Pilgrimages Begin with Intention
Images courtesy of Susan Jagannath. Used with permission.
“People say it’s not the destination, it’s the journey that matters … Why would I walk and struggle and be unable to breathe arbitrarily, randomly? We need a goal and a reason to do it.”
Susan Jagannath has experience with setting goals. She wrote about her lifelong dream of trekking in the Himalayas in her 2018 guidebook and memoir Chasing Himalayan Dreams: A trek in the shadow of Kanchenjunga and Everest. A technical writer turned book coach, Jagannath jokes that she didn’t intend to write a guidebook when she began her first pilgrimage as a Catholic following a less traveled route of the Camino de Santiago called the Camino Ingles, but with 50 IT technical manuals under her belt she was sure she could do it better.
As Susan described her treks, I couldn’t help but wonder if we technical writers are drawn irresistibly to the world of long-distance walks, writing, stories, and the pilgrimage as a metaphor for life. My own journey from a shadow writer career in the software industry to story doula and blog writer has involved a couple of long walks across Spain.
Pilgrimage is often defined as long journey with a moral or spiritual significance, but it’s typically attached to a journey to a holy place or a shrine important to a person’s beliefs and faith. Today, only about 25 percent of those who walk to Santiago de Compostela to the tomb of St. James along a traditional Catholic pilgrimage route walk for religious or spiritual reasons.
I walked my first Camino because for 10 years I couldn’t get an innocuous internet photo of a long Spanish dirt road flanked by spent yellow fields out of my head. I walked to save my son (or so I thought). And, I walked to save myself.
Intention might be the definition of pilgrimage, the reason or the "why" behind that perennial question asked of pilgrims: "Why do you walk?" As anyone who has walked the Camino de Santiago will tell you, long walks can become addictive. My friend Rosemary and I met on our first Camino, and we planned another long walk together from Lausanne, Switzerland to Rome. Five years after we met, Rose was diagnosed with a butterfly glioblastoma brain tumor.
We joked and planned and spoke endlessly about making another pilgrimage together after she’d beaten cancer. Once we even talked about hiking a portion of the Pacific Crest Trail with our daughters. Rose died in 2019, 15 months after her initial diagnosis, and I made a personal commitment to walk from Rose’s doorstep in Shrewsbury, Shropshire County in the West Midlands to Rome via Canterbury and the Via Francigena. When the coronavirus threatened my travel plans for next spring, I started this blog to stay connected to my commitment. I also began to consider broadening the definition of where I could walk. There are pilgrimages all over the world, some right here in the United States.
The California Missions Trail is an 800-mile journey to 21 Catholic missions from San Diego to San Francisco Bay. Volunteers support the walk but the California Missions Trail is unmarked. A pilgrim must rely on guidebooks and GPS to find the route, 80 percent of which is on concrete roads, bike paths, and sidewalks. At 60, I’m not sure I’m up for getting wild on the Pacific Crest Trail, but California is a close neighbor and a California hike even in pandemic times seemed so doable.
One of our favorite family board games is Tokaido, where each player is a traveler crossing the East sea road, an ancient Japanese route that connected Osaka, Kyoto, and Tokyo. When I first played the game, the stops at temples and hot springs along the game board reminded me so much of my Camino that I spent weeks cutting up brown paper bags to create a Camino de Santiago game board and playing pieces. When I started to explore pilgrimage routes outside of the United States and Europe, Japan was the first stop on my internet tour.
Japan has not one but two quite famous pilgrimage routes. The Kumano Kodo network of trails has been in use for 1000 years and is the only pilgrimage besides the Camino de Santiago to be designated a world heritage site. Designed as a religious experience with rights of worship and purification rituals, the route was developed as a way to move between three Kumano shrines.
The Shikoku pilgrimage route, one of a few circular pilgrimages in the world, links 88 official temples and numerous sacred sites over 1200 kilometers. White clothing, a rosary, a bell, a stole, and a pilgrimage book echo the religious rites and rituals of other faiths. And as with the Camino de Santiago and other pilgrimages, some pilgrims walk the Shikoku route for religious reasons, some to pray for healing, some in memory of someone who has passed, and others just as often looking for adventure and exercise.
My intention was to walk in Rose’s memory from her home in Shrewsbury to Canterbury, and then on to Rome. Walking in Rose’s memory from her doorstep is the intention that fueled this blog and the reason why I probably won’t walk the beautiful pilgrimage routes in Japan, or the Himalayas, or even the accessible California Missions trail. None of these pilgrimages is the hike on the Via Francigena that Rose and I planned together.