The Singular Pilgrim: Travels on Sacred Ground

by Mahoney, Rosemary

• ISBN13: 9780618022625
• ISBN10: 0618022627
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-03-27
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Summary

In an increasingly secular age of high-speed travel and advanced technology, it is surprising to learn that the ancient tradition of religious pilgrimage is on the rise. Charting this phenomenon from Ireland to India, Rosemary Mahoney turns her sharp eye and discerning ear on the pilgrims she meets in the course of six extraordinary journeys. Never a passive observer, Mahoney is a full participant, soldiering barefoot through the three-day penitential Catholic pilgrimage on Irelands Station Island, walking the five-hundred-mile Camino de Santiago in Spain, braving the icy bathwater at Lourdes, where pilgrims beseech the Blessed Virgin for miraculous cures. In Varanasi, Indias holiest city, Mahoney befriends a curious young boy whose intelligence and sensitivity provide startling insights into this ancient culture, with its public cremations and elaborate prayer rituals. And in the Holy Land, she rows alone across the Sea of Galilee to spend an unnerving, hilarious night camped below the Golan Heights in search of the essence of Jesus, a vigil punctuated by a pack of howling cats and a bad case of the jitters. What Mahoney discovers among the true believers and charlatans, the holy and the profane, is the single thread that binds all religions: the desire for a relationship with God. "If I was struck by anything," she writes, "it was the shared human struggle to find reason, to confront the natural fear of uncertainty and obscurity." The Singular Pilgrim is a book less about religion than about belief. "An affecting visit to the ancient, humbling act of pilgrimage... [Mahoney] conveys a genuine sense of spiritual mindfulness on the road, and there is no denying that these pilgrimages paid her back in full" (Kirkus Reviews).

Author Biography

ROSEMARY MAHONEY is the author of Whoredom in Kimmage, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the New York Times Notable Book The Early Arrival of Dreams. The recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, she lives in Rhode Island.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 1
Walsingham	p. 8
Lourdes	p. 50
El Camino de Santiago	p. 74
Varanasi	p. 144
The Holy Land	p. 253
Saint Patrick's Purgatory	p. 335
Bibliography	p. 405
Acknowledgments	p. 406
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

INTRODUCTION A few years ago a friend of mine, whom I know to be an intelligent and compassionate woman, listened carefully as I told her about a Greek Orthodox pilgrimage I had witnessed on the tiny Cycladic island of Tinos in the Aegean Sea. Each year on August 15, the Feast of the Assumption, which marks the spiritual and bodily assumption of the Virgin Mary into heaven, the Greek Orthodox faithful travel great distances to Tinos to venerate an icon of the Virgin housed in a church atop a small hill at the end of an avenue of marble paving stones. The icon, which was discovered in the early nineteenth century amid the rubble left by an earthquake, is said to have worked miraculous cures and to have granted many pilgrims their individual wishes. The pilgrims arrive by ferry. The moment the gangplank touches the dock, they rush forward, fall to the ground, and begin making their way to the church on hands and knees. Some slither the half-mile on their bellies, poling themselves forward with their elbows in the manner of besieged soldiers creeping through underbrush. Some lie across the street and, like horizontal dervishes, roll themselves slowly up the gradual incline across stones baked torrid by the August sun. As they proceed they pray for miracles and for mercy. Some weep, others call out the name of the Virgin. Many carry on their backs offerings of wax candles the length of their bodies. In the terrible heat the candles droop and sweat. Elderly white-haired widows in black dresses inch their way silently up the hill, humbling themselves in hope of the Virgins attention, their frail backs forming saddles for the punishing sun. (Many women in need of divine intervention in some grave family matter - an illness, a wayward or disobedient child, a financial bind, an unfaithful husband - vow to return to Tinos every year if the Virgin will grant the desired outcome.) By the time they reach the church after several hours of crawling, their hands and knees are galled into raw and bloody emblems of their belief. Once before the icon they prostrate themselves in a rapture of spiritual desire. My friend, who had listened patiently to my story, suddenly shook her head and said with disdain, "How pathetic!" Her remark struck me with a disorienting slap of surprise. It was uncharacteristically dismissive, and it was far enough from my own response to the Tinos pilgrims that I suffered a moment of self-doubt. Had I been wrong in my view of them? Were they in fact pathetic? It was true that standing at the edge of that Tinos street I had been astonished by what I saw, had even looked with skepticism upon some of the more ostentatious displays of piety, and when a military parade of admirals and ensigns came quick-marching up the street in honor of the Virgin I had found the procession pompous and incongruous. But at the end of that day (the flow of pilgrims ran long into the night), after watching untold numbers of elderly women craw

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Excerpted from The Singular Pilgrim: Travels on Sacred Ground by Rosemary Mahoney
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