When I was a graduate student I chose the topic of Pilgrimage for my thesis. What I soon learned was how many others were as interested as I was in pilgrimage. It seems to capture the imagination. In hindsight, I see the many reasons it was of interest to me as a woman on the cusp of a changing life. It took many more years before I would embark on my own pilgrimage. I had one failed attempt when my long-planned pilgrimage was thwarted at the very last minute as I was about to board a plane: That connecting flight could not land in Boston in time for my international flight. It was over before it started. Another year would go by before I finally made that pilgrimage to the Anchorage of the medieval mystic, Julian of Norwich in England within months of the pandemic foreclosing all travel. Julian, herself, lived during the Black Death plagues of the fourteenth century. She had a near-death experience in which she saw sixteen visions. She survived three long days that forever changed her life. Writing about those visions became her life's work. An anchorage was just the place for a writer given that there was no exit! When she entered at the age of fifty she knew that she would spend the rest of her life living in that 12 x 12 room attached to the small parish church with three windows but no door! How did she do it? What was it like to live there? Could I? Could you? Seeking those answers comes as a "pilgrim call" to leave home to go to the place where one woman lived and died and has never been forgotten. She is now affectionately known to twenty-first century pilgrims as Lady Julian or Mother Julian.
In three weeks, I will be leading a small group of women on a pilgrimage to Julian's Anchorage. The writing that she left behind resulted in Julian becoming the first known woman to have written a book in English. A quite extraordinary feat for a woman in 1373 in direct defiance of the Roman Church who killed "heretics" for having a Bible in English rather than Latin. In spite of that, she wrote two separate versions which have survived for over six centuries. The first was known as the short text, or Showings; twenty years later while living in the Anchorage, she wrote her well-known Revelations of Divine Love. Both books are still in print in 2024! Her handwritten words were transcribed for posterity by some nuns and are now part of the rare manuscripts archives in the British Library. These writings fared better than the Anchorage and St. Julian's Church having been bombed to the ground during World War II. They were rebuilt and reopened in 1953 thanks to some nuns who did not want Julian's life story to be forgotten. Clearly, the nuns in the middle ages and those in the twentieth century were forward thinking in a way that has made it possible for the Anchorage to have become a pilgrimage destination. Many a pilgrim travels far and wide with Julian's most well known words "All Shall be well" on their lips and in their hearts. Our own pilgrimage will coincide with Julian's feast days, May 8 and 13, celebrated by both the Anglican and Catholic Church.
The Guardian Editorial* in the past week spoke to the ever-growing number of people who set out on pilgrimage each year and continues to increase exponentially. What is behind this global phenomenon reaching across geographic, demographic, and ideological beliefs? The answer may be in the word itself:
WHAT IS A PILGRIMAGE?
For as long as humans have walked, they have walked to get closer to their gods.
The Greeks made these quests, as did the Israelites, the Mayans, and the Chinese. Jesus hailed these journeys, along with the Buddha and the Prophet Mohammad. These wanderings have been around forever. Pilgrims made them in the eons before writing was invented. Believers made them in the millennia during which the great civilizations were built. Seekers follow them today.
Six stages characterize every pilgrimage:
The Call: The opening clarion of any spiritual journey. Often in the form of a feeling or some vague yearning, that summons expresses a fundamental human desire: finding meaning in an overscheduled world somehow requires leaving behind our daily obligations. Sameness is the enemy of spirituality.
The Separation: Pilgrimage, by its very nature, undoes certainty. It rejects the safe and familiar. It asserts that one is freer when one frees oneself from daily obligations of family, work, and community, but also the obligations of science, reason, and technology.
The Journey: The backbone of a sacred journey is the pain of the journey itself. In India, pilgrims approach the holy sites barefoot. In Iraq, they flagellate themselves. In Tibet, the more difficult the trip the most merit the pilgrim acquires. In almost every place, the travelers develop blisters, hunger, and diarrhea. This personal sacrifice enhances the experience; it also elevates the sense of community one develops along the way.
The Contemplation: Some pilgrimages go the direct route, right to the center of the holy of holies, directly to the heart of the matter. Others take a more indirect route, circling around the outside of the sacred place, transforming the physical journey into a spiritual path of contemplation.
The Encounter: After all the toil and trouble, after all the sunburn and swelling, after all the anticipation and expectation comes the approach, the sighting. The encounter is the climax of the journey, the moment when the traveler attempts to slide through a thin membrane in the universe and return to the Garden of Origin, where humans lived in concert with the Creator.
The Completion and Return: At the culmination of the journey, the pilgrim returns home only to discover that meaning they sought lies in the familiar of one's own world.
*https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/14/the-guardian-view-on-pilgrimage-a-21st-century-spiritual-exercise?CMP=share_btn_url
Blessings on your pilgrimage. I will be praying for you and for the group. I would LOVE to go sometime but this year is not it. Love and light- TMK