PILGRIMAGE
The journey to remembering our story
By Andrew Jones. Bible Reading Fellowship. 199 pages. £8.99
ISBN 978 1 841 018 34 8
The Archdeacon of Meirionnydd, experienced pilgrimage-leader, says that Christians ‘have developed a vast network of important pilgrimage sites all over the world’. Spot some assumptions. Several pilgrim-guides (but not Bunyan) are quoted, from the bulging literature on the subject.
Israel’s exile was ‘a huge faith-defining moment… the crisis was essentially a quarrel not between the Jews and their captors but between the Jews and their God’. Yes; although pilgrimage is something we share with other faiths, ‘the church is in an exile situation today’.
The author’s introduction leans on Walter Brueggemann, and he can’t admit that God actually said anything to Israel: ‘The prophets of the period saw the hand of God…’; yes, but did they hear his voice?
If you react against the archdeacon-speak of the subtitle, be prepared for spiritual formation, sacred space, the holy Eucharist and sprinklings of New Age dialect. Well, we take a phrase book when we travel, but a map and a time-line would also help. Two of the chosen sites are Scottish, two Welsh, two Irish (North and South), two English. Most are essentially and remotely rural; even Canterbury isn’t exactly Peckham. What does this say about where God may be found?
But the human stories which introduce each local shrine — people before places — breathe reality; have some traditional churches failed these needy people? One bishop (Bangor) writes a Foreword; another (Worcester) is quoted as ‘a specialist in the theology of place’. The authors of the Day One ‘Travel Guides’ might not quite claim that; they introduce a different set of saints and cities.
Walking might have been commended more firmly — better than flying, driving, or crawling on our knees for forgiveness around a Black Madonna. Just how saintly was Becket, and did Caedmon really write The Dream of the Rood? More questions, then, than answers.
Christopher Idle retired to the holy space of Bromley, Kent
