from the past, that it is good to have faith.

When Harold says he would not claim to be religious, she suggests that she simply means a faith that things can get better.

Her words strike a chord with Harold, who moments earlier had walked out of his house in Devon to post a compassionate letter to his friend. To the bafflement of his wife Maureen (Penelope Wilton), he decides to keep walking from Devon to Queenie’s hospice in Berwick-upon-Tweed. He sends Queenie a message that she must live. He thinks that somehow his walk will stop her from dying.

Along the way, a doctor who takes him into her house to bathe his battered feet talks about her own problems and says: ‘If only I had a shred of your faith.’ good enough’ and ‘never will be’.

In a tearoom he meets another medical professional, who describes himself as religious but who says that the devastating illness he treats is nothing to do with belief or lack of it.

However, when Harold phones the hospice, a staff member tells him that Queenie has changed for the better since she learnt of his crazy venture. Perhaps, says the voice on the phone, the world needs ‘a bit more faith’.

He certainly feels as if he has taken some wrong turns in life.

He feels he has taken some wrong turns

Maureen, too, is thrown off balance by her husband’s pilgrimage. Yet when she asks him to forgive her for selfishly asking him to quit, he says: ‘I’m the one who needs forgiveness.’

But, while inspiring others, it seems as if Harold believes that something needs to be resolved.

He tells Maureen in a phone call back home: ‘It isn’t enough to post a letter.’ And, when talking with the doctor who bathes his feet about his walk and about the son who seems often to be on his mind, something prompts him to say that ‘it isn’t

The same could have been said by unnumbered Christians who have set off on more usual pilgrimages over the centuries. They, and those who have followed the Christian faith in other ways, have been aware that they have not always done what they should have done or been what they should have been.

But they have accepted the truth summarised by one Bible writer in a letter to early believers: ‘You were saved by faith in God, who treats us much better than we deserve’ (Ephesians 2:8 Contemporary English Version).

They recognise that when they placed their trust in the love for humankind that God revealed in Jesus, they received forgiveness for the past and hope for the future.

It’s a life-changing message. It’s why people continue to take the step of making that leap of faith.