A thought

Why am I planning a pilgrimage?  It certainly isn't for the same reason as the early medieval pilgrims.  I don't think that hiking to Jerusalem will absolve me of any of my sins or release anyone I know from purgatory.  I don't even believe in purgatory!  I do believe in God, however, and I think Jerusalem would be a cool place to go just because Jesus Christ lived there.  But I'm not planning on being overcome with ecstatic visions of paradise like some medieval mystics.  And I don't really care to hear all of the apocryphal stories about where the child Jesus did some miraculous thing or where the Virgin Mary ascended to heaven.  I don't need to see the places to believe in the events.  I almost worry that seeing the places will pop the bubble of history and sully my image of events with their connection to the crass modern world.  I do hope that I will be able to spend some time pondering and feeling and reaffirming my testimony.  I want to feel some joy and peace as well as some sorrow and gratitude. 

But really, if that was all I wanted, I could fly out there like every other self-respecting modern tourist, tour the sites and fly home.  Air conditioned, cozy, normal clothes, never escaping my own self. 

Instead, my pilgrimage is about the journey.  It isn't even connected to religious feelings.  I just want to see things I've never seen and do things I've never done.  Maybe even do something that no one has done in at least 400 years!  Now that is worth the lack of air conditioning!

Wandering Women

A few quotes about women on pilgrimages: 

"Whoever builds his house out of willows, and spurs his blind horse over plowed land, and suffers his wife to go seeking shrines, is worthy to be hanged on a gallows!"

The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer

“[It would] provide a certain shield against vice, if your synod and your princes would forbid matrons and veiled women to make these frequent journeys back and forth to Rome.  A great part of them perish and few keep their virtue.  There are very few towns in Lombardy and Frankland or Gaul where there is not a courtesan or harlot of English stock.  It is a scandal and a disgrace to your whole church."

St Boniface to the Archbishop of Canterbury, 8^th century

“[Tolerate] neither broken sword nor wandering woman.”

Spanish proverb

It sounds like my gender is going to have to be one of the anachronistic elements of my journey.