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by Jim Holman.
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I Wasn't Alone

A Walk With Serra Along El Camino Real

By Christopher Zehnder

Five years ago, a small group was setting up for a string quartet concert at Carmel Mission in Monterey. One of the workers, turning to a woman near him, commented on the beauty of the mission. The woman (who was his mother-in-law), replied, "Well, you know, Junípero Serra is buried here."

"Really?" he said with some surprise.

"Yes, You are standing on his grave, right there."

John David Black said, since he grew up in California, he knew who Serra was, but had never given much thought to him. Now, as he looked down at the slab marking Serra's grave, he said, he "had an intense spiritual experience, a sudden sense of identification with him as a person, and with the mission that he came here to fulfill -- to preach the gospel, to gather souls into the kingdom of God." The "revival and renewal in California" that Black said he had been praying for, would be, he then felt, rooted in the work that Serra began over two hundred years ago.

That Black would tie the revival and renewal of California to Serra was surprising. Black was a Protestant. He and his wife had been involved in church ministries. Only the previous year, she had participated in a part of a prayer walk, sponsored by a Protestant group, that followed the El Camino Real. Yet, this walk had no Catholic overtones. "They were following the El Camino Real," Black said, "simply because it was the first road in California, and because the first place the gospel was preached was the missions; but that is about as far as they went."

Before his experience at Carmel, Black had felt drawn to make a similar prayer walk; but he would do his alone, starting from San Diego and concluding it in San Francisco, his home. His wife, said Black, "was not all that thrilled" about the idea. "We had a lay ministry where we lived on donations," he said. He would be leaving her alone with two small children for two months.

Yet, the idea of the walk would not leave him. Meanwhile, Black began to read more about Serra. He had never felt hostile to the Catholic Church, merely thought "almost" that it "didn't count;" but, now, reading about Serra, Black felt more drawn to the friar's "catholicity." "I wished," he said, "that I had grown up then and been a Catholic and been able to serve God in that way, because, at least then, I wouldn't have known any better." His study of Serra interested Black in the Franciscans and their founder, St. Francis, whose "commitment to poverty, simplicity and humility and prayer," inspired him.

Black began to see "that what we build on here in California is a continuous and unbroken train of tradition going all the way back [through Mexico and Spain] to Christ. I felt the uniqueness of that. In California, all our mountains, rivers, valleys, points along the coast, our cities, are named after Franciscan saints, and angels. As Protestants, I thought, we have to come to terms with this -- that the sovereignty of God chose and ordained the spiritual foundation of this place -- and it's Spanish, it's Franciscan and it's Catholic."

As time passed, Black thought more about doing the prayer walk. Coming home one day, he asked himself, "Why do you continue to think about this walk, when you are never going to do it?" Sitting down to lunch with his wife, he said to her, "I need to do this walk." And she, pausing a minute, looked him in the eye, and said, "yes, you do."

Of course, there were practical problems with the walk and Black began to worry whether he could do it. "As I struggled with the difficulty of it," he said, "I read about when Junípero Serra first landed in Mexico from Spain; he refused to the take the pack train from Vera Cruz to Mexico City, but determined that he was going to walk the 200 miles distance in emulation of St. Francis who sent his friars out barefoot to preach the gospel. Serra deliberately put on his more difficult pair of sandals and took nothing with him but his staff and breviary, and a companion. They trusted in the providence of God to provide them with food and shelter along the way -- and there were a couple of times that they thought they were ministered to by angels.

"When I read that," said Black, "I thought, 'this is what I have to do. I'm just going to pack a day-pack, with one change of clothes. I 'm not going to take a sleeping bag; I'm not going to worry about the money I need; I'm not going to line out where I am going to stay every night. Basically, I'm going to fly down to San Diego and turn around and walk back.'"

Black flew down to San Diego in early October 1998. Taking a bus out to Mission San Diego, he prayed in the church there and, at about 11 a.m., started his prayer walk.

The first day was difficult. Walking all day and far into the night, Black arrived at South Carlsbad at 4 a.m. Unable to sleep on the beach because of the chill, he started walking an hour later. Having arrangements to sleep at Mission San Luis Rey, he pushed on with blistered feet. About 11 a.m., outside Oceanside, he reached a little rise that overlooked the valley where the mission stood. The bright sun, flashing on the whitewashed buildings, made them look a brilliant white. The exhausted Black felt a great exhilaration and "a bizarre sense of almost being welcomed by someone." Staggering through the valley, "even in such a poor physical state, as I was coming across the grounds of the mission, I was choking back the tears." It seemed as if someone was congratulating him.

Black thinks that this sense of being greeted was a foretaste of the communion of saints -- a doctrine with which, as a Protestant, he was not conversant. Yet, an understanding of the communion of saints would grow in Black as he went from mission to mission. After visiting San Juan Capistrano, Black trudged on to Mission San Gabriel. "When I got to San Gabriel," he said, "something different than what I had expected began to happen. I had the sense of being welcomed, and embraced, as if everyone was excited to see me, and going into the church to pray, I tried to process what that sense of connection to the place was. When I went up to the front of the church and read the names of the padres buried there, I began to contemplate their commitment -- how they left their homeland, and their families, forever. I thought, I want that kind of commitment to God and to gathering souls into the kingdom. I knelt down, and prayed, 'God, may a measure of their mantle fall to me. May you take the best of what these men represent and put some of it in me.' I had a strange sense that they were all standing around me, praying for me."

Black said that at San Gabriel "the idea that the saints might actually be there praying for me didn't seem so utterly foreign. I had no theological foundation to understand the communion of saints, but I couldn't deny what I was experiencing there."

Black would next to be introduced to the doctrine of the Eucharist. From San Gabriel, he walked to Burbank where he was to stay with a friend, an Episcopal priest. The priest, Father Chuck, took Black to visit his Episcopal parish church. After explaining the stations of the cross on the walls, Father Chuck pointed out the tabernacle in the front and the symbolism of it. Then he pointed out the red candle that burned near it, explaining that the flame represented God's presence in the sanctuary. Black, an evangelical Protestant, found all this "heavy liturgical stuff" theologically repellent. "At the same time," he said, "something in me was drawing me to what Father Chuck was showing me. I felt some sense of affection towards this red candle and towards the tabernacle. I felt in that church the presence of Christ in a unique way that made it hard for me to pray in the way I was used to praying. I felt a little irreverent, and I felt more a sense of awe and caution. I was confused by it."

As his journey lengthened, Black began to see that through the considerable pain and fatigue he felt, he was reliving the labors of the Franciscan missionaries. "My sense was that my walking through the pain and the suffering is just a symbol of my commitment to identify with that level of commitment to Christ that they exemplified. I was just going to have to live with this pain." Like Fray Junípero, Black received help along his journey, sometimes in unexpected ways. He was able to find lodging in houses, sometimes with people he had never met before. Lodging arrangements often "came together the day I came into town." He didn't run out of money. "People would give me money," said Black, "and ask me to pray for them." A couple in Oxnard gave him money to stay at a hotel in Carpinteria, but arriving there at 9.30 p.m. on a Saturday night, he found all the hotels packed. With no room in the inn, he had to keep walking to Santa Barbara where he had made arrangements to stay with a friar at the mission.

The next morning at about dawn, Black stood in front of Mission Santa Barbara. With, again, the incredible sense of being welcomed, Black said, "I felt I had acquired a deeper sense of my whole Christian faith, and the assistance of the Saints to help me along that was not spooky or weird. I sensed that we are part of a family -- there are those on earth and those in heaven, but we're all laboring for the same end."

At Santa Barbara Black was greeted by Brother Joachim Grant. Brother Joachim worked in the friars' infirmary and introduced Black to the elderly friars there. One of them noted that Black must have a lot of time to pray the rosary on his walk. Black did not relate his dislike of the rosary to the friar, nor did he know that shortly he would have his first experience of that questionable prayer (nor that he would be praying it by the end of his journey.) That afternoon, Brother Joachim took Black to the convent of the Poor Clares for prayer and adoration before the exposed Eucharist. "I saw the people there praying the rosary," said Black. "I saw the devotion in Brother Joachim's eyes, the love of Christ, and the adoration he had in his heart, and I began to suspect that he had tapped into levels of Christian spirituality that I knew nothing about and that they were related to some of these things I was learning -- could even be related to things like the rosary."

Early the next morning Brother Joachim awakened Black to take him to Mass. The worship was a surprise for him. "From the perspective of a Protestant," said Black, "especially of the Charismatic tradition, where we would rely on great music and bombastic preaching, and where the service really had to be happening, I had learned to look down on those liturgical, dry services. But when I got into this Mass, and the priest was reading from the Eucharistic prayer about 'our joy' and 'our praise' in a monotone -- watching the service, I was thinking, 'man, if you had a service that was this lethargic and methodical in a Protestant church, you couldn't get people to come on a Sunday morning, let alone every single day. What draws these people, here?' I noticed when I left, though, that I really had the sense that I had been to church -- and that was peculiar to me. I had a sense that I was blessed to have gone. The next morning when Brother Joachim woke me for Mass, I found myself wanting to go."

"I could clearly experience the presence of Christ in that place," Black continued. "I felt an attraction to the tabernacle. Each time I would come into a mission, I'd look for that red candle I had learned about at the Episcopal church in Burbank. By the time I had gotten to Santa Barbara, I still didn't understand what it meant. I didn't realize that it actually designated the real presence."

The next leg of Black's walk would prove extremely difficult. Because the El Niño rains had washed out portions of the road to Santa Iñez, making them too dangerous for cars and a pilgrim to share, Black had to follow a trail that passed over the mountains. Climbing 4,300 feet from Santa Barbara, and then winding down another 2,300 feet, the journey was 47 miles long, with nowhere to stop in between. Starting at noon, Black reached Santa Iñez peak by 9.30 at night.

"I was cold and hungry," said Black. "I was way out in the middle of nowhere. I had had a little bit of a moon during the earlier hours, but it was setting, and it was getting very dark. I had at least six or seven hours of walking left; no idea of whether I was lost. I began to worry if I should even have attempted it. It would be hours before anyone could get to me, if anything happened, and I didn't even know if the road was through all the way."

Before Black had left Santa Barbara, Brother Joachim had given him a gift -- a portion of the bones of Junípero Serra -- which he could mail back when he reached San Francisco. When Black put the relic into his pack, Brother Joachim said, "Father Serra is going to walk with you the rest of the way." Black said he did not know how literally true this was.

While the night advanced, Black's situation seemed more perilous and he grew more frightened. "It was about this time that I distinctly heard someone say, 'let's pray for John,'" said Black. "I heard it interiorly, but it was loud enough to make me startle, turn my head to see who was talking. At that moment a real sense of peace began to flow over me; I wasn't alone, I was going to make it. Getting down the mountain was probably, physically, the most difficult thing I have ever done, but the sense of peace and comfort never left me."

Black reached Mission Santa Iñez about 4.30 in the morning. "I stumbled across the field into that mission and went over and lay down right near the wall by the graveyard. You would think that at night, it was a sort of spooky place to lie down, but my sense of identification and comfort with the people who were there was very strong. It was almost as if I felt more safe than I could possibly be; it was almost as if I were being told, 'you lie down and rest. You've had a long journey. Don't worry, nothing will harm you here.' For two hours I didn't move, and then the bell woke me up for Mass.

"I called Brother Joachim to let him know I had arrived. He told me, 'last night, I was lying in bed and you came to my mind. I thought about you out there all by yourself, and I knew you needed help. I got out of bed and started praying for you.' I asked him what time that happened, and it was exactly at the time I heard the voice, about 9.30, ten o'clock that night."

Black said his experience that night, when, he believes, Father Serra interceded for him, helped him to understand the communion of saints. "I would not have called myself Catholic, then," he said, "but I didn't feel like a Protestant anymore. I was somewhere in between. When he came to Mission La Purisima Concepcíon, which is now a state park, and entered the church, he had the same experience of the communion of saints he had experienced in every mission, but entering the mission church, there, he felt like something was missing. "I was scratching my head to figure out what was missing," said Black, "and then it dawned on me: there's no red candle, there's no host here. That's what's drawing people to Mass day after day; it wasn't fantastic preaching, or anything else. The real presence of Christ is drawing them, because I could feel it, and it wasn't in that church."

Walking to Mission San Miguel, Black said he asked God, "'are you intending to convert me to Catholicism?' I asked it as kind of a joke. The fact that I got silence, got me." The question of the place of Mary, of course, bothered him; but, as he walked he had a "conversation in his mind" about the incarnation, of how God the Son was formed in her womb, of how Mary raised Him and cared for Him. "Suddenly," said Black, "I began to understand Marian devotion in a way I had never understood it before." Arriving at San Miguel and kneeling down in the church to pray, "for the first time in my whole Christian experience, Jesus and Mary were fused together in a way that has become for me inseparable -- where He is, she is; where she is, He is. There is no way to separate the two and the ministry that they each perform. As I knelt there and prayed, heaven seemed a lot bigger to me. It was full of the saints, these incredible men and women of God who have labored and sacrificed for the Lord. It made me feel very small, and very insignificant and very humble; at the same time, it called me to a higher level of commitment. It challenged me."

Walking out of the church, Black saw a stack of The Way of St. Francis, a periodical put out by the Franciscans. "I opened it up," he said, "and saw an article entitled: 'Standing on the Shoulders of Giants,' and it said, basically, word for word, everything I had been learning about the communion of saints."

Black did finally become Catholic. After he returned to San Francisco, he met the man who publishes The Way of St. Francis, who introduced him to a woman who ran an RCIA program. On Holy Saturday, 1999, Black was received into the Catholic Church. Later, his wife would follow.

Black says he believes that Junípero Serra played "a very significant role" in his conversion. "He had walked with me, had prayed for me, from that moment that he had captured my heart there on his grave, to the day I went to San Miguel" and came to understand the role of Mary. That day, said Black, Serra had passed him off to her.

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