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THE ETHICAL EDGE OF PILGRIMAGE
Dr. Henry Ralph Carse
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St. George's College - Jerusalem St. George's College - Jerusalem St. George's College - Jerusalem St. George's College - Jerusalem St. George's College - Jerusalem St. George's College - Jerusalem St. George's College - Jerusalem
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“A pilgrim is a traveler who is taken seriously.” This definition, written by Ambrose Bierce, is very questionable. It seems to entrust the pilgrim’s identity to an observer – rather than to the pilgrim herself. It also raises the question: Who should take a pilgrim seriously? Pilgrims themselves often don’t take themselves seriously, as the Canterbury Tales demonstrate. And who is qualified to judge the “serious” nature of a journey? Will a pilgrim be less authentic if his contemporaries think of pilgrimage as a religious vacation, and of pilgrims as tourists on a holy spree?
There is indeed a sober quality to pilgrimage, an intentionality, an ethical edge. Whatever role conscience plays in this journey, however, is not defined by observers.
Richard Niebuhr gives us a much more intentional description:
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Pilgrims are persons in motion,
passing through territories not their own,
seeking something we might call completion,
or perhaps the word clarity will do as well,
a goal to which only the spirit’s compass
points the way.
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Do Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land really seek clarity or completion? When we read the ancient journals of pilgrims of long ago, we see that their intentions were diverse: to understand the Bible (Mileto of Sardis), to visit the places where Christ once walked (the Pilgrim of Bordeaux), to participate personally in the Gospel narrative “in the very places” of the original events (Egeria of Spain).
Pilgrims make a journey of prayer. They respond in some way to the poetic exhortation of T.S. Eliot – “You are here to kneel where prayer has been valid”. Prayer is valid wherever the pilgrim kneels. The oldest Christian pilgrim graffito in Jerusalem is perhaps the “DOMINE IVIMUS” inscription under the Church of the Resurrection, which simply reports: “Lord, We Have Arrived!”
When the pilgrim kneels at the place of prayer, when the joy of arrival abates, it is then that the pilgrim touches the ethical edge.
Theologies of Pilgrimage
Christian theology of Holy Land pilgrimage ranges from the obvious to the obtuse, from wildly enthusiastic to dead set against. Some of the great theological minds of the Christian world (including heavy-weights like Gregory of Nyssa, Jerome, Calvin and Luther) all roundly condemned the practice of pilgrimage, and scoffed at the idea that it could have any spiritual merit:
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Look closely at the matter and you will see that it is bound to do moral harm to those who have begun to lead the stricter life… what advantage is to be gained by the one who reaches those famous places themselves? One cannot suppose that Our Lord lives there today in the body, but is absent from us foreigners! Or that the Holy Spirit is fully present in Jerusalem but cannot travel so far to reach us!
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| (Gregory of Nyssa, On Pilgrimage) |
Fortunately, thousands of Christians throughout the ancient world ignored the moralizing proscriptions of Gregory and others -- the “teaching of restraint”. Pilgrimage remained immensely popular in the Byzantine period, and thereafter whenever travel conditions allowed it.
From “Holy Agenda” to Ethical Engagement
Egeria, at the end of the 4th century, is a model enthusiast who marvels at the opportunity to read the Gospel in the actual setting. She was touched by the emotional engagement of her fellow pilgrims during the memorials of Christ’s passion in the Holy City:
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What I admire and value most is that all the hymns and antiphons and readings they have, and all the prayers… are always relevant to the day which is being observed and to the place in which they are used…. It is impressive to see how the people are moved by these readings, and how they mourn… You could hardly believe how every single one of them weeps… because of the manner in which the Lord suffered for us.
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| (Egeria’s Travels) |
Being touched and moved by the place and by the sacred text is a genuine hallmark of pilgrimage. In their landmark anthropological study of pilgrimage in the Christian world, Victor and Edith Turner show that the essence of the experience is the “inner movement of the heart” (Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture). This sentiment is echoed by Cynthia Ozick when she writes: “a visitor passes through a place; the place passes through the pilgrim.”
The pilgrim must be moved, must be engaged, must be changed. Somehow, encounter with the Holy Land is intended to be transformational, radical, even revolutionary. But how?
Each Christian pilgrim today will answer that from a very different point of view. Glenn Bowman’s study (in Contesting the Sacred) of the “three traditions” of Christian pilgrimage is helpful here, but only partly so. Some (but not all) Orthodox pilgrims surely come to Jerusalem to prepare for a holy death. Some (but not all) Roman Catholic pilgrims make the journey for renewal of moral commitment. Some (but not all) pilgrims from reforming (including protestant) traditions come to the Land of the Bible with a critical mind and an awakened conscience, ready to ask probing questions about faith and contemporary realities.
These model patterns in the sociology of pilgrimage are now changing. Religious enthusiasm is no longer adequate.
In over 30 years of guiding and listening to Christian pilgrims of all types, I have noticed an emerging trend which contrasts remarkably with traditional prototypes. The essential meaning of a pilgrimage to the Holy Land is gradually being changed by the evolution of ethical engagement, specifically with the suffering of those who yearn and work for freedom, peace and justice in the “Land Called Holy”. This is a remarkable and unprecedented development, and needs to be noted and processed.
When I read the diary of Egeria, I am struck by the fact that she totally ignores the social scene around her. I cannot believe that there was no oppression or injustice in the Jerusalem of her time. Gregory himself goes out of his way to say that the residents of Jerusalem are constantly “pouring out each others’ lifeblood for the sake of lifeless property”. Egeria, however, seems immersed in her predictable itinerary. The only “mourning” she notices is the drama of the re-enacted passion of Christ in the shrines of the city. She does not once mention a beggar, an oppressed minority, a conflict or even an unpleasantness. Her pilgrimage takes place in a bubble of “holy agenda” largely devoid of contemporary meaning. The same can be said for most of the conventional pilgrim reports from the Byzantine and the Crusader period, up to the dawn of modernity.
Today, there are Christian pilgrims who follow suit, and somehow maintain a near-total ignorance of the systemic violence, the injustice, and the sheer suffering impacting people who live in the Holy Land today. But it is more and more difficult to maintain the imposture of the “oblivious pilgrim”. My conversations with many pilgrims over the last several years have provided examples of a deepening ethical awareness, and the trend is growing even as the realities of life in the region are becoming more desperate and brutal.
Encountering Contemporary Christs
Of course we can always find pilgrims who simply don’t get it, for whom the journey is all about themselves, like the lady who told me: “I absolutely hated it… dashing from place to place… Today is Monday, it must be Bethlehem…” and so forth.
And there will always be Christian pilgrims for whom every other faith and culture is simply an abomination, like the pilgrim who refused to go into the Dome of the Rock. She claimed that she saw Jesus weeping because of the pagan disbelief of those “Muslim idolaters”! Religious bigotry concerning other faiths is not the monopoly of one era, as we know too well!
However, a growing number of Christian pilgrims whom I have interviewed have had a truly eye-opening and heart-opening encounter with the “other” here. Their narratives speak of a deep moral courage and humility, as they re-invent their theological priorities in light of encountering the divine, not in shrines and rituals, but in the “suffering body” of Jerusalem’s contemporary Christs. Listen to these pilgrim narratives and voices carefully, for they bring hope and clarity, perhaps even a form of redemption:
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“I expected to walk in the footsteps of Jesus. I didn’t expect to come face to face with Israeli and Palestinian tension, intolerance, inequality, diminishing human rights…”
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“But God hears the oppressed. God hears the cry of a child suffering and responds. God cares not only for the blood line of Abraham and Sarah, but also for Hagar[‘s] and Abraham’s child [Ishmael]… God cares for all people. God is even in the rejection and humiliation…”
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“The passion and the power and the pain of the Lord [are] everywhere. There’s the same intolerance where I live and work. And I see it in myself.”
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Although I must quote these insights anonymously, I can assure you that they reflect very personal, very real theological and moral developments. I believe that once these seeds of conscience have been sown in the Holy Land pilgrimage experience, they will eventually grow into a new pilgrimage ethic, more sensitive to the shared divine image in all faiths, and less apathetic about the cry for justice and peace. In the words of another pilgrim:
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“At Dominus Flevit
Here is the God of humanity
Reaching out to gather in the chicks
Of his creation…
In the Holy Land of today
We see another God,
The image of God at a checkpoint
Where the people are oppressed,
An image of God at Yad Vashem
Where memories try to rest.”
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“Pilgrimage Unplugged”
I believe that we are ready for a paradigm shift in the ethical theory and practice of pilgrimage to the Holy Land. This shift may encourage pilgrimages that look very different from those we are accustomed to, but in fact will complement tradition in ways appropriate for the postmodern and interfaith era.
Perhaps Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land have become at least to some extent “plugged into” systems that are familiar and marketable -- and feel “safe” – but are devoid of ethical challenge. And yet, the very word “pilgrim” --- pereginus in Latin – has connotations of “experience” and “peril”. Pilgrims are called to take a holy risk, for the sake of a deeper experience of reality – not just feel-good personal piety. The kind of pilgrimage I advocate as a means to that deeper journey is very simple: “pilgrimage unplugged!”
Unplug your pilgrimage from the predictable. Too much planning, too much “holy agenda” and too much “shrine hopping” can insulate the pilgrim from reality. Predictable pilgrims always ride on buses, visit only the expected shrines and historic sites, and meet only the guides and shopkeepers who are on the “agenda”. Unplugged pilgrims walk from Nazareth to Tabor, or walk through the checkpoint to Bethany. They sleep in pilgrim guest houses, with local families, or under the stars in the Sinai. They skip sites that lack spiritual challenge, but go out of their way to meet peacemakers, mystics, mavericks – and children!
Unplug your pilgrimage from passive piety. While the sacred journey is a journey of prayer, your prayerfulness cannot afford to be insulated by habit from the “shrineless sanctity” of an unplugged pilgrimage. Pilgrim prayer which is “experiential” is more attentive, more listening, more engaged, and less selfish than pilgrim prayers inside the designated shrines have sometimes been.
Unplug your pilgrimage from political platforms. It is true, in a radical and essential sense, that every pilgrimage is a political act. Chateaubriand wrote: “Never a pilgrim came home without one less prejudice and one more idea”. Pilgrims bring about a radical change in the fabric of our attitudes and concepts of the “other” --- especially other cultures and other faiths. Thus pilgrims affect the “polis” of our communities.
However --- pilgrims can also become crusaders, supporting one or another “holy cause”. Crusades blind the “pilgrim gaze” and transform an open heart into a battleground of anger, frustration, and recrimination. Crusades are not pilgrimages. Today more than ever, our journey to Jerusalem can be a temptation to take sides in the unholy scramble for justification and legitimacy that has torn at the heart of Israel and Palestine for nearly a hundred years. There is so much compelling suffering on both sides. To resist the temptation to take sides is one of the hardest challenges a pilgrim to Jerusalem may face.
The Sacred Presence of Pilgrims
Pilgrimage is a postmodern pursuit in the sense that it leaves behind the “overarching narratives” of “holy agenda”. Each pilgrim lives a uniquely authentic path in the realm of sacred space and sacred encounter. But what will guide our conscience in this new freedom? The guidelines of church and state are inadequate. If in the past “orthodoxy” might be the measure of an authentic pilgrimage, what will measure the ethical edge of “unplugged pilgrimage” today?
The answer I believe lies in the sacred power and the radical presence expressed in listening to and resonating with living stories. The Buddhist monk and peacemaker Thich Nhat Hanh put it this way: “Are there people who are still available to both sides? They need not do much. They need only do one thing: go to one side and tell all about the suffering endured by the other side. And go to the other side and tell all about the suffering endured by this side… But how many of us are able to do that?”
Pilgrims can do that. Pilgrims in Jerusalem can be living bridges of sacred listening and sacred telling, voicing the suffering and faith on the “other side” of every shrine. Pilgrimage can be a practice of the “holy present” – in the sense of being “wholly present”. Pilgrims can be models of integration in the midst of alienation. The Hebrew and Arabic spiritual cultures which Jerusalem pilgrims enter offer a perfect pilgrim prayer in two simple words -- Shalom and Salaam – both of which mean “wholeness” and “integration”.
Informed by prayer, unplugged from predictability, listening presently, impassioned with compassion, truthfully retelling each story of pain and promise, walking through the walls, treading the ethical edge --- this is how pilgrims are the best possible peacemakers.
Dr. Henry Ralph Carse February 18, 2009
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