Pilgrimage

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zepherus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,
And smale fowles maken melodye,
That slepen al the night with open ye,
So priketh hem nature in hir corages:
Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.
~The Canterbury Tales


Geoffrey Chaucer (who surely had the coolest name of any writer in history) was really onto something when he said that people "long to go on pilgrimages" in the month of April. This is a time when the spirit yearns for the open air, broader horizons, and a stiff physical challenge.

And yet, as a "liberal" Protestant rationalist, the whole notion of "pilgrimage" is a little bit foreign to me. In the worldview that I inherited, no place is holier than another, and The Sacred (or "God") is approachable, available, and ready to be experienced at any time, in any place, by any creature. Why make a pilgrimage to far-off Lourdes when you can experience The Sacred in the greening of the earth, the blooming of a daffodil, the laughter of a child?

This is a well-documented shift in thought from the Medieval to the Rationalist. It's a democratization of life--and of The Divine. But like all democratic systems, it has its pros and cons. On the one hand, it places all humanity on equal footing; the old "hierarchy of being," which began with God at the top, the king and the Church in the middle, and the peasant classes at the bottom, is undone. (Hurray.) On the other hand, when all places alike are declared "sacred," and all people alike are declared worthy to approach The Divine, then The Sacred becomes trivialized and banal. (Booh.) The logic starts to sound like this: "Pilgrimages are moot because all places are holy, but this place doesn't feel holy, and that place doesn't feel holy, so maybe no place is holy, nor anything."

I have a theory that Calvinism, by democratizing all of life, is at the root of modern secularism. Just look at the old hotbeds of Calvinist orthodoxy: Geneva, Amsterdam, Boston. (Of course, the leading families down in Pittsburgh were Scotch-Irish and also staunchly Calvinist...and their legacy has mainly been a kind of industrial materialism. No legalizing non-traditional families down there...or cannabis.) And so, the attempt to make all the world holy, in effect, made the world less holy by taking away the sense of sanctity that once lingered like a mist over particular places, like Rome.

Another contributing factor was Christianity's attempts to purify itself. In pre-Christian Europe, people believed that every locale had its little local deity, called a "numen." (Imagine it in a Jerry Seinfeld voice: "Hello...Numen.") This is where we get legends about Green Man, and elves, and sprites. As rationalism caught up with the Christian faith, little tolerance was shown to this ancient belief in lesser local deities. All places were the dwelling place of The Most High, and no place was more sacred than another.

But if no place is especially sacred, then why were the great cathedrals of Europe so frequently constructed on pre-Christian holy sites? I mean, I feel nothing especially moving or sacrosanct about the pretty, cobbled streets around Notre Dame, in Paris. But that spot has always been a place of worship, since long before its first primitive church was constructed out of wattles and daub. First it was a center of Frankish Druidic worship, and then early Christianity, and now modern Catholicism. What's so special about that spot? It's hard to deny that some places seem vested with a greater sanctity than others, like the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, a hallowed place to three of the world's great faith traditions.

There are new winds blowing in the world today. Not a return to Medievalism, but a new respect for sacred space and sacred time. Nowadays, even a largely rationalistic person admits to an unexplainable dimension to life, perhaps a sense of the Numinous, or even a Myterious Other. It undergirds all the living world, but makes itself especially known in certain places, and perhaps even at certain times. I think I know some places in the forest that seem more poignantly spiritual than others, or at least places that lend themselves to a deeper sense of the Numinous.

What would it look like to go into the forest with a sense of pilgrimage? What would it look like to wander freely under tree and over brook until you found a place that spoke its own sanctity to you, a geographic chakra, of sorts? What would it look like to remove your shoes and stand barefoot in the woods, aware that you're on holy ground?