Thoughts on Pilgrimage

(...why does my hand look like this. I'm sorry, y'all.)

Hello everybody! Plans changed a tad, and this is really the second-to-last post before you get Concurrent Sam back, possibly with some travel stories! I wrote the majority of this reflection while I was in Lourdes, and added the first few paragraphs for context, and a few extra paragraphs for further thoughts. ;)

When I was in Salzburg, right before I left for my research trip, I bought a bracelet at a local market. It's a simple thing, a double helix of yellow and green beads, with a seashell charm in the middle. When I got back to Sheffield for my few days of frantic packing and package-sending and breaking down crying while trying to fill out customs forms before I left on my trip, I had the priest at the Catholic centre there bless it for me. 

The origins of why I wanted the bracelet are twofold. One, when I left my home town, I asked my pastor for a travel blessing, and he gave me the Blessing for One Going On Pilgrimage. And two, when I was in Guernsey with my family's long-time family friends, they were telling me all about how the scallop shell was an ancient symbol of pilgrimage, especially for the Camino de Santiago. 

Well, I wasn't going to be hiking the Camino (although I think it might be very cool to do that someday), but I apparently was on pilgrimage (I was going from church to church for most of the trip, after all), so why not get a scallop shell of some sort to take with me to remind me that I'm on pilgrimage while I'm travelling? And that has been really good for me. I've also started reciting St. Patrick's Breastplate while I put it on, which is a favourite part of my morning routine. 

But it slowly dawned on me as I travelled that I didn't feel like a pilgrim. But what does a pilgrim even feel like, anyway? I was a pilgrim, by any meaningful definition of the word. 

"Pilgrim, n. a person who journeys to a sacred place for religious reasons." 

I was travelling for religious reasons, even if I was also travelling for research reasons. I was going to Mass nearly daily, and praying in most if not all of the churches I encountered. So, however I felt must be an okay way for a pilgrim to feel, even if it wasn't how I expected to feel as a pilgrim. 

The trouble with being on pilgrimage is that you take your human nature with you. You don't feel like you think you "should" feel, you get tired, hangry, distracted. It's just as possible to get distracted during Mass at the Vatican as during Mass at home. Ask me how I know. 

For that reason, I think pilgrimage is a great time to rethink some of the assumptions we have about ourselves. And there are many that we could rethink. 

One of the ones I've been thinking about a lot lately is "then I will be holy", or even (and almost worse) "then I will be disciplined". 
When I find my vocation, then I will be holy.
When I get back to Newman, then I will be disciplined and go to bed every night at 9 pm. (I know this is a lie, and yet, I think it anyway!) 

The truth is that if I can't be recollected and disciplined without effort when I'm "journeying to a sacred place for religious reasons", it's not going to happen without conscious effort at any other time. There's no effortless way to holiness, and to think otherwise is to discount both the effects of Original Sin AND (and most especially) the needs and limitations of our bodies and minds. 

I think part of the trouble is the "how we think we should feel". We forget that it's normal to have a body and for that body to have needs. It's normal to have a mind that starts thinking about exactly how many horcruxes there are in Harry Potter during the Eucharistic Prayer (although in that case we should definitely try to get our attention back). And if that example sounds far too specific...yeah. There are certainly instances in which we should make sure we're doing our utmost to make sure that we're paying attention, and also instances in which our bodily needs have to take a backseat, such as when we're fasting. 

But to expect ourselves to constantly be transcendent, constantly in a rapture, constantly meditating on the mysteries of God and not wondering what we're going to have for lunch is unrealistic and sets us up for self-recrimination and self-accusations about not loving God enough. (Which, in a sense, is true. None of us love God enough. But it's not useful to beat ourselves up about it.) 

But those self-recriminations and self-accusations, even if they have a grain of truth to them, are profoundly unhelpful. After all, God became Man, both so that we know that He understands the human condition, but also so that He can come to us physically. He doesn't only come to use through ecstatic prayer, or even only through the words of the Bible. He also comes to us in stuff--water, oil, and the forms of bread and wine. He comes to our bodies, just as much as to our minds and souls. 

This was something that was brought home to me at Lourdes. The "stuff" of Lourdes, as a pilgrim, is so very real. You don't go to Lourdes and just stare at the place where Our Lady appeared and think about the apparition. You walk through the grotto with your hand on the rock, and lean your forehead against it. You light a huge candle, smell the sweet smell of wax burning en masse, feel the heat on your face and the wax dripping onto your hand. You wash your face in the cool water from the grotto and drink it, tasting the slight metallic taste, and bearing in mind Our Lady's words to St. Bernadette. The most recollected moments I had at Lourdes weren't during Mass and Adoration--they were when I was cupping my hands around the flame of the huge candle I lit for my intentions and those of my friends and loved ones, so that it wouldn't go out. When I was drinking the water from the spring and washing my face. I was fully in the action I was performing, praying by doing, offering my senses up to God, in some sense. 

And I think, in some ways, that's why one goes on pilgrimage. I'm not saying that one shouldn't strive to be recollected, because that's not true, and I have as much or more work to do there as as anyone else. But in some ways, one goes on pilgrimage to remind one's self of the weakness and needs of the body, and in order to nourish it in faith, along with the soul. It's one of the ways we bring our bodies into our life of faith--by physically travelling somewhere different, sensing different things, encountering God in a new place and a new way. Through this, one reminds one's self that there's no magical solution to the fact that we have bodies and fallen natures, and growing in holiness requires disciplining both. (Do I want to do this, even after writing this whole post? No. No, I do not. Will I end up doing it anyway? I really hope so.) 

After revisiting all these thoughts, which I wrote while in Lourdes several weeks before I set up the rest of the post, I would add that one of the things which pilgrimage reminds one of is the universal pilgrimage of life. It's so easy to think (along the lines of "then I will be holy, disciplined, recollected") "when I get to [x church or y city], then I will Feel A Sense of Arrival, have a Profound Spiritual Experience, then I will feel At Home, then I will be Perfectly Reconciled to God's Will", etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. 

And it's not true. 

There is no place that you can go where being there will be a perfect experience, perfect union with God, perfect anything. Of course there are places that are hallowed and holy--on a scale from the smallest, simplest chapel to St. Peter's in Rome, or the places where Our Lord and Our Lady have appeared--but the only place where we will truly experience the most profound sense of arrival, where we will be at home, is Heaven. There is no place on Earth, no matter how hallowed, that can satisfy our desire for union with God. And that's okay. Because there is no place on Earth that is meant to. 

We can go on pilgrimage to the most hallowed places on the planet, and truly reap fruit from that, but we will still be left wandering, "strangers in a strange land", and "pilgrims on the journey" until God calls us home.