Rosemary Mahoney makes pilgrims of us all

#40days40books entry 39

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

10) Roads to Santiago by Cees Nooteboom

like hello perfect afternoon

So this is a short tale of books like dominoes taking over huge swathes of my life. Roads to Santiago is a beautiful text in translation from the Dutch. The author is a poet who has lived with this troubling love for Spain for most of his adult life. The book is not a guide to the pilgrim paths or to any kind of depth of faith experience. I don't even know that you could follow any road Nooteboom takes and get to anywhere, in point of fact. In that, this is not unlike that other rambling Iberian route Journey to Portugal which I tried valiantly to mark out on a map of the country with zero success. (It was a valiant effort. There were colored pencils and copious notes.) I have memories of landscapes my eyes have never seen, and know the smell of churches whose names I cannot remember and have never spoken. Nooteboom considers history as he does the surface of a painting, or a plain, or the quality of air. 

St Francis of the many

His extended contemplations on the work of various artists, mostly Velazquez and Francisco de Zurbaran, are captivating. Particularly as I'd discovered that the St. Louis Art Museum owns one of Zurbaran's many St. Francis of Assisi paintings. There is extraordinary power in that contemplative image. Enough that one year I circled and circled around this catalog of an exhibition from the 1980s that I eventually bought. It's especially unnerving as this exhibition is one that Nooteboom mentions in his book - he went to both the New York and Paris shows. 

Sometimes the synchronicity, it is just odd.

Saw the sheep, knew I wanted it

Another afternoon, another leisurely wander around the art museum's gift shop and I saw a book about Zurbaran that was priced out of my budget. So I copied out the ISBN and went hunting at work. It took about a week for the book to get to me. Best surprise? The text was written by one Cees Nooteboom, Dutch man of letters and part-time resident of Minorca.  

These three books were my companions during a lovely trip to snowbound Hermann, MO one Valentine's Day weekend. It was glorious and cold and solitary and the food was strange and the wine was not great. The books, though. The books were startling.

But don't worry, there's more. Because, you see, I know that there are guides to the pilgrim routes to Santiago, and it's been decided that this long walk is in my future. So back to the distribution center website with me, and will you be surprised? 

So. Anyone wanna help take care of Ethel while I'm gone?

May your libraries offer such grandly quiet adventures as all those many miles of walking.