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Kathryn Barush, Santa Clara University
(THE CONVERSATION) Many major religious pilgrimages have been canceled or curtailed in an effort to contain the spread of COVID-19. These have included the Hajj, a religious milestone for Muslims the world over; the Hindu pilgrimage, known as the Amarnath Yatra high in the mountains of Kashmir; and pilgrimages to Lourdes in France.
Pilgrims have faced delays and cancellations for centuries. The reasons ranged from monetary difficulties and everyday agricultural work to what is now all too familiar to fashionable pilgrims: plague or poor health.
At that moment, as now, a strategy to run the pilgrimage house or the devout community.
A thousand-mile journey
The pilgrimage can be an inner or outer adventure and, possibly, individual motivations can vary, it can be an act of devotion or a way of seeking closeness to the divine.
Over the centuries and in all cultures, those who aspired to a sacred adventure would find tactics of choice to do so.
Reading stories, mapping with your finger or eye, or bringing a memory of a sacred place helped facilitate a genuine sense by the pilgrim sent home. Thanks to these visual aids or curtains, others felt that they too were experiencing a pilgrimage in which they enjoyed and even connected with others.
An example of this is the story of Dominican brother Felix Fabri, who was noted for recording his own pilgrimages in other formats, some for the laity and others for his brothers.
Fabri approached in the 1490s through an organization of cloistered nuns, which meant they had promised to lead a contemplative life in the tranquility of their community. They sought to exercise in devotion so that they could obtain the non-secular benefits of hajj without having to break their promise of a life away from the outdoor world.
He made “Die Sionpilger”, a virtual pilgrimage in the form of a consultant to Santiago de Compostela, Jerusalem and Rome. In these cities, pilgrims found sites and scenes related to many aspects of their religion: shrines to honor Jesus and the saints, relics, wonderful cathedrals, and sacred landscapes related to miraculous occasions and histories.
Fabri’s consultant sent the pilgrim on an imaginative adventure of a thousand kilometers, having to take a bachelor’s step.
DIY pilgrimages
My current allocation of e-books shows that from Lourdes to South Africa, from Jerusalem to England, from Ecuador to California, DIY pilgrimages are just a medieval phenomenon. Phil Volker’s Way garden is an example.
Volker is a 72-year-old father and now grandfather, woodworker and veteran who mapped the Camino de Santiago onto his backyard in Vashon Island in the Pacific Northwest. Volker prays the rosary as he walks: for those who have been impacted by the pandemic, his family, his neighbors, the world.
After a cancer diagnosis in 2013, some elements combined to motivate Volker to build a Way in the Garden, adding the film “The Way”, a pocket meditation book, Annie O’Neil’s “Everyday Way With Annie” and the story of Eratosthetees. , the Greek scholar of the 2nd century BC. who discovered a way to measure the circumference of the Earth the Sun, a stick and a well.
“For me, this guy was the grand godfather of do-it-yourselfers. How can someone pull off this kind of a caper with things at hand in his own backyard? It got me thinking, what else can come out of one’s backyard?,” he told me.
Volker started a circuit around his 10-acre assets on Vashon Island in the Pacific Northwest. It was a possibility of exercise, which his doctors had encouraged, but also of creating a space for reflection and prayer.
Each tower around the assets is just over a mile away. Realizing that he was traveling a wonderful distance, he discovered a map of the pilgrimage direction of the Camino de Santiago to track his progress, calculating that 909 towers would take him from St. John Pied-de-Port to St. James Cathedral.
To date, Volker has finished 3500 miles of roads leaving his yard.
Through a documentary film, Volker’s blog and an article in Northwest Catholic magazine, Camino’s Garden has attracted many visitors, some just curious, but many looking for healing and comfort.
Romeria and remembrance
The story of Volker’s backyard Camino inspired Sara Postlethwaite, a sister of the Verbum Dei Missionary Fraternity, to map St. Kevin’s Way, a 19-mile pilgrimage route in County Wicklow, Ireland onto a series of daily 1.5-mile circuits in Daly City, California.
The road runs through the roads and the Hollywood countryside to the ruins of the monastery that St. Kevin, a 6th-century abbot, had founded in Glendalough. Postlethwaite intended to return to his local Ireland in the spring of 2020 for the itinerary himself, but due to pandemic restrictions, he took the pilgrimage home to Daly City.
Occasionally, Postlethwaite would check Google Maps to see where it was along the Irish road, turning the camera to see the surrounding trees or, at one point, ending up in the middle of an old stone circle.
Many have joined the Postlethwaite Solidarity March, in the United States and abroad.
After a day of hiking, he stopped at the shed of his net house, where he had drawn a full-scale edition of Market Cross in Glendalough.
While Postlethwaite chalked the knots, circles, and image of the cross of the crucified Christ, he reflected not only on the suffering caused by the pandemic, but also on the problems of racism, justice, and privilege. In particular, he recalled Ahmaud Arbery, a black runner shot dead through two white men in a fatal confrontation in February 2020. He put his call on the cross with chalk.
For the Berkeley-founded artist Maggie Preston, a DIY chalk maze on the open-air street of her home has a way to unite with her neighbors and her three-year-old son. Here is a link with medieval methods to bring longer pilgrimages to the church or community. Researchers warned that the mazes would possibly have been founded on maps of Jerusalem, offering a reduced edition of a much longer pilgrimage route.
They started out by chalking in the places they could no longer go – the aquarium, the zoo, a train journey – and then created a simple labyrinth formed by a continuous path in seven half-circles.
“A maze has given us a bigger destination, not just a position to believe in, but a subsidized path to travel literally with our feet,” he told me.
When neighbors discovered the maze, he began to create a true sense of network similar to what many seek to locate when embarking on a much longer pilgrimage.
“Relearning to pretend”
Volker’s cancer has progressed to level IV and celebrated its 100th chemotherapy remedy in 2017, however, she still walks and prays regularly. Give the following tips:
“For folks starting their own backyard Camino I think that creating the myth is the most important consideration. Study maps, learn to pronounce the names of the towns, walk in the dust and the mud, be out there in the rain, drink their wine and eat their food, relearn to pretend.”
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