PILGRIM WAYS
Theological Reflections
By Henry Ralph Carse, Ph.D.
Part Four - Shrines
In an essay on “The Sacredness of Place,” the historian Philip F. Sheldrake writes that holy places have special meaning in “the geography of imagination.” Each of us has an inner landscape of spirituality, and when we travel there, we can visit places that are also visited by the divine. In some traditions, outer places that evoke this inner landscape are called “thin places,” because the barrier between this world and the other world fades away, our perception is sanctified, and we catch glimpses of heaven on earth.
Among early Christian pilgrims, the focus of worship was on the person of Christ, with less overt reverence for sacred places. The first Christians, after all, saw their faith as free of geographical specificity. Delubras et aras non habemus! – “We have no shrines or altars!” – was a common cry of the early Christians, who worshipped God through Jesus Christ, always and everywhere.
A new emphasis on sacred shrines emerged in the Constantinian era. After the Council of Nicea (325 CE), the Holy Land became the scene of intense church-building, and as a result the focus of pilgrimage shifted away from placeless devotion and toward a piety linked with particular places and contexts. In the Middle Ages, one observant pilgrim to Jerusalem, Felix Fabri, noted ironically that “holy places… have a wonderful power of moving to tears, groans and sighs, men who in any other place would not be moved.”
Modern pilgrims in the Holy Land often share the traditional emotional response to their first glimpses of Jerusalem, for example, or of Bethlehem or Nazareth. Often, these pilgrims express a feeling of sacred authenticity and reality in these places. One pilgrim, Dan, seeing an ancient stairway from the time of Jesus, said:
To turn around, and look up, and [think] that these are the steps that Jesus walked up!... Yes, I found that, you know, very, very moving… almost [to] tears!
Pilgrims today are more aware than their medieval counterparts of the fact that historical validity cannot be taken for granted. However, they tend to express tolerance for later shrine structures that claim to be “the very place” where Jesus walked and taught. As Jennie put it:
Of course many of the shrines we visited were of… spurious authenticity, though some, such as the Sea of Galilee, are exactly as they were at the time of Jesus. But even the numerous churches… supposedly built on the place of Jesus’ birth, or the Annunciation, or Jesus’ death… are imbued with a sense of reality.
There seems to be, in the Holy Land, a fascinating ambiguity and interplay between “authentic” and “spurious.” The sense of “reality” is a product of what anthropologists would call “the pilgrim gaze” - that is, the “in-place” / “out of place” spiritual disposition of the pilgrim herself. The sacred nature of a particular place reflects very much the soulful attention of the pilgrim.
In addition to many “canonical” destinations like Jerusalem’s Church of the Resurrection (often mistakenly called “The Holy Sepulcher”), and the Basilica of the Nativity in Bethlehem, pilgrims also find “alternative shrines” of various kinds, some of them more inspiring than the more famous sites. In the Holy Land, these alternatives can include: the Sea of Galilee, the “Upper Room” (which is paradoxically “downstairs”), the Chapel of the Primacy at Tabgha, Cana of Galilee, the Road to Jericho, and the Road to Emmaus, among others.
Of all the alternative holy places visited by pilgrims in the land of the Bible, it is perhaps the desert that reveals itself to the “pilgrim gaze” as most authentic, most sacred and most spiritual. Whether the Desert of Judea, the Negev Desert, or the vast expanses of the Sinai Wilderness, these open spaces always evoke a sense of awe and divine presence. For a pilgrim named Ronald, the desert goes beyond the limits of biblical context and touches on the mystical:
The time in the desert was whole and complete… engaging with the truth in an emotional, non-rational way… It had urgency, reality, meaning. It addressed Ultimate Being. In religious language: an encounter with God.
Whatever the authenticity of the shrines toward which pilgrims move, it is evident in their spiritual responses, that for them the soul of “sacred space” is not in the place itself, but in the living encounter experienced there. It is in meeting a sacred “other” that a pilgrim is most deeply transformed by the journey.
To Be Continued…