The Singular Pilgrim is a book about being a pilgrim in the most well-known and also not-so well-known pilgrimage places in the world. Rosemary Mahoney walks one of the Caminos in Spain, she goes to Lourdes, Varanasi and the Sea of Galilee. Her journeys are spiritually and physically challenging. She meets believers and skeptics alike. Each of the places she goes holds significance both sacred and mundane in the lives of people who live on or near the sites. She meets people who return again and again. It is not possible to read this book and come away unchanged.
There is something so purely focused about travel as a pilgrim that is nowhere to be found in our day to day lives. We generally don't seek out the sacred in our offices, or stores, or local coffee shops. The focus on every act as having something to offer the soul is non-existent in most secular lives. Mahoney's book offers readers something more complicated than a long walk across a country with many others going in the same direction. It offers a long conversation about the nature of living while sacred in a world that doesn't let anything alone.
This was another used book find that got gobbled right up. It was that acquisitive a buy. I have literally no reason to walk any of the Caminos across Spain, but now I have to. No idea when. No idea how. Not worried about it yet.
Rosemary Mahoney undertook all of these pilgrimages alone and fulfilled them. She was dunked in Lourdes, rowed herself across the Sea of Galilee, spent time in Varanasi, walked the 500 miles to Santiago de Compostela and spent three grueling days in circuit on Ireland's Station Island. The people she walked and ate with are as fascinating as you could expect - and they are so very familiar and so very human.
I love that this book is so focused on the travel. There is nothing but relief in the reading of it. It's dusty and grimy and smells kind of ... much from time to time. Everything in my day looks gray and meaningless when I've come out of this book. That doesn't seem to be its aim, and it doesn't last long, but it is powerful.
This book is everything that I love - being alone, walking, being tired, talking to people as they happen along, thinking about things entirely other than "real life" and being totally immersed in the strangeness of faith and consumerism. It's that total exhaustion after a day of hiking when you fall into your sleeping bag and know that dreams will be no refuge, only more adventures. That first glass of water that tastes like nothing so much as champagne you're so sore and parched.
You feel sort of scarred and magnified before getting to the kindness of the end.
I want more. Like this. Less armchair, though. More boots and backpacks.
Read this with tea and good bread and butter or jam.
#40days40books list
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