BOOKS
On Pilgrimage By Jennifer Lash (Bloomsbury USA, $24.95)
By Joe Milazzo
There's more than a little haste in this unusual book and, consequently, more than a few contradictory notions - audacity and reverence, compassion and outrage, inquiry and trust.
True, the travelogue in general consists mostly of a casual flow of a traveler's impressions. Yet late British novelist Jennifer Lash' s pace here is one the reader might initially suppose should be more deliberate.
In 1991, Ms. Lash, a lapsed Catholic recovering from a serious illness, took her inspiration from a pilgrimage by Margery Kempe, a 15th-century woman of independent opinion and religious courage. Nearly 500 years later, then, the author undertook her solitary journey. The established path of the Christian pilgrim leads her through France to, finally, the Spanish province of Galicia and Santiago de Compostela, believed by Catholics to be where St. James, the first martyred of the 12 Apostles, brought the Gospel to Europe.
In each chapter, Ms. Lash recounts her time at particular stops. Meandering in her stories as she pauses physically, she contemplates what has made each destination historic and holy.
Her first pause was just across the English Channel in Alencon, birthplace of St. Therese. In Vezelay, the presence of a reliquary dedicated to Mary Magdalene, though no longer sanctioned by the church, exerted its pull. Le Puy is renowned for a famous stone (the "Fever Stone") associated with a manifestation of the Virgin Mary and said to possess curative powers. And Ms. Lash made her own quixotic forays. She visited Lourdes but also retreated to Dhagpo Kagyu Long, a Tibetan Buddhist settlement in the Dordonge forest.
Curiously, piety here seems incidental, transient. The author's prose is hardly glib, but it certainly is very much in the present. At religious ceremonies, her focus was on externals: the green and breezy fields of Taize, a Gothic basilica reached only by way of a penitential climb, a cozy abbey chapel. Her attention was much less drawn to the content of prayers she overhears than to their aesthetic character, whether these devotions are sung or whispered, expressed through reverent bowing to icons or kisses to Black Madonnas, or on parade by rowdy gypsies through the streets of a coastal French town.
Once one's expectations adjust to the illumination of Ms. Lash' s point of view (much as she herself had to allow her vision to accustom itself to the interior darkness of the cathedrals), there is much indeed to see here. Parts of this book crackle with the friction of crowding themes; its most memorable passages are the highly abstract ones. The writer is at her reflective best when elaborating on "this derelict, no man's land between belief and disbelief" that she was traveling as she moved physically across her Occidental landscape. And she did find a form of faith.
Back
home in suburban London, she realized that a proper pilgrimage can reveal
meaning to those too debilitated by their contemporary environs to guess
just how or where their own faith might rise. And though the pace of her
pilgrimage was quick-step, it never skipped over the difficulties that
must be traversed before arriving at conviction.
Free-lance writer Joe Milazzo lives and works
in the Dallas area.
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