Catholic couple takes “interfaith pilgrimage” on “Faithbook”

A great story about spiritual discovery, and how a couple is learning more about the world’s faiths, including their own:

Frederic and Anne-Laure Pascal are devout Roman Catholics who built their lives around their religion. When she lost her job last year, the young couple decided on an unlikely expression of their religious commitment: a worldwide “interfaith pilgrimage” to places where peace has won out over dueling dogmas.

Since October, the French couple has visited 11 nations from Iraq to Malaysia in an odyssey to find people of all creeds who have dedicated their lives to overcoming religious intolerance in some of the world’s most divided and war-torn corners.

The husband-and-wife team blogs about their adventures — and their own soul-searching — and takes short video clips for the project they’ve dubbed the Faithbook Tour.

The Pascals travel on a shoestring budget, kept afloat by 115 individual donors who are mostly friends and family. They say their travels are meant to illuminate examples of hope and peace in a world that is too often torn apart by faith-driven fervor. Their conversation, in a mix of French and English, is peppered with quotes from Mahatma Gandhi, ancient Chinese proverbs and references to their inspiration, St. Francis of Assisi.

They began the three-week U.S. leg of their trip late last month after arriving in California jetlagged from Japan and will visit Israel before hanging up their backpacks.

“There is a saying, ‘A tree that falls makes more noise than a forest that grows.’ My aim was to meet the people who make the forest grow and not the people who make the tree fall,” said Frederic, 29, as the couple took a break during a recent visit to Claremont Lincoln University, an interreligious graduate institute in Southern California. “We have to be the mirror to reflect their light.”

On its face, the project seems almost naive, but in practice, the Pascals’ blend of religious journalism and personal exploration has brought them face-to-face with some of the world’s top religious thinkers and deposited them in some of the most forgotten parts of the planet.

In their five months on the road, the couple has trekked through the Sahel in the West African nation of Burkina Faso, explored interfaith schools in the slums of Cairo and traveled across the Iraqi desert in the dead of night to reach a camp dedicated to Christian and Muslim children.

Along the way, they have felt their own faith deepen.

“What really hit me in Egypt is the Muslim call to prayer. The more I heard that call, the more I was called back to my own faith and the more I asked myself, ‘How do I pray? Do I pray regularly? Am I faithful in my prayer or not?'” said Anne-Laure, 28. “There were a lot of things like that where, in meeting others, we were brought back our own faith and how we live our faith.”

Read more. And follow their adventures here.