SPIRITUALITY TODAY
Spring 1992, Vol.44 No. 1, pp. 20-36
Pilgrims and Tourists
Conflicting Metaphors for the Christian Journey to God
| Distinguishing between pilgrims and tourists leads to the realization that the pilgrim's disposition begins internally; the journey, always with others, explores inner space. |
Doris Donnelly is an associate professor of theology at John Carroll University in Cleveland where she teaches graduate courses in spitituality and sacramental theology. |
EVERYONE who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of roots and in the kingdom of motion. Although a high level of comfort enjoins us to keep two feet on the ground near home, friends and familiar surroundings, the truth is that we are also occasionally grasped by an intense desire to forsake the security of home-base and to travel across uncharted and sometimes hazardous terrain. The kingdom of motion beckons us every so often to pack an overnight bag, to call United or Amtrak, or to ready our own cars in order to make an outward journey which responds to our interior quest toward the center we lose in the clutter of everyday living. It seems necessary to go away from the ordinary and to break ties, even if temporarily, for the recovery to happen. Only then can we be "jerked clean out of the habitual," as Thomas Merton wrote during his Asian journey, so that we might see what we need to see and find what needs to be found (Berton, Hart and Laughlin 233).
When the outward molds the inward, we become pilgrims, women and men in via, persons en route to some destination, toward some end. Although the theme of pilgrimage is still current as a metaphor for the Christian spiritual journey, another unarticulated image -- that of the tourist -- distorts its purity. At least five substantial distinctions between pilgrim and tourist exist. The distinctions are these: (1) pilgrims perceive an internal dimension to pilgrimage, while tourists are concerned with the external journey alone; (2) pilgrims invest themselves, while the tourists avoid personal commitment; (3) the focus for the pilgrim is to be affected by the pilgrimage, while the tourist seeks to be untouched by his/her experiences; (4) both the journey and arrival are of import for the pilgrim, while only the arrival matters for the tourist; and (5) community is formed for the pilgrim, and it is not a desideratum for the tourist. Some implications arising from these differences will be offered in the concluding part of this article.
VALUING THE INTERNAL
The idea of pilgrimage can be used in various ways;(1) three of those senses seem helpful here. The first, the literal pilgrimage, involves a physical journey to a place made holy by the Christ, the biblical Mary, or one of the saints, with Jerusalem or Rome representing the most popular sites. Other favorite locations over the years included the shrine of St. James at Compostela, that of Thomas Becket at Canterbury, and the sites of Marian apparitions at Lourdes, Knock, Czestochowa, Guadalupe, and most recently Medjugorje.
The second kind of pilgrimage, the allegorical, views life itself as a pilgrimage or a journey through a temporary abode on earth to an everlasting home in the world beyond. Dante comes to mind. His pilgrim-poet in The Divine Comedy typifies the allegorical pilgrimage as he travels through purgatory to heavenly bliss. At the sight of the great crystal rose which encompassed all of the blessed around God, Dante speaks:
- And like a pilgrim refreshed
- by looking around the church of his vow,
- with hopes of telling it again;
- So, taking my way through the living light
- I carried my eyes up and down, through the ranks,
- looking around again and again. (XXXI 44-48)
- by looking around the church of his vow,
The third sense of pilgrimage extends its understanding to an important spiritual meaning. In these cases, the outer physical pilgrimage is always secondary to the internal spiritual one. Depth, not distance, is the goal. What is valued is not mileage on the odometer, but lived experience consonant with becoming a more fully alive human being. Nowhere, perhaps, is this freedom revealed more succinctly than by Herman Hesse and his journey to the East as one of a "procession of believers . . . moving towards the Home of Light," (12-13) although St. Bonaventure, in a lengthier exposition of the same theme, discloses the stages of the journey of the mind to God in the Itinerarium.
The literal, allegorical, and spiritual meanings of pilgrimage all have in common "the irresistible conviction," as Richard Niebuhr put it, "that we acquire ourselves not in abiding only, but (also) in moving" (10). The moving, of course, is toward a destination which has less to do with externals and more to do with the internal realm of transformation. Most pilgrims who undertake physical pilgrimages understand that it is their own interior incompleteness that leads them to seek contact with holy places and persons to do for them what they cannot do by themselves: to deliver them from fragmentation and effect a glimmer of wholeness which invariably opens unto God. The Wall at Jerusalem, Mecca, Bodhgaya, and Kyoto represent in other traditions what Rome, Lourdes and Canterbury do for the Christian, namely, to speak of our inner yearning to walk where the holy ones have walked, to osmose their equipoise, and to be transformed. To this, the pilgrim believes, attention must be paid.
Unlike the pilgrim, the tourist settles for the literal, un-nuanced physical meaning of pilgrimage and does not see, or refuses to see, how it points to a more significant internal level. Geoffrey Chaucer offered us the picture of such an insincere journeyer through the Pardoner in The Canterbury Tales. The Pardoner was an avaricious, professional preacher. He was skilled at manipulating both the vulnerable people who accompanied him on pilgrimage to the shrine of Thomas at Canterbury as well as those who were duped when he returned from his travels with spurious relics for their edification. For both sets of persons, the Pardoner offered absolution . . . at a price. That the Pardoner was aware of his deceit did not mitigate his guilt: he was a rogue, a tourist masquerading as a pilgrim. Sensitive and wise pilgrims needed to beware of the shenanigans of culprits like the Pardoner, and according to the host at the Tabard Inn, some apparently were (437).
VALUING SELF-INVESTMENT
The second characteristic that separates the pilgrim from the tourist is the type of investment each places in the journey. To be a pilgrim is to assume a new and risky identity, surrendering all that clutters one's life so that God takes center stage. To be a pilgrim is to live within the Paschal Mystery of holding on and letting go, over and over again. The investment is total, severe, and uncompromising.
Ultimately, the journey undertaken by the pilgrim is an interiorization of the via crucis, the way of the cross, since the Christian pilgrimage is, in a real sense, the core metaphor for Christian life. One contemporary pilgrim who offers us insight into the radical investment involved in following the via crucis is John Dunne, a priest of the Congregation of the Holy Cross. What is of interest, in particular, is the journey Dunne made to the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas, where fourteen of Mark Rothko's paintings are housed. Although the Rothko murals correspond to the traditional Stations of the Cross in Roman Catholic devotional life, they do not bear the usual images of the events in the life of Jesus. Instead, they are abstract renderings with one large black canvas bordered in maroon which Dunne eventually came to recognize as the principal event, the crucifixion. The thirteen other murals were difficult to decipher until Dunne, as a pilgrim, was willing to make the investment of self which required "going from living in-my mind to living in my heart" (ix).
Dunne learned that the artist planned to code the fourteen Stations on the outside of the chapel to indicate the location of each mural on the inside, but Rothko committed suicide before accomplishing this task. In the process of deciphering the heavy, non-representational art, Dunne saw that his "investment" of self called for a "divestment" of his preconceptions in order to enter another world. Once the investment was made and the divestment done, he found that these abstract paintings did not show the Christ suffering in the manner of conventional stations where persons travel as observers with Jesus toward Calvary and watch what happens to him. Rather, what Dunne saw, what he was privileged to see, and what the artist intended, was what was seen by the suffering Christ's eyes and what was felt by the suffering Christ's heart. The murals offered the pilgrim the uncommon position of seeing the world from Jesus' point of view.
Dunne's immediate response to this discovery was to pray the traditional words, "We adore Thee, O Christ, and we bless thee, because by thy holy cross thou hast redeemed the world," and to find in the praying that heart speaks to heart. Dunne leaves us with a suggestion that the separation of reality and imagination, like the isolation of the human from the divine, is the essence of darkness. The paradox of Dunne's discovery is that once reality and imagination were reconciled, and seeing and feeling conjoined, Dunne knew that the peace he found in the Rothko Chapel co-existed with the suffering and death he faced in the dark stations of the cross. "I can feel the reality of the joy," he wrote. "I can see the reality of the sorrow!" (86).
The point is that the investment of self and divestment of preconceptions yield ample dividends and profound insight. By comparison, the investment of the tourist is peripheral. It is seldom personal, often merely financial, usually amounting to an outlay for travel charged, perhaps, to a revolving credit card. Unlike the pilgrim who is interested in divesting, the tourist is eager to accumulate. Souvenir kiosks and 35mm film were designed for the tourist whose memories need to be entrusted to paper and other perishables because they are not usually enshrined in the heart. The investment of time and energy made by pilgrims like John Dunne is unimportant and often disdained by tourists.
VALUING TRANSFORMATION
A third distinction concerns the goal of the journey. Pilgrims traditionally set out to visit places made holy by the presence of saints and martyrs, or through an event in the life of Jesus, precisely in order to be affected, to be altered, to be touched and to be touched so deeply that a transformation of significance occurs (Davies 17-47).
Of no small consequence is the fact that all parts of the human being are affected in pilgrimage. The senses are heightened as pilgrims breathe the air in Bethlehem at the designated site of the birth of Jesus, or as they walk the route of the Via Dolorosa, or visit the catacombs under the city of modern Rome. Modern pilgrims to the shrine of Elizabeth Bayley Seton at Emittsburg, Maryland, or to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s pulpit at Dexter Memorial Church in Montgomery, Alabama, attest to the same power of events to imprint themselves on bodies and spirits.
Tourists, on the other hand, represent an entirely different species. Tourists make a conscious decision to be unaffected, ,untouched, and unaltered by their new surroundings. Tourists consciously resist transformation. If possible, tourists carry along their own water and food, seek out familiar places where there will be no jolts to the equilibrium, and participate in an American aberration which C.J. McNaspy, S.J. referred to as "Baedeker-bouncing from treasure to treasure" (17).
The American novelist Anne Tyler writes of such sightseers in her novel The Accidental Tourist through Macon Leary, an author of guidebooks for people forced to travel:
He [Macon] covered only the cities in these guides for people taking business trips who flew into cities and out again and didn't see the countryside at all. They didn't see the cities, for that matter. Their concern was how to pretend they had never left home. What hotels in Madrid boasted king-sized Beautyrest mattresses? What restaurants in Tokyo offered Sweet'n'Low? Did Amsterdam have a McDonald's? Did Mexico City have a Taco Bell? Did any place in Rome serve Chef Boyardee ravioli? (11, italics added).Macon Leary's success lay in a misguided ability to provide for his readers the convenience of going somewhere without sensing that they ever left their favorite armchair. Caught in a swirl of new languages, sites, persons, and culture, Learns travellers were insulated -- islands unto themselves -- without even a hint of the transformative possibilities of their experiences. Tourists like Macon Leary have their emotional gauges calibrated for zero impact.
It sometimes happens, of course, that the tourist becomes a pilgrim without intending to do so. From the Pieta at St. Peter's, for example, or from the Sea of Galilee, or from Assisi or Benares come stories of many an unsuspecting or even cynical tourist who is drawn into the drama of the place and its religious history, or its theological import, or the faith life of other pilgrims, and is swept away with awe, veneration, and praise. In this connection, Eleanor Munro offers us this insight from Lourdes:
And what was most painful at Lourdes was what was most revealing. For I asked myself as I stood by that procession whether it was morbidity that kept me fixed to the sight of so many individuals there in extremes of deformity and fear. But I thought, it was not. I was transfixed at Lourdes because through those imprisoning bodies, some entangled yet separate will had glinted out with shocking immediacy-the same that I had witnessed elsewhere along the course of these travels. (234)While these accidental transformations occur in the lives of tourists -- unplanned, unbidden, and for the most part unwelcome -- change and conversion are intentional and basic to the disposition of the pilgrim.
VALUING THE JOURNEY AS WELL AS THE ARRIVAL
In contrast to Macon Leary's interest in the arrival and nothing but the arrival is this account by Ellen Feinberg who planned a pilgrimage "on foot" from Paris to Santiago de Compostella. Advised "that it was the journey that mattered" (xvii), she narrates the night prior to the pilgrimage:
We were in Paris in July . . . . The next day we would begin our journey to St. James, our pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostella. A waiter approached our table [and] placed our order in front of us -- shells scraped clean of the sea, offering us their bounty. Coquilles St. Jacques -- the scallop shell of St. James, symbol of the thousand year old pilgrimage to St. James tomb . . . in Spain . . . . We poured straw-colored wine into our glasses and toasted each other: "To Santiago." "To pilgrimage." For dessert. . . we ordered madeleines . . . sugar coated sponge cakes whose sea shell shape [also] echoes the scallop shell, [and] the pilgrimage to Compostella . . . . The sky was clear, full of glittering stars. The Milky Way, the Via Lactea, spread across the sky. Tradition says it points the way to Santiago, and for over a thousand years pilgrims have followed its star-lit trail. (xi)Clearly, for Feinberg and her companion, the journey was as important as the arrival. Their preparations reflected a concern for the symbols associated with their journey and a care to savor each present moment en route.
That the journey itself was a school of virtue was a sentiment with a long history. St. Aibert of the eleventh century wrote:
Walking completely barefoot, clothed in a simple tunic, and with scarcely a penny on them, he and his companions set out for Rome rich in the abundance of their poverty. They rode on horseback rarely or never, and used their mule only to help weak and infirm pilgrims they met on the road. (Quoted by Sumption 127)Money was always a subject of concern for pilgrims modern or medieval -- and another eleventh century preacher urged his audience to make their pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostella a monastic exercise of the most austere sort:
The pilgrim may bring with him no money at all, except perhaps to distribute it to the poor on the road. Those who sell their property before leaving must give every penny of it to the poor, for if they spend it on their own journey they are departing from the path of the Lord . . . . Thus it is that the pilgrim who dies on the road with money in his pocket is permanently excluded from the kingdom of heaven. (Sumpdon 124-125)Communally garbed and penniless, or in Ms. Feinberg's case, a frugal graduate student about to make "not a hike [but] a pilgrimage," it seems convenient to identify with the interpretation of pilgrimage offered by the anthropologists Victor and Edith Turner as a liminal event, an idea which they borrow from Arnold van Gennep. The Turners see pilgrimage as a rite of passage and a state of transition, a place in between where-we-were and where-we-are-going, wherein the journey becomes as important as the arrival point.
Yet it is no less than Gregory the Great who gives us a most satisfying way to understand the value of both the journey and the arrival for pilgrimage. Gregory takes the Emmaus story from Luke 24:13-33 and wrestles with it through the lens of Christian experience. Gregory does not glorify the arrival and dismiss the journey as inconsequential. Rather, he finds in the Emmaus story that it is in the process of a journey that Jesus' identity is revealed. The journey allows for different relationships to develop, for new meanings to be evoked, and for the love of the disciples to grow. In the meantime, the disciples are unable to recognize the stranger who walks beside them as Christ because their love is weak and tentative, but Gregory hopes that "though they do not yet love him as God, they can nevertheless love him as pilgrim" (PL, vol. 76, column 11820. The disciples rise to the challenge: they respond in love to the human they see and they offer the stranger hospitality. This is likewise one strength of The Rule of St. Benedict.(3)
For Gregory, the gift of pilgrimage is inextricably tied to hospitality. For all future generations of disciples, those on the road to Emmaus lay out this wisdom for us: Do not avoid the journey, hastening to the arrival point, for the journey itself is the occasion for growth in love and recognition that the person we call stranger is Christ in disguise. And it is in the generous offer of hospitality that the disguise evaporates and our inner blindness yields to sight (Gardiner).
To consider the point of view of the tourist on the subject of journey and arrival, is to confront these questions: Do tourists have time, energy and simple interest in the spiritual preparation for the journey? Are tourists eager to contemplate their journey every inch of the way? Would they consider traveling light, without electric razors, radios, or laptop computers?
More than likely, tourists would choose the most expeditious means of travel so that they arrive at their destinations, and back home again, as quickly and as efficiently as possible. Time "on the road" is considered time wasted. Yet it was precisely "on the road" that two pilgrims at Emmaus met the risen Christ with burning hearts and kindled desire. Pilgrims for centuries hereafter would have it no other way.
VALUING COMMUNITY
Pilgrims differ from tourists because pilgrims and pilgrimages build community while tourists and tours do not (Yob 521-37). 'Bonding is essential to pilgrimage, as a work such as The Canterbury Tales shows, and this happens even when the persons involved are rogues and scoundrels. No world is perfect, and the pilgrim must adjust to the sad fact that some companions on the journey are tourists pretending they are pilgrims. Some companions are sources of temptation; others, sources of grace, and it is the prudent pilgrim who knows the difference.
Among the authentic pilgrims journeying, it often happens that community, either during the pilgrimage or upon arrival at the sacred place, is formed. That community is curiously nonhierarchical. In the Middle Ages, the uniform gray garb and hat which all wore reinforced the corporate commitment of the pilgrim band as needy men and women and obliterated any distinction among them of rank or status.(4) An egalitarian spirit prevailed on medieval pilgrimages, much as it does now, with no special privileges (or at least none that mattered) accorded to anyone who journeyed. For the Moslems on their pilgrimage to Mecca (the Hajj), a particular event reinforces the egalitarian aspect of pilgrimage. Upon arrival, the pilgrim bathes and is clothed in two seamless garments. "No one, from now on, can tell whether he is a king or a servant. His status is forgotten" (Eaton 21). This is the spirit of pilgrimage.
Victor Turner calls the initial pilgrimage grouping associational rather than primary and by that he means that it is based not on ascribed status but on friendship or voluntary association (252-55). It is a throng of similars, not of structurally interdependent persons. Through rituals celebrated during the journey, or at the journey's end, with the Eucharist prime among all of these, the likeness that existed in this association is converted into communitas. When that happens, there is homogeneity and the absence of rank. When communitas emerges, the deep story that binds the pilgrims is the cement that holds them together. A spiritual community comes into being with ties of faith stronger than ties of one's own family of origin.
Even when it appears as though pilgrims are traveling alone, it is not so. Even in extreme cases when pilgrims travel solo, they are never really alone. Like the pilgrim figure, Christian, in Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, they are continually in relationship with those who would discourage their journeys and those who would support them.(5) In stories of other pilgrims, Mary and the saints come to their aid. In fact, the primary motive of pilgrimage is to put oneself in the way of the saints. There is something of a contradiction here: The pilgrim speaks of going on pilgrimage to save his or her soul, but the pilgrim also echoes the words of the older Augustine: "I cannot be saved without you."
Not only does this community enlarge individual life and allow persons to interact in free, non-coercive ways among each other, but it is also validated by its ability to cut across social lines. The exchange of stories assists the process as men and women enter into the human experience of others and return to themselves, and eventually to home base, richer for the passage.
In this context, Pilgrimage Psalm 122 suggests that pilgrimage not only builds community, but it also establishes solidarity with the oppressed.(6) The psalm begins in the first person singular: "I was glad when I heard them say, 'Let us go to the house of the Lord"' (NEB, v. 1). Jerusalem is the place which gathers the twelve tribes, allows them to differentiate themselves, but also sees them as one. It is also the place where the King's justice is done, where God's order for the universe is established, where there is fair dealing, protection for the weak, a chance of impartial justice for the underprivileged. Part of the delight for the pilgrim is entering that kind of world-view.
When the time comes to close the psalm, the pilgrim-psalmist prays a peaceful benediction on those who have traveled alongside as well as for those who remained home. Pilgrimage has the power to effect strong alliances and to squelch the myth of the autonomous, independent Western man or woman. The sensitivity gained from pilgrimage is one of connectedness, not separateness; of solidarity, not independence; of community, not privatism.
Does the tourist know community? It is doubtful that this is the case. If one measure of the pilgrim experience is how much it opens one to the experience of others and how able we are to pass over into those experiences and back again; if the measure of community is the ability to share one's personal faith story and appreciate that of another, then the tourist falls short. The camaraderie of tourists is not communitas, nor would it seem that tourists would want it to develop accordingly.
Pilgrims, on the other hand, get a fix on the Promised Land even before they arrive. Like Jerusalem, it is the place where brothers and sisters dwell in peace, security, with human needs satisfied and eternal promises guaranteed.
CONCLUSION
Christian spirituality has known a long affinity with pilgrims. Although bullet trains, jets, and lunar travel may have deflected some of the ardor associated with pilgrimage as sophisticated men and women of the '80s and '90s decline the opportunity to trudge barefoot from Rome to Assisi, the pilgrim spirit seems capable of resuscitation in the collective psyche with minimum assistance.
Separated from tourism, the pilgrimage continues to represent the need of the human person to reach within for an interior wholeness and completeness by activating the feet (and heart) and by renewing passports in the kingdom of motion. More specifically, the pilgrim/ pilgrimage theme reinforces three major implications for the field of Christian spiritual theology.
The most obvious implication is the sense of interconnectedness established in pilgrimage. The cliche is the reality: people need other people. We inter-exist. Pilgrimage instructs us that however much it may appear a solo function, to be pilgrim is always a corporate event. Human beings need support, encouragement, and relationships or they perish. While the support is essentially among those who are companions on the journey, it is also true that the support from those who extend hospitality along the way is also of consequence. Those who house and provide food for pilgrims share the road for a while and form part of the pilgrim's very real extended community.
It further appears to be true that the solidarity forged on pilgrimage extends a relationship to the earth and the environment. The pilgrim is citoyen du monde and the citizenship intersects with persons as well as other forms of life; all forms of life are to be honored and treated with fundamental respect. So, in dress and accoutrements, the pilgrim reflects the essence of simplicity. To travel light and unencumbered is the goal. While pilgrims might be exploited by robbers, they themselves must not exploit. In via, pilgrims are expected to respect companions and the road they travel.
A second strong emphasis of Christian pilgrimage is the centrality of the Eucharist as the ritual that commemorates the roots of the community and reestablishes the identity of pilgrims as com-panions -- as breakers of bread. In this context, the bonding has a distinctly egalitarian flavor to it with each person valued for who he or she is, rather than by function, rank or pedigree. Even when pilgrims are economically advantaged, all women and men are equal in God's eyes and all kinds of artificial and/or external distinctions are ultimately inconsequential. It is precisely at Eucharist that status does not matter as brothers and sisters, like the pilgrims on the road to Emmaus, value the disclosure of the body of Christ among themselves.
The most fundamental implication to be drawn from this study of the pilgrim metaphor concerns its inner dimension. To be a pilgrim is an attitude and a disposition that begins interior- ly before it is acted out externally, if it becomes external at all. Psalm 84 remains the focused recollection point when it appropriately calls those blessed who "have highways in their hearts" (v. 5). What is paramount, then, is an inclination of the heart towards pilgrimage. "We go to God not by walking but by loving;" St. Augustine wrote, thereby reinforcing the importance of this kind of inward or spiritual journey (Epistula 155, quoted in Miles 43).
Finally, it seems appropriate to raise a question about a possible fourth implication. The question has to do with the fittingness of proposing pilgrim as a model of the church to complement the models offered by Avery Dulles. Simply the question is raised here, but a fuller consideration seems profitable.(7)
For Dulles, models can and should function on two levels the explanatory and the exploratory. On the explanatory level, a model helps to synthesize "what we already know or are inclined to believe" (24). In this context, the images of the pilgrim and tourist both validly represent forms of Christian spirituality: there are pilgrims who are committed, involved, seeking transformation and community, and there are the uninvolved who form the tourist population in congregations all over the world.
Such complementarity, however, does not extend to exploratory function. It is there that the image of tourist falls short. Dulles claims that a model must challenge us and push us forward beyond what we already know. In a sense it must go beyond explaining who we are and challenge us to become what we should be.
The pilgrim image does that. The tourist image is severely deficient. The pilgrim image speaks in an age of lunar travel of the need to explore inner space on a journey to wholeness. It evokes rich ecological, world order and egalitarian themes that nudge us away from isolationism and individualism. Perhaps the key to survival of the species is embodied in the image of pilgrim people "in a foreign land, [which] presses forward amid the persecutions of the world and the consolations of God" through all forms of darkness to the light which knows no setting." (8)
Endnotes
- There is much relevant material on the subject. Some of the most interesting and helpful include: "Pilgrimage" and "Sacred Times and Places" in Sacramentum Mundi, 1970 ed.; Gerald A. Arbuckle, SM, "Seminary Formation and Pilgrimage," Human Development 7 (1986):27-33; Bernhard M. Christiansen, The Inward Pilgrimage: Spiritual Classics from Augustine to Bonhoeffer (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Press, 1976); Robert Coles, Simone Weil: A Modern Pilgrimage (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1987); Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (New York: Harper's Magazine Press, 1974); Julia Bolton Holloway, The Pilgrim and the Book: A Study of Dante Langlan and Chaucer (New York: Peter Lang, 1987); E.A. Morinis, "Pilgrimage: The Human Quest," Numen: International Review for the History of Religions 28 (1981):281-85; Malcolm Muggeridge, Confessions of a Twentieth-Century Pilgrim (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988); Gwen Kennedy Neville, Kinship and Pilgrimage: Rituals of Reunion in American Protestant Culture (New York: Oxford UP, 1987); John Olin, "The Idea of Pilgrimage in the Experience of Ignatius of Loyola," Church History 48 (1979):387-97 (I am also indebted to Professor Olin for the distinctions he makes among three kinds of pilgrimage.); Sharon Daloz Parks, "Home and Pilgrimage: Companion Metaphors for Personal and Social Transformation," Soundings 72 (1989):297-315.
- John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress (Glasgow: Collins, 1979). Not only does Bunyan's classic itself enjoy popularity, but its importance has prompted a number of related articles. Among them: Brainerd P. Stranahan, "Bunyan and the Epistle to the Hebrews: His Source for the Idea of Pilgrimage in The Pilgrim's Progress," Studies in Psychology 79 (1982):279-96; William G. Johnsson, "Pilgrimage Motif in the Book of Hebrews," Journal of Biblical Literature 97 (1978):239-51; Mary E. Harding, "Bunyan's Pilgrimage in Modern Terms," Pastoral Psychology 7 (1957):67-82.
- In particular, see RB 53.2 (honor shown to pilgrims); RB 53.15 (care of pilgrims); RB 56.1 (abbot's table with guests); RB 61 (reception of visiting/guest monks).
- Two of the most helpful studies of medieval pilgrimage still remain those of Donald R. Howard, Writers and Pilgrims: Medieval Pilgrimage Narratives and Their Posterity (Berkeley: UCP, 1980) and Donald J. Hall, English Medieval Pilgrimage (London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1965).
- Professor Margaret Miles offers an enlightening analysis of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress with special insight concerning the solo-companion themes and community in her chapter "A Society of Aliens: Pilgrimage," in Practicing Christianity (New York: Crossroad, 1988) 43-62.
- Psalm 122 is counted among the "Songs of Zion," according to Walter Brueggemann, The Message of the Psalms (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg, 1984) 178, n.6. The scholarly position of classification has been established by Hermann Gunkel, The Psalms (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1967) and Sigmund Mowinckel, The Psalms in Israel's Worship (Nashville:Abingdon Press 1962). The interpretation in the text of this paper is compatible with Mitchell Dahood, Psalms, vol. 3 (Garden City NY: Doubleday, 1970); and that of John S. Kselman, SS and Michael L. Barre, SS, "Psalms," The New Jerome Biblical Commentary, ed. Raymond E. Brown, et. al. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1990) 547-48.
- I am grateful to James Brennan, a graduate student at John Carroll University, for his preliminary development of the routing for this consideration of pilgrimage as a model of church.
- Walter M. Abbott, SJ, ed., The Documents of Vatican 11 (New York: America Press, 1966). See "Lumen Genitum," ch. 1, no. 8. The quote is from St. Augustine, The City of God, XVI11, 51, 2; PL 41, 614, and is quoted in "Lumen Gentium."
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Turner, Victor and Edith. Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture. New York: Columbia UP, 1978.
Tyler, Anne. The Accidental Tourist. New York: Berkley Books, 1986.
Yob, Iris M. "The Pragmatist and Pilgrimage: Revitalizing an Old Metaphor for Religious Education." Religious Education 84 (1989):521-37.
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