Throughout
this blog a word “pilgrimage” has been repeated over and over
again. There has been a pilgrimage to Lourdes, to the Pyrenees, to
Santiago de Compostela, to Finisterre. Others have made it when
travelling to Jerusalem, Lumbini, Rome, Kumbh Mela, Mecca, Meherabad.
The list could go on and on, and on. It seems that almost every place
can be a pilgrimage site now. You might even have an impression that
more people than ever before are making their own journeys to places
of particular interest or significance, to borrow a definition of a
pilgrimage from the Oxford Dictionaries. This
might be even correct considering that there are more people alive
now than ever before in the record history. If in fact we all, or at
least a majority of us, are, have been or will be on a pilgrimage,
what is this pilgrimage actually all about? Is it really simply a
type of a journey indicated by the professors from Oxford?
Having
read several books and social media websites, having gone on three
different pilgrimages which can also be considered one long
pilgrimage, I am still struggling with that question. Giving my own
answer does not settle the issue since that response would have come
from a single pilgrim. Considering that only Lourdes, one pilgrim
destination, if you will, is visited annually by between 4 and 6
million people, an answer from a pilgrim hardly stands a chance of
comprehensively covering the topic. In fact, to use a word
'pilgrimage' in itself might be seen by some as an overstatement.
Mainly because of its strong association with religion. Gideon Lewis-
Kraus, asked by an interviewer about the waning authenticity of
pilgrimages nowadays when they are becoming “just this kind of
backpacker jaunt”5
completely rejects this approach. He bluntly states that when, “Your
feet are coming apart ... You've been walking for eight hours in the
rain. Authenticity is the last thing you care about.”
This opinion is
shared by an increasing number of people. As a Spaniard from Madrid
told me, they are making a pilgrimage because they feel like it. They
have a need for it. And it does not have to be a religious need
understood, at least, as being connected with this or that religious
institution or organisation. At the very same time, it can be this
type of motivation that will be driving a pilgrim forward. That would
make them decide to walk through the doors of their house in the
first place. The pilgrims I have passed by so many times in Lourdes
came there exactly for this reason. Both are equally valid, neither
is better or worse. One clever person I met made it very clear to me.
When a topic of people supposedly making a wrong kind of pilgrimage
came up, she replied with one sentence. This is their decision. Four
words, that is it. Your pilgrimage is simply your pilgrimage. The
person sitting next to you, even if they completely disagree with
your motivation for walking, does not and cannot invalidate your
journey. Pilgrimage is something you are on. An answer to the 'why'
question does matter, and very much so, but its content, whatever it
is, will not mean that you are not on a pilgrimage even if someone
says otherwise. It is something you
are on.
What
comes to mind when one thinks pilgrimage? In all likelihood one of
the places mentioned above, or a location of an analogous kind only
somewhere else on the face of the planet. What unites these images is
that they are somewhere far away from your home, from your life. A
person from France met in Mansilla de la Mulas said that this is the
case because it is hard to be free in normal life. That to go on a
pilgrimage one needs to go away from whatever they consider the
usual. Many do agree with that. A person from Belgium I run into on
the first day in the Pyrenees explained that he is hiking because it
is about going away, walking away. More opinions could be quoted
here. Nevertheless, there are those who would dare to disagree. A
reply would be that to go on a pilgrimage understood as a journey
somewhere there is no need to physically move from a place X to a
place Y. You can travel inside of you. You can grow inside. You can
develop and experience without having to board a plane that is going
to take you 2 or 5 thousand kilometres away from the airport. A dad
of a friend inquiring me just days before my flight asked if I really
needed to go that far to do what I was hoping to do. The question got
me thinking. The answer would be not always and not necessarily. 40
or so days later when I was again in Poland another person I was
talking with about what I have lived through said that she has
experienced some of those things without going on a pilgrimage. That
she could recognise and understand what I was saying even if she has
not walked the Camino de Santiago, has not hiked in the Pyrenees or
nor she has visited Lourdes. A pilgrimage is a journey far away but
it is also a journey right where you are.
(to be continued)
Photo: Shortly before Ponferrada, the Camino de Santiago
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