Teresa Irwin and Meg Spesia are both members of the Catholic Worker Movement, a network of faith-inspired communities dedicated to social justice that was founded by Dorothy Day in the 1930s. In this conversation, the friends reflect on how personal experiences including religious pilgrimage and missionary work have shaped their faith in the unseen.
This story was produced by David Dault at Sandburg Media, LLC.
This story is a part of the American Pilgrimage Project, a conversation series that invites Americans of diverse backgrounds to sit together and talk to each other one-to-one about the role their religious beliefs play at crucial moments in their lives. The interview was recorded by StoryCorps, a national nonprofit whose mission is to preserve and share humanity’s stories in order to build connections between people and create a more just and compassionate world.
Meg Spesia: How I think of faith the most is it's a tapping into this entire other structure of the world that we can't see. We've been told about it, and we experience in many, many ways through many different forms, but it's the best gift that we have to access the less visible ways.
Teresa Irwin: I like what you said about the unseen, because I think if it was seen, it wouldn't be faith. It's something that we have to believe without seeing. I feel like my whole life is just one big witness that faith is real, that God is real. Specifically, I lived with a host family in Chile for five months; I was studying there. After I was there for about three months, my host cousin committed suicide. I knew him pretty well. We hung out, and he was my age. It was just this moment where we were in their house after this horrible thing happened. My host father looked at me and he was like, "This is when it's easier if you have faith." I was just like, "Oh."
Meg Spesia: Wow.
Teresa Irwin: About four years ago when I was a missionary, I was staying with a host family. We just had this amazing conversation with the host parents, and the dad said that the veil between heaven and earth is far thinner than we think. I was like, "Wow!"
Meg Spesia: That's so beautiful.
Teresa Irwin: It's so crazy. Thinking about that, it's just a veil that's covering our little experience here right now, but heaven is all around us. It's just sometimes we can't see it. Sometimes we do see it. We get this little glimpse. Do you have an experience of faith in your life?
Meg Spesia: This past summer, I walked the Camino de Santiago in Spain. It's this ancient pilgrimage. The route that I did with three friends is about 500 miles. It was about five weeks that we were doing this. I feel like I met so many people that were really enjoying their time, and it was doing really good things for them, but the language that they had to talk about their pilgrimage, the gratitude that they have or the healing that they had experienced, it was a lot of like, "The Camino has been so good for me," and "The Camino changes you, and it stops you in your tracks." It was all about what this trail was doing.
All along, I kept having this feeling that there was somebody else who was stopping people in their tracks and touching their hearts and doing all the things that they were experiencing and feeling, but there was something that was missing. Then, when we completed our pilgrimage and we were in Santiago, we were invited to see this very ancient entrance to the cathedral called the Portico of Glory. It's all of these really beautiful carvings of different saints and people from the community at the time. All of a sudden, I just was like, "Here are the people who are living in glory for eternity." It was just a very striking visualization of this feeling that I hadn't really been able to describe even to myself the whole time.
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