THE SINGULAR PILGRIM

An affecting visit to the ancient, humbling act of pilgrimage.

Having witnessed pilgrims from afar, NBCC Award finalist Mahoney (A Likely Story, 1998, etc.) had sensed the spiritual weight of their deed. She was awed by their faith, these vulnerable souls confronting the natural fears of uncertainty and obscurity, and felt a twinge of envy, an envy fueled by her own flirtations with belief. So she took to the pilgrim's road—six of them, in fact: Walsingham, Lourdes, El Camino de Santiago, Varanasi, the Holy Land, and St. Patrick's Purgatory (she notes there is a shrine to a dead outlaw where drug dealers pay homage, but she gives that one a miss)—to see if the journeys’ difficulties might be redemptive and renewing for her. With each pilgrimage, Mahoney gains in appreciation for the process; each had its own cosmos, beginning with Walsingham, a rough start where Paisleyites hurled curses at vicars venerating the Virgin. On the long walk to Santiago, she gets a first taste of the worldly experience a pilgrimage offers, where once there were “bandits and charlatans, kooks and cheats, festivals, toll bridges, romances, sideshows.” At Varanasi, things turn more sublime—“so many people standing half naked in the river accentuated both the frailty and the grace of the human body. Their devotion refined, soft, slightly wry”—while by the Sea of Galilee she discerns the compelling nature of Jesus, his “generosity and charity, the effort to see God and bring forth the highest virtue in man.” Her “little stump of reverence for the Catholic Church” is in evidence, so too her skepticism, as well as her conviction that faith requires a leap, may indeed live in that leap. Doubt, too, and risk and daring; reason could ignite faith, but trust sustained it.

Spiritual solace remains elemental, Mahoney finds, the urge for direct personal experience with the divine. She conveys a genuine sense of spiritual mindfulness on the road and there is no denying these pilgrimages paid her back in full.