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Pilgrims seek lost selves
By MICHAEL J. FARRELL
Dont be surprised if we
eventually learn that Adam and Eve, as soon as they were sprung from the
Garden, went on a pilgrimage. Eden sounds neat enough to have made us content
here below. Banished from Eden, though, were in transit and searching.
Pilgrims whether we go on pilgrimage or not, a great number of us go far from
home in search of our lost selves.
This universal urge will grow more intense during the upcoming
Jubilee year. Pilgrims have never needed an excuse to take to the road, but by
the same token there has never been an excuse they did not embrace with gusto.
And there will hardly be a more apt moment than this for another thousand
years.
Everyone is gearing up. The pope has been making pronouncements
and plans a personal trip to the Holy Land. The papal fervor has naturally
trickled down to the faithful. In the process some odd alliances have emerged.
The Israeli tourist authorities, for example, are leaving no ancient stone
unturned. Some months ago, Jennifer E. Reed reported for Catholic News Service
on a junket hosted by Unitours and El Al for 13 U.S. bishops and their guests.
We rode in an air-conditioned bus over miles and miles of dusty roadways,
the same paths Jesus would have walked from Galilee on his way to
Jerusalem, she writes. This was scarcely pilgrims progress:
At lunches and dinners in various hotels, smoked salmon, duck, even
caviar were on our menus.
Every other entity in what might loosely be called the travel
business is similarly jockeying for position and, yes, profit. Only the
naïve are likely to be shocked. Sackcloth and ashes have long walked hand
in glove with the grubby and dubious. One of the intriguing aspects of the
pilgrim trail is the human way it descends into the low valleys as well as
climbing the high hills.
The Catholic Encyclopedia defines pilgrimage as a
journey to a sacred shrine or sanctuary for a religious motive. Like many
widely used words, pilgrim has become frayed at the edges. In the Old
West, at least in the movies, one stranger was likely to greet another as
pilgrim, thereby making a conscious or unconscious comment on their
mutual human condition. Writes Tom Wright in The Way of the Lord: Christian
Pilgrimage Today, a pilgrim is someone who goes on a journey in the
hope of encountering God or meeting him in a new way.
Abandoning the familiar
Other travelers, from explorers to
tourists, do not share the pilgrims motive, writes Nicholas Shrady in
Sacred Roads: Adventures from the Pilgrimage Trail. Nor do they share
the significance with which they imbue their destination. Shrady goes on to
compare pilgrims favorably with heroes: By abandoning familiar, worldly
surroundings, submitting themselves to physical hardship and sometimes
considerable danger, and paying homage or doing penance at a holy site,
pilgrims, like heroes, know that they will return from their odyssey in some
way renewed.
Shrady cites Cynthia Ozick: A visitor passes through a
place, the place passes through the pilgrim. And he cites the ubiquitous
Meister Eckhart writing of the wayless way, where the sons of God lose
themselves and at the same time find themselves. Its more than
tourism.
Shradys book is an antidote to parochialism, a reminder that
pilgrimage was also earlier and more widespread than Christianity. While the
author has a chapter on Medjugorje, he has, frankly, better ones on such
non-Christian sites as the Ganges River at Varanasi, the Hindu holy place. The
best time to be there, Shrady writes, is when the moon is full -- and it was --
and his description captures well that ledge between devotion and delirium on
which pilgrims often dare to walk:
When the sun set, I stepped out of my guesthouse and into
the crush. There was no question of which way to go -- the sea of pilgrims was
flowing toward the river, and I let myself get swept up by the current. They
had come from every corner of the subcontinent. There were Keralans, Bengalis
and Punjabis, whole clans from Gujarat, masses from impoverished Bihar, desert
people from Rajasthan, Tamils, Kashmiris and Goans. They marched and danced
behind troupes playing reedy, high-pitched flutes and beating furiously on
drums. Men were wielding snakes, torches, banners and images of Shiva, Ganga
and Vishnu. Pilgrims halted at temples and shrines along the route, offering
puja and smearing lingams with vermilion powders in a clear allusion to
ancient blood sacrifices. It was as frenzied a spectacle as I had ever
witnessed.
Earth is dotted with holy places. Before package tours, the
renowned sacred places were out of reach of the majority. So people found the
numinous and miraculous closer to home. Yet whenever money and other
circumstances allowed, the devout desired to go on the grand journey, usually
in the footsteps of religious founders such as Siddhartha Gautama or Jesus
Christ. In that way, for each religion, a sacred geography grew.
In the Christian case it grew only gradually. Members of the
persecuted early church were too preoccupied with survival to worry about
pilgrimage. Yet chroniclers mention occasional early bishops who could not
resist an urge to visit the land where the founder had lived. Not surprisingly,
though, it is Emperor Constantine, who gave Christians their religious freedom,
who is remembered as champion pilgrim of the early centuries. He and his mother
Helena get credit for finding the Holy Sepulcher and building grand basilicas
on more prominent sites such as that of the Nativity. Fathers of the church
Athenasius and John Chrysostom promoted pilgrimages, as did Jerome, the great
scripture scholar who spent 30 years in the Holy Land. Thus a tradition was
being forged in those crucial early years.
A letter from Jeromes friend Paula echoes the Hindu
description and the universality of the pilgrims: What shall we say about
the Armenians, Persians, peoples of India and Ethiopia, from Egypt
Pontus, Cappadocia, Syria, Mesopotamia and all the crowds from the
East?
Feasting, merrymaking
Dnd no mournful procession were
they. Stories are told throughout Christendom of feasting and merrymaking and
in turn of clergy and hierarchy trying to rein in the excess of good times.
Many pilgrimages resemble the ebullience of the traditional Irish wake, and
perhaps with good reason: Both occurred at points where life and death
intersected dramatically and where humans confronted their mortality more
deliberately than usual.
In Pilgrimage, a 1996 Concilium publication edited by Fr.
Virgil Elizondo and Sean Freyne, David Carrosco writes of an underlying
pattern in pilgrimages of all traditions. Despite the differences, they
all have in common three related stages: (1) Separation from a spatial, social
and psychological status quo and the passage into (2) a liminal
space and set of social relationships within which a theophany takes
place, resulting in a profound sense of community, which usually leads the
pilgrim (3) to re-enter society as a changed, renewed human being.
First, there is the separation from the spatial, social and
spiritual status quo. This may be voluntary or brought on by necessity. It is
often symbolized by a vow or a promise or even taking a new name -- one can see
this is a more serious approach than the typical coach tour taking in the
Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, said to be the most
popular pilgrimage in the United States.
The motives that coaxed pilgrims to a place apart can generally be
reduced to entreaty and thanksgiving. The entreaty aspect is aimed primarily at
physical health, but historically it ran the gamut from sheer spiritual fervor
to victory over an enemy to whatever success in life the Christian at that
moment aspired to. In short, mixed motives were always in order.
In what are wistfully called the ages of faith, there was
elaborate formality attached to this setting out. Back then, the pilgrim
received a special liturgical blessing. There was special dress, topped off by
a broad-brimmed hat, a pouch and a staff. The pilgrim was also expected to put
his or her affairs in order, make provision for the family -- these were often
long and dangerous ventures. Other prerequisites included authorization from
the bishop.
The second consideration was that place apart. There were
frequently pilgrim roads to get there. Shrady devotes a chapter to his 500-mile
trek across Spain, following all the elaborate old rituals, to Santiago de
Compostela. Shrady writes that this is Christendoms most venerated
pilgrimage after Jerusalem and Rome. In each town the pilgrim must get a stamp
from the local priest to verify progress -- but that is only an echo of old
glory. Back then, the vast sea of pilgrims included the pious and the
irreverent, popes and paupers, scholars and simpletons, saints and charlatans,
fortune-seekers and common criminals (the last were frequently sentenced to
march to Santiago in an example of innovative medieval
jurisprudence).
Among those who did it were Francis of Assisi and El Cid. Along
the way, hospices, shrines and commerce sprang up, and expanded. Wrote Goethe:
Europe was formed journeying to Santiago.
Other sacred places have similarly contributed to local landscapes
and lifestyles around the globe. They are a mountain or an island or a grove.
The guardians of some such sites try harder than others to stay apart and keep
avid entrepreneurs at bay and preserve the penitential spirit. St.
Patricks Purgatory in Ireland has preserved the fierce medieval penance
better than most, but even there the less ambitious pilgrim can arrange a
softer off-season version.
Profound freedom
Wherever this hallowed space may be,
a bonding, which Carrasco calls communitas takes place. This is
the unplanned, intensive, direct and total confrontation of human identities
involved in the pilgrimage. Moments of spontaneous communitas are like
happenings rather than pre-ordained rituals, and result in a
momentary sense of profound freedom from social norms and biases and a new
sense of collective identity. Something like this can happen at summer
camp or at Woodstock reruns, but it is the unique shared aspiration that gives
the pilgrim encounter its communitas.
Finally there is the return to reality. Here no doubt the
distinction between the pilgrim and the tourist will be most pronounced. The
serious pilgrim of whatever tradition has ever regarded his or her journey as a
pivotal event and the beginning of a new life.
Despite the Buddhas alleged last words to his followers to
Walk on! religious founders have seldom preached pilgrimage. Rather
their followers have spontaneously followed the urge to follow in their
footsteps, sensing liberation somewhere deep down, and perhaps a turning upside
down of the status quo.
Philippe Baud, in Pilgrimage, alludes to the untamed,
subversive quality that makes the pilgrim more of a risk to the status quo than
the average Christian: The human condition is certainly that of a
pilgrim. So it is not surprising that the societies which seek to affirm the
sacral character of their power forbid access to places of pilgrimage, make the
nomads settle down, imprison the curious, gag writers, curse poets and burn
visionaries, offering only exile as a possible route. The strong-minded, the
scapegoats, have to die outside the world so that their brothers and sisters
can sleep soundly.
In a so-called post-modern world when belief seems to be withering
and materialism lord of the jungle, the last thing we might expect is an
embracing of the hardships involved in real pilgrimage. And truth to tell, the
hardships have dwindled. Yet pilgrims do undertake unaccustomed hardships in
order to walk on.
In his introduction to the excellent little Pilgrimage,
Elizondo puts the paradox in context:
The faster humanity moves, the more it needs to be
grounded. It seems that pilgrimage sites are responding to this deep
anthropological need of the human soul to be connected to mother earth.
Furthermore, the more knowledge, science and information we have, the greater
the quest of the soul for ultimate meaning; the more psychological analysis and
psychotherapy we undergo, the greater the quest of the soul for penance and
purification; the more medical science accomplishes, the greater the search for
miracles; and the more families break apart while churches become more
rule-oriented, the greater the quest for an unconditional human
community.
On the eve of what will surely be the most crowded year in the
history of pilgrimage, it might seem a sacrilege to suggest that the essential
journey is internal and is not dependent on faraway places or using up gas or
shoe leather. Opponents of pilgrimage, especially in the days of its greatest
abuses, usually quoted St. Augustine, who, reflecting St. Johns Gospel,
insisted that not by journeys but by loving do we grow close to God.
Great year for pickpockets
Still, it will be a great year for
tour operators, bus drivers, guides, translators, airlines and publishers of
pilgrimage books. It will be a great year for Vatican monsignori and Roman
pickpockets. But it will be a good year, too, for the humble pilgrim. The
restless, searching descendents of Adam and Eve may have a cell phone in one
pocket and a camera in the other. Theyre going to bitch about hotel
prices and airport searches. But if they dont watch out, enlightenment or
metanoia or divine grace or some odd tic of the human spirit may take them by
surprise, confront them with lost dreams or tarnished idealism, challenge them
to be all they can be and, by God, a little more, land them foursquare in some
form of communitas they had not bargained for in their package deal.
They thought they were responding to an ad or an article, in
search of some small grail or just innocent fun. It is said, though, that a
pilgrim sitting under a banyan tree or by a bleak ancient ruin often gets
ambushed by the divine.
Books on pilgrimage |
These are a few of the books about pilgrimage and related
topics that came across our NCR desks in the recent past: Sacred
Places: Adventures from the Pilgrimage Trail, by Nicholas Shrady
(HarperSanFrancisco, 268 pages, $22 hardcover). Catholic Shrines of
Western Europe: A Pilgrims Travel Guide, by Kevin J. Wright (Ligouri,
238 pages, $13.95 paper). The Way of the Lord: Christian Pilgrimage
Today, by Tom Wright (Eerdmans, 132 pages, $10 paper). Shrines of
the Holy Land: A Pilgrims Travel Guide, by Norman Wareham and Jill
Gill (Ligouri, 235 pages, $13.95 paper). Marian Shrines of the United
States, by Theresa Santa Czarnopys and Thomas M. Santa (Ligouri, 235 pages,
$13.95 paper). Pilgrimage, edited by Virgil Elizondo and Sean Freyne
(Concilium/Orbis, 127 pages). Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular
Age, by Ruth Harris (Viking, 496 pages, $29.95 hardcover). Into the
Heart of Jerusalem: A Travelers Guide to Vacations, Celebrations and
Sojourns, by Arlynn Nellhaus (John Muir Publications, 351 pages, $17.95
paper). Guadalupe: Our Lady of New Mexico, by Jacqueline Orsini
Dunnington (Museum of New Mexico Press, 189 pages, $24.95 paper). |
Michael Farrell is editor of NCR.
National Catholic Reporter, October 15,
1999
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