Pilgrimages

Hey Steph,

  I watched this movie last week called The Way. I highly recommend it. You can find it on Netflix. The film is about a father journeying on El Camino de Santiago, or the Way of St. James, with the ashes of his son. The journey is a pilgrimage to Galicia and the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. Santiago is the Spanish name of James, the New Testament writer, and the cathedral is the supposed resting place of James’s body. The film was a beautiful telling of a modern man performing a timeless act of endurance and vulnerability. I’ve been thinking a lot about pilgrimages recently.

Pilgrim: a person who journeys to a place of spiritual significance for the restoration of their soul, for strengthening of their faith, for the blessing of a miracle, or for the deepening of their understanding

The idea of pilgrimage is a beautiful one for me. I love the idea of setting apart an act to focus on God. I love the symbolism of the Jewish tallit, or prayer shawl, and its tzitzit, or fringes, which remind wearers of the 613 commandments of the Torah. And Hindu and Buddhist Japa mala, beads used to recall the number of times a mantra is repeated while meditating. And the Catholic thurible, a censer used to expel smoke toward heaven in representation of prayer. And the Islamic Qur’an board used to help believers memorize section after section of the Qur’an. The ink is scraped off again and again to be replaced by another section of text. Tradition is that the boards grow more sacred with each addition of text, just as the memorizer grows more sacred with the words of the Qur’an held in their minds.

From top left to bottom right: Jewish Tallit with Tzitzit; Hindu and Buddhist Japa  Mala, Catholic Thurible, and Islamic Qur'an Board. 

The beautiful thing about pilgrimages is that nearly all religions practice pilgrimage of some sort.  In a world full of stuff around us, it’s easy for objects to lose their meaning, and I think that is the benefit of a pilgrimage. While we focus on our journey, we take stride after stride in an effort to be nearer to God. Our actions, not just an object, are set aside for us to grow more godly, more pure, more at one with deity. The practice seems to be somewhat archaic from our American perspective. When we think pilgrims we think of Mayflower passengers coming to New England or, for the more literary among us, of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and his odd group of pilgrims. But every year some 100 million people take a pilgrimage. You can find some great lists of pilgrimages here, here, and here. And if you’re in the mood to listen to a song about a pilgrimage, check this video out.

Though the practice of pilgrimage may seem more of an Eastern tradition, I see it in my own beliefs as a Latter-day Saint. As part of LDS beliefs, believers make a pilgrimage of sorts to a temple where they make commitments to God and learn more about their spiritual selves. The journey to the temple is one in which believers set apart a physical space to commune with God. Latter-day Saints who go to the temple come after they’ve reached maturity and have journeyed far enough down a spiritual and religious path to reach the destination of the temple. For these reasons, I see the temple as a type of pilgrimage.

It makes me happy that not all the richness of these religious pilgrimages are gone from American life; that I, too, can set apart my strides to walk toward a place of pilgrimage and seek God in physical actions. There’s something about this shared religious concept that makes me feel connected across continents, religions, and time to the rest of our human family now and throughout history. It diminishes the diameter of the earth, and, in my opinion, that’s nearly always a good thing.

Cheers,

Amanda

What journey has changed your life? What’s the most interesting pilgrimage you’ve learned about?