Quest for a soul revival
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On Pilgrimage
A Time to Seek
by Jini Fiennes
Sinclair-Stevenson
16.95 pounds pp226
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Karen Armstrong
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The pilgrimage, a rite of passage found in all cultures, obviously fulfils an important human need. The ritual journey to a hold place is an ecocative symbol of spiritual migration, and its disciplines have changed the lives of individuals and of whole societies.. Even in our more secular world, people have found that a pilgrimage has helped them to achieve a personal salvation which is not always specifically religious.
It is, therefore, not surprising that after a cancer operation, Jini Fiennes (better known as the novelist Jennifer Lash) decided to make the ancient pilgrimage to Compostella in northern Spain, even though she had long ceased to be a practising Catholic. She hoped that her three-month journey visiting the shrines of France would also become an interior quest, but found that the experience was more complex and disturbing than she had expected.
This, perhaps, explains the rather uneven qualithy of On Pilgrimage, her account of the expedition. Fiennes is at her best in the lively descriptions of her encounters with other pilgrims, which give an arresting insight into the variety and extent of spiritual aspiration in Europe at present, particularly among the young. The pilgrim roads are surprisingly crowded, not only at the ancient shrines of Vezelay and Rocamadour but at the more modern sites that Fiennes visited, including a Buddhist settlement in the Dordogne.
Fiennes also sought out places associated with the saints who had been the luminaries of her own convent schooldays, such as Therese of Lisieux and Margaret Mary Alacoque, who was responsible for the mawkish but ubiquitous Catholic cult of the Sacred Heart. Fiennes's perception of these saints is surprisingly uncritical. Margaret Mary, for example, seems to have suffered from anorexia and to have distinctly unhealthy masochistic tendencies. Nor was the family life of Therese Martin as idyllic as Fiennes would have us believe: her mother, Zelie, who is currently a candidate for canonization, clearly loathed Therese's older sister, Leonie, who remained bitter and damaged.
Fiennes could
not stomach the convent at Nevers where St. Bernadette of Lourdes ended
her life. The mummified body of the poor saintm with plucked eyebrows
and pink nails, is proudly displayed in a Snow-White-type casket.
But at other shrines, Fiennes found that she was deeply