Wise, honest insights fill `Pilgrimage'
"On Pilgrimage." By Jennifer Lash. Bloomsbury USA. 226 pages. $23.95. British writer Jennifer Lash left the world a valuable gift before she died of cancer in 1993. After enduring surgery, chemotherapy and radiation, and living with her illness for four years, she felt called to make a religious pilgrimage . . . and write about it.
She had not been religious for some time, she explains in the preface to "On Pilgrimage," the resulting memoir whose U.S. release follows earlier publication in Great Britain.
Indeed, the author of five novels, wife, and mother of seven children considered herself a lapsed Catholic when she began her solo journey through France and part of Spain in the spring of 1990. Nonetheless, she notes, cancer had released within her a yearning to visit ancient places and be among contemporary seekers as, in effect, she reconnected to her roots and her deepest self.
Being neither Catholic nor Christian myself, I was drawn into the book at first by the beauty and clarity of Lash's writing, by her wise and honest observations and insights. I was mildly curious about the saints and shrines, relics and rites which formed the cornerstones of her journey, and which she describes in careful, scholarly detail at every stopping point along her path.
What kept me going, however, was less the subject matter than Lash's enthusiasm for it, an enthusiasm that extended to the mechanics of the journey itself and to almost painterly descriptions of the people and events that figured in unexpectedly along the way.
For instance, in Paray-le-Monial, where her official business was Saint Margaret-Mary, Lash is momentarily transfixed by the sight of two Dominican priests at lunch: "Their rough, white habits and white hair was in such contrast to the dark paneling of the little room. Broken bread was beside each one, very bright on the worn mahogany surface. Sun from a high window just gave a rim of light to their cuffs and knuckles and the edge of the bowl . . . I was happy to have this small, midday monastic second so firmly fixed in my memory."
There are frequent ironic twists along the trail, but mostly Lash's path is laden with the kindnesses of strangers, who share their own stories with her and offer her rides, food, and directions to affordable lodgings. Chapter by chapter, shrine by shrine, this memoir adds up to an in-depth look at saints and today's thriving charismatic movement. I could not help but grow fascinated.
The self-portrait that eventually also emerges is of a brave, spiritual, extremely thoughtful woman seeking the essence of life and fresh ways to liberate it for herself for whatever length of time remains to her.
Does she also regain her religious faith? Maybe, maybe not, judging from her fairly ambiguous answer to that question at the end of the book. But that question probably isn't even key to a book which honors doubt and diversity as a source of strength and seeks to understand the powerful place where the sacred and the secular meet.
"On Pilgrimage" offers many answers about life for those who carefully mine its wisdom.
------------ Fran Zell is a Madison-based writer.
(Copyright 1999)