A pilgrim once came to the rectory door. She had a backpack and a staff and was looking for a place to spend the night. I can’t say what brought her here, or where she was headed. I wish I’d been able to ask her in for a cup of tea and find out the whole story. But I was out visiting, and by the time I got home she’d gone. Gone where? To Little Gidding or Walsingham? To Norwich Cathedral or to the shrine of Mother Julian? Or was she headed south, to Canterbury, Rome or Santiago de Compostela? Was she on the road to Bethlehem? Pilgrimage has never gone away. If a religion holds particular people and places as holy, the faithful will want to walk in the footsteps of their saints. They’ll walk alone or together, sharing stories. They’ll sleep in hostels. They’ll pray. And, of course, they’ll bring home souvenirs of their pilgrimage as their ancestors did; the cheap metal pilgrims’ badges that turn up in such numbers on the foreshore of the Thames.
Somehow, I’ve never managed to go on a conventional pilgrimage. I’ve been to Međugorje, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where I prayed in the church, and bought an extremely kitsch T-shirt and a holographic postcard of Our Lord crucified. The image opened and shut its eyes when you tilted the card. I loved it; I bet the medieval pilgrims would have loved it too. Međugorje was full of the faithful that day; our mixed group of Christians, Muslims and Jews was humbled by their devotion. We were distanced by it too. These people, we thought, were true believers, like the ones we’d met at the Blagaj Tekke, the Sufi monastery near Mostar. We were not. We were conscious of the heat and of our bodily needs.
I’ve also been to Santiago de Compostela, the grandfather of Christian pilgrimage sites—though I don’t have the stamped pilgrim booklet to certify that I took this or that route. I only hobbled up the hill from the railway station to the cathedral on crutches. I felt like I deserved a medal. There were lots to choose from. Santiago is full of pilgrim-themed souvenirs, including a whole shop selling the traditional jet jewellery. Never mind a medal: I could have bought a figa, a jet hand, carved making the traditional obscene gesture, to protect me from witches on the way home. Sadly, the shop was shut that day, or I would have done. With the help of God and St James, the patron saint of pilgrims, the journey home was uneventful.
My family never let me forget that I was the child who declared that Canterbury Cathedral was “hot and boring”. That child is still very much alive in me. Looking at the wrong things, refusing to contemplate the right ones, wandering across the labyrinth, thinking my own thoughts. A bad candidate for pilgrimage, however much I may sing about it. So it’s not surprising that I’ve never been to Jerusalem. That’s the pilgrimage that I haven’t made that haunts me the most. I’ve imagined it so vividly for so long. Not the New Jerusalem, but the actual city. I’m not ready to go to Jerusalem, nor do I know that I ever will be. Nor Bethlehem. Nor Nazareth. Nor the Sea of Galilee.
Which pilgrimage I haven’t made haunts me the least? That would be the Anglican Shrine at Walsingham, the theme park of English pilgrim sites. The Holy House plonked in place by a 1920s Anglo-Catholic priest called Alfred Hope Patten. Not too long ago our parish assistant’s boyfriend broke up with her by text. He was on pilgrimage to Walsingham at the time. The Blessed Virgin had a word for him. I imagine him kneeling in prayer before the image of Our Lady at the heart of the shrine church, then pressing “send”.
I imagine it that way because, in the end, I’m deeply ambivalent about pilgrimages, powerfully drawn to the idea of the long walk to the holy place, and just as powerfully repelled. I want to see every square inch of the earth as holy. Yes, and the sky too, and the ocean. When TS Eliot appears on the scene with “Little Gidding” and announces, “You are here to kneel / Where prayer has been valid”, I bridle. I think of the couple of visits I’ve paid to the church at Little Gidding. They weren’t conducive to prayer, and neither was the adjacent retreat house with its curling devotional paperbacks. Let me remind myself instead that, at some point in the 1950s, Little Gidding was farmed by a tenant, a survivor of the Holodomor and former partisan fighter in Poland, whose wife devotedly scrubbed the floor of that church, and whose three children climbed the apple trees, conscious that they lived in a place that was holy, blissfully ignorant that it was becoming a shrine.
