My old friend and equaintance Lance Mannion wonderfully appreciates that small but touching movie, The Way, which came out last year. He captures so many aspects of the film, from Martin Sheen's ability to carry a movie with sheer grumpiness, to the underlying beauty of the story.
The Way is a sweet, sad, funny, joyful movie that asks its audience to accept that intelligent, humane, educated, thoroughly modernized and basically liberal people can, although lapsed, still be Catholic enough to find solace in their faith or to miss it if they’ve lost it enough to walk a thousand miles to chase it down and get some of the feeling and comfort it used to give them back, if only for a few moments…
Gary Wills has written about the divide between the church of the People of God and the institutional Church. It’s a divide I’ve always seen as being between the church of St Francis and the Church of the Pope. In the latter, the priests stand between you and Christ. In the former, you go out into the world like Christ in order to join him in the company of other sinners. The one approach is institutional. The other way is purely personal.
For some of us, faith is a journey, not a destination; a search, not a knowing.
Kit Stolz 