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Pilgrim's passion | page 1, 2
Of course the pilgrim, like any traveler, is mostly traveling inside
herself, to a destination not found on any map. Yet there is a palpable
benefit in making the trip physically, on foot: The very feel of stones in
Jerusalem, Alane Salierno Mason says, "has a charismatic effect on the whole body," much as, perhaps, the very act of getting down on our knees releases in us a kind of humanity and sweetness. The wonder, the intensity,
the electricity of pilgrimage are infectious -- passed on like a holy
fever -- and in Michael Wolfe's ecstatic account of making the trip to
Makkah, we can feel the fires burning in every pilgrim's heart (if Wolfe had
stayed in California, he'd have thought his destination was "Mecca"). Distinctions get buried on the road, and the pilgrim is keeping company with kindred spirits from distant centuries and continents; the first pilgrim to Canterbury, we learn here, walking on his knees, was a king, Henry II,
traveling to atone for his execution of Thomas à Becket. Even here in my
neighborhood in Japan, when I travel to my local temple I am taken out of
the age I know, often, by the sight of yamabushi, or mountain pilgrims, done up in an outlandish shamanic gear of trinkets and cowrie shells and deer skins. The pilgrim moves into a realm of talismans and spells. In a sense, these powerful souls remind us, all pilgrimage is a trial, and
its adherents are tested by the road; the pilgrim is like the hero in some
classic fairy tale, asked to perform various deeds of heroism and cunning to
prove his love. Except in this case, the person asking is himself. In Japan,
when he was growing up, a 90-year-old Zen painter once told me, children
were taught to pay for suffering (it is such a privilege, and a catalyst for
growth); in our more comfortable cultures, many people have to go abroad, on pilgrimage, to measure themselves against a pain that is reality. The heart of all our faiths is religio, or a rebinding, as the Latin term suggests. The final thing that hits me, traveling with these contemporary pilgrims, is
how fluid and beyond boundaries our pilgrims are today, in a world that's
stepping across borders every minute: Gretel Ehrlich, a modern American,
treads a Buddhist path in China, just as many Chinese make similar trips of
worship to the Holy Land that is America (founded, after all, by pilgrims,
and "discovered" by another votary who thought he'd come to India). A
Christian learns from Buddhist monks, and agnostics learn from Christians.
I, though born a Hindu, have never been to the Hindu holy place of
Varanasi -- and yet have been lucky enough, in our mobile world, to sit
before Notre Dame and Ayers Rock and the Buddhist caves of Laos. "To study the Way is to study the self," the great Zen teacher Dogen said. "To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by
all things. To be thus enlightened is to remove the barriers between one's
self and others." At the end of every pilgrimage, of course, you learn that ends are new
beginnings, and that you see only what you brought with you. (Besides, "If
you can understand it," as Augustine says, "then it is not God.") The main
point of climbing to an icy cave in India, where a sadhu sits, is to realize
(as Anne Cushman says) that one might be better off in California; except if
one had remained in California, one would have always had unanswered
questions about an icy cave in India. In any case, whatever is discovered
cannot -- or need not -- be spelled out. "It is in seeking truth that we find enlightenment," the Catholic Father Laurence Freeman writes, "not in declaring it." Thus the final redeeming beauty of the pilgrimage is that no step on such a
trip is wasted, and whatever happens, however difficult, is good. "To seek
God is to find him," said Gregory of Nyssa, "to find God is to seek him."
Peter Matthiessen travels to Nepal to find the snow leopard and discovers
that the main lesson he must learn comes from not finding the animal; Graham Greene goes to Mexico during the time of the persecution of priests and finds his modern savior in a broken, squalid "whisky priest," who forgets himself by reaching out toward the suffering. And so we go on taking pilgrimages, in part because every discovery, however unlooked-for, is a step forward; but also, more deeply, because every one of us carries around, inside, a certain, unnamed homesickness, a longing for a place we left and don't know how to find again (the vision seen by Meaulnes in the haunting Alain-Fournier novel, the vanished Shangri-La sought by Conway in "Lost Horizon"). If there is a Golden Age behind us, we believe, there may be one ahead of us too. A pilgrim, ultimately, is a traveler moving toward the light, a light she hopes to collect and scatter across her path; where an adventurer may seek out a distant planet, the pilgrim only seeks the sun. "All the way to heaven," as Catherine of Siena writes, "is heaven."
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