Among American long distance hikers there’s a thing – a real thing – called “Springer Fever.” It hits this time of year. Hard to avoid. Not that you’d necessarily want to. It’s this deep urge to go hiking again, to be back in Georgia on Springer Mountain (hence the name), starting another Appalachian Trail hike. Or, for me this year, walking church to church the length of Britain.
Read moreLEJOG overview map
I have lifted this map from the inside front cover of Cycling Land’s End to John O’Groats: LEJOG end-to-end on quiet roads and traffic-free paths by Richard Barrett. 3rd edition. Kendal, Cumbria : Cicerone, ©2021. It shows pretty much the route I’m planning on walking northbound, except for the two diversions I’ve already mentioned: the Offa’s Dyke Path, and the Annandale Way.
Read moreLEJOG as pilgrimage
Okay, fine, the last posts explain what a LEJOG is, but why do it?
A goodly number of the people do this trek to raise funds for a charity. Those are the people who post and boost videos during their trip. LEJOGers who aren’t trying to reach more potential donors don’t have the same need to publicize their efforts. But there are other reasons to walk 1,000 miles.
Read moretwo types of pilgrimage
“The pilgrimage idea, the outgoing quest, appears in mystical literature under two rather different aspects. One is the search for ‘the Hidden Treasure which desires to be found.’ Such is the ‘quest of the Grail’ when regarded in its mystic aspect as an allegory of the adventure of the soul. The other is the long, hard journey towards a known and definite goal or state. Such is Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’; which is, in one of its aspects, a faithful and detailed description of the Mystic Way.” (Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1912, p. 154)
pilgrims remember and love
“Pilgrimage in that moment seemed less to me like exteriorized mysticism and more a rite of remembrance. The world would have us forget what is painful. It would have us move on and be free of the past; but both as individuals and societies, we have our loyalties to what we have known and endured. Pilgrimage gave us the illusion of a forward movement across space, even as it allowed an inner journey toward communion with our past. It was a crystallization of the poet Joseph Brodsky’s idea that “if there is any substitute for love, it’s memory.””
Taseer, Aatish Ali. A Pilgrimage Year. New York Times Style Magazine. 9 November 2023. <viewed online 12 November 2023 at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/11/09/t-magazine/travel-bolivia-mongolia-iraq.html>
In pilgrimage our bodies move forward, and our hearts move inward or outward at the same time. I think he’s saying here that our love for God and the saints (however defined) moves us to want to be where they were (are?) so that we can ‘commune with our past’.
missionary pilgrims
“It is true, of course, that many of these pilgrimages brought Irish monks into inhabited places where the natives were willing and ready to receive the Christian message. The monks then became missionaries. The main reason for their journeys was not the missionary apostolate but the desire of voluntary exile.”
Merton, Thomas. “From Pilgrimage to Crusade.” (1964) in Selected Essays. Edited with an introduction by Patrick F. O’Connell. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013, p. 189.
primal urge to pilgrimage
“The ‘sacred journey’ has origins in prehistoric religious cultures and myths. Man instinctively regards himself as a wanderer and wayfarer, and it is second nature for him to go on pilgrimage in search of a privileged and holy place, a center and source of indefectible life. This hope is built into his psychology, and whether he acts it out or simply dreams it, his heart seeks to return to a mythical source, a place of ‘origin,’ the ‘home’ where the ancestors came from, the mountain where the ancient fathers were in direct communication with heaven, the place of the creation of the world, paradise itself, with its sacred tree of life.”
Merton, Thomas. “From Pilgrimage to Crusade.” (1964) in Selected Essays. Edited with an introduction by Patrick F. O’Connell. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013, p. 186.
persistance
"Once a man has set foot on this way, there is no excuse for abandoning it, for to be actually on the way is to recognize without doubt or hesitation that only the way is fully real and that everything else is deception, except insofar as it may in some secret and hidden manner be connected with ‘the way.’
“Thus, far from wishing to abandon this way, the contemplative seeks only to travel farther and farther along it. This journey without maps leads him into rugged mountainous country where there are often mists and storms and where he is more and more alone. Yet at the same time, ascending the slopes in darkness, feeling more and more keenly his own emptiness, and with the winter wind blowing cruelly through his now tattered garments, he meets at times other travelers on the way, poor pilgrims as he is, and as solitary as he, belonging perhaps to other lands and other traditions. There are of course great differences between them, and yet they have much in common. Indeed, the Western contemplative can say that he feels himself much closer to the Zen monks of ancient Japan than to the busy and impatient men of the West, of his own country, who think in terms of money, power, publicity, machines, business, political advantage, military strategy–who seek, in a word, the triumphant affirmation of their own will, their own power, considered as the end for which they exist. Is not this perhaps the most foolish of all dreams, the most tenacious and damaging of illusions?”
Merton, Thomas. “The Contemplative Life in the Modern World.” (1965) in Selected Essays. Edited with an introduction by Patrick F. O’Connell. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013, p. 228.
This is just SO good! And I think that the person who seeks only to travel farther and farther along the way of contemplation may just be the person tending toward the suite of attributes listed by a friend of mine when he wrote (and I’m mashing together bits from two different letters of his) that the fruit of the Spirit is love – which, itself is patient, kind, not envious, not boastful, not arrogant, nor rude – joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Vaya con Dios!
hold on for now
“You cannot imagine a new space fully until you have been taken there. I make this point strongly to help you understand why almost all spiritual teachers tell you to ‘believe’ or ‘trust’ or ‘hold on.’ They are not just telling you to believe silly or irrational things. They are telling you to hold on until you can go on the further journey for yourself, and they are telling you that the whole spiritual journey is, in fact, for real–which you cannot possibly know yet.”
Rohr, Richard. Falling Upward: a Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2011), page xxvii.
There were so, so many places along the Appalachian Trail which I’d read about for decades and had very clear pictures of in my mind that turned out–when I finally got there–to be nothing at all like I’d pictured them. The inner journey of the spiritual life has been surprising me like that. Heaven will no doubt turn out the same way.
poverty and simplicity along the way
“Our goal is the renewal of the presently corrupt creation. This makes it clear that the route through the wilderness, the path of our pilgrimage, will involve two things in particular: renunciation on the one hand and rediscovery on the other.” (p. 190)
“The problem is that it is by no means clear what we are to renounce and what we are to rediscover. How can we say ‘No’ to things which seem so much part of life that to reject them appears to us as the rejection of part of God’s good creation? How can we say ‘Yes’ to things which many Christians have seen not as good and right but as dangerous and deluded? How can we (the same old question once more) avoid dualism on the one hand and paganism on the other?” (p. 191)
Wright, Tom. Simply Christian. London: SPCK, 2006.
Pathology: the Study of a Path 