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Pilgrim's passion
A peripatetic seeker reflects on the quest at the heart of the pilgrimage.

Editor's Note:"Traveling Souls" is a compelling new collection of pilgrims' tales that range in setting from Mecca, Jerusalem and Lourdes to Joshua Tree National Park, the birthplace of African-American writer Zora Neale Hurston and the New England woods where Henry David Thoreau once walked. Contributors include Alice Walker, Gretel Ehrlich, Malcolm X and Pico Iyer, who wrote the foreword we excerpt here.

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By Pico Iyer

Dec. 15, 1999 | Every journey is a question of sorts, and the best journeys for me are the ones in which every answer opens onto deeper and more searching questions. Every traveler is on a quest of sorts, but the pilgrim stands out because his every step is a leap of faith, and his journey is through such states as penitence and prayer. Unlike a typical adventurer, the pilgrim seeks not to conquer the worlds he visits but to surrender to them; and unlike a missionary, he seeks not to preach but, in the silence of his supplication, to listen. A pilgrim does not have to be moving toward something holy, I think, so much as toward whatever resides in the deepest part of him: It could be a poet who gave wings to his soul, or a lover who broke his heart open. The most eternal pilgrim in literature -- always referred to as such -- is Romeo.

Yet even as the pilgrim thinks she knows where, and why, she's going, the beauty of every trip is that circumstances are far wiser than she is, and she seldom ends up where she expected to. Her unseen partner on the road is serendipity. Several years ago, too settled in an office in Rockefeller Center in New York, I decided to travel to the land I'd always dreamed of, Japan; I wanted to learn about simplicity and kindness in a monastery. I flew over to Kyoto, checked into a Zen temple on the back streets and, after a week or so, found that the routine was much more familiar than I'd expected. So I stepped out, and instantly found much of the compassion and wisdom I'd been seeking -- in the modern city all around, the woman standing at the temple gates. God comes to see us, as Emerson writes, without bell.

Traveling Souls By Brian Bouldrey (Editor) Whereabouts 224 pages Buy Traveling Souls

Like anyone, I've taken my pilgrimages in every direction of my inner compass, and to every corner of the shrine I carry round inside me. Our souls are always traveling, of course, and whatever we find in Jerusalem we could also find at home. Yet the very fact of moving quickens our attention, and jettisons our habits, in a way that leaves us wide awake to what otherwise we might take for granted. So I have gone to Taos, to see where D.H. Lawrence conducted his "savage pilgrimage"; to Tibet, where local pilgrims walk for months on end, across the empty plains, prostrating themselves every step of the way; to Cambodia, most recently to see how people live amid ghosts and broken memories. Once, traveling to the rock caves around Lalibela, in Ethiopia, by mule, through a landscape of cedar trees and olives, I was humbled to notice that the people all around me had come on foot, traveling for weeks in dusty robes, while fasting. Why had they come to this unprepossessing spot? Because, they said, between joyful ululations, to come here was to come to heaven.

In the mind's eye, a pilgrimage is generally a straight line, from here to there (from being lost to being found); in practice, however, it is more often a kind of circle, as in the ritual circumambulations that worshipers make in Tibet, in India or around the Islamic Ka'ba. A pilgrim's journey, unlike a traveler's, never ends; it only deepens. That is the thrust of Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress" -- that all our life is a pilgrimage -- and it is part of the reason, I'm sure, why so many religions have a tradition of mendicancy and wandering. The great contemporary pilgrims -- I'm thinking here of Annie Dillard and Peter Brook, Van Morrison and John le Carré (a "secret pilgrim," like many of us) -- are all essentially traveling deeper into faith and doubt at the same time: deeper into complexity. In that sense, it matters little whether they're surrounded by tolling bells or clanging sirens.

Yet reading the wonderfully varied and unexpected stories assembled here, I was struck by how much the notion of pilgrimage today has to do with retrieving a sense of purpose (and simplicity, and constancy); with putting oneself, quite literally, in the footsteps of the past. Once upon a less secular time, almost everyone made pilgrimages, and most of the great works of our early literature -- Dante's ascent into the stars, Chaucer's wanderers to Canterbury, the tales of Orpheus and Odysseus and Hercules -- commemorate both inward and outward journeys; these days, I suspect, many of us travel in part to experience pilgrimage by proxy. Most of the travelers in this volume leave home, as I have done, to partake of someone else's pilgrimage, and so to learn what animates people to undertake such sacrificial tasks; the destination of pilgrimage is pilgrimage itself.

Next page | Climbing to an icy cave in India