Contemplative travel may not be an obvious component of the modern world. Yet from Santiago de Compostella to the byways of Britain, Europeans are once again becoming pilgrims. By means of an ascetic journey – usually by foot – people are reconnecting with themselves, their surroundings, and each other. As an outlet for the pressures of accelerative materialism, the practice is becoming more popular than it has been for decades.
Pilgrimage is unique in being both an outwardly-focused and an inwardly-focused activity. Pilgrims follows a pre-ordained route which – like a monastic rule – frees them from physical choice. They are willingly subsumed in a community of equals – an individual pilgrim pod or a pilgrim route – and humble themselves to the continuity of generations which have sanctified their final destination. As physical ambitions are reduced to the essential, the senses become attuned. The natural and human world through which you pass cease to be a distraction and become a source of insight. Because pilgrimage is about contemplation, it is also about transformation. Hence it is one of the most perennial religious practices; appearing across Judeo-Christian, Islamic and Buddhist traditions. A journey interdependent on other pilgrims is physically, socially, and spiritually liberating. From such freedom comes self-knowledge and change. And not a one-off change: the pilgrimage becomes a pivot to which the mind returns, renewing itself once again.
The practice has survived numerous historical encroachments. The Reformation attempted to stamp it out on the basis of idolatry – surely leading to Pythonesque inquisitions of innocuous Seventeenth-Century travellers. The USSR went further, expropriating the practice by centring it on Lenin’s mausoleum. Now ‘pilgrimage’ is often associated with modern personality cults. London’s Abbey Road Studios is the number-one destination for Beatles’ fans. A series of shrines to George Michael has more recently sprung up to in Highgate. Each national church of George Michael has a different section, with tributes drawn from its language and culture. When adherents meet there, they are exhilarated (the end of a pilgrim journey is always a moment of release: in the Catalonian monastery of Montserrat, arriving pilgrims danced ecstatically before the altar). Even the drab concrete annulus erected to the memory of Princess Diana in Kensington Gardens sows camaraderie. It connects visitors to each other via their connection to something greater.
The opportunity for bonding is a key component of the modern pilgrim revival. Europe’s most famous pilgrim route – to Santiago de Compostella – has acquired cult status, driving a near 300-fold increase in use over the past 30 years. It is, by all accounts, a cheery ecumenical bunfight, on which people of all beliefs and backgrounds swap tales (and bunks – fittingly, given that ‘licentiousness’ was among the Reformation’s original injunction against pilgrimage). The historical resonances of Santiago as a pilgrim destination – on the cusp of first Moorish Spain and then the New World – remain somewhat diffused along the column of backpackers.
A narrower gate is found at the other end of the Mediterranean world: Mount Athos, a peninsular in northern Greece which is the spiritual seat of the worldwide Orthodox church. It was chosen by the first hermits for its inaccessibility – and it remains inaccessible. Access requires a stamp issued by the office of the Ecumenical Patriarch in Istanbul (a process described by Robert Byron in The Station). Yet accommodation itself must be organised with the individual monasteries, which are – in the spirit of subsidiarity – highly idiosyncratic. One may inform a telephone caller that it is far too late to book for a given date; another, that it’s far too early. The stripping away of physical distraction extends to an injunction against women, which has been challenged by the EU. Even female animals are forbidden – because the monks are largely vegetarian and pescatarian, making animal husbandry extraneous. What remains is a purified consciousness that has given Mount Athos the highest life-expectancy in the modern world.
For all its immutability, one arrives on Athos to find renewal. Pilgrims are whisked along dirt roads in Mercedes people-carriers with monks at the wheel. Bobbing at the ancient stone quay of Vatopedi – monastery-of-choice for Prince Charles and President Putin – is a twin-engined powerboat for VIPs. One visitor told me that he hadn’t bitten his nails once on the peninsular. Our guide – an avowed atheist who was on this fifth ‘last’ visit to Athos – wept when we left. It seems that the circumspection and historicism of Athos exert an appeal that transcends individual belief.
The more grandiose promises of Catholic healing shrines inevitably rest on a narrower constituency. Pilgrim-destinations such as Lourdes (France), Czestochowa (Poland), and Medjugorje (Bosnia) function as barometers of overall religiosity. Hence the overall decline of Lourdes was bucked in the crash year of 2008, while traffic to Czestochowa has risen with the overall religious revival gripping Poland. Yet the decades-long increase of Santiago bears no such correlation. This brings us to the question: what is distinct about pilgrimage? If we strip out faith, what remains to drive the revival among secular populations? And how can these universal aspects be extracted and refined?
It is an issue to which a recent organisation, the British Pilgrim Trust, has set its mind. The Trust has harnessed renewed interest in folk culture to take people on one and two-day guided pilgrimages along Britain’s old ways. Its directors count one academic and one long-standing practitioner. The former is Dr Guy Hayward, an expert in the community-building aspects of music. The latter is Will Parsons, who once walked Britain’s Celtic fringe while funding himself by singing folk songs, pursued – unaware – by the national press. Its patron is Dr Rupert Sheldrake, whose new book Science and Spiritual Practice examines the neurological and sociological dividends of a range of religious practices, including meditation, gratitude, music – and pilgrimage.
Drawing on Rupert Sheldrake’s work, the Trust has developed an applied theory of pilgrimage. Its events are not history walks but a type of landscape therapy. This means harnessing nature, the built environment, and the group itself towards the realisation of private, internal goals. The experience is beyond ecumenical – the motto is ‘bring your own beliefs’ – yet seems to pay back more than a religious or even interfaith approach. The natural world becomes a source of powerful existential metaphors, which pilgrims are encouraged to apply to their own lives. The underlying theme is that pilgrimage only is a means to the end of personal transformation.
At the close of Rupert Sheldrake’s chapter on the science of pilgrimage, he makes two suggestions. One – unsurprisingly – is to go on a pilgrimage; whether it be structured, in the manner of the British Pilgrimage Trust, or extemporised. The second is more subtle: namely to turn your existing journeys into pilgrimages. This speaks to an odd paradox of the modern world: that the increased connectivity of commercial travel and tourism belies real connection between different cultures. The backpacker bars of Budapest are now indistinguishable from those of Thailand, ditto the business hotels. And yet we still profess that each place and people is uniquely valuable. Next time you travel, earth that value – and perhaps a personal intention – into visiting a unique place at your destination; and the spiritual air miles may soon be piling up.
