Pilgrimage In Modernity
Stephen Watt looks what Pilgrimage means to many in Scotland today.
I have written previously about Charles Taylor’s concept of the buffered self, that human beings in modernity see themselves as ‘buffered’ from the world, peering out at it and bestowing meaning upon it from within our consciousness and subjectivity. Opposed to this is the pre-modern idea of the ‘porous self’, the self that allows meaning to flow into us from the universe. Taylor’s account is primarily descriptive: we live in such modernity whether we like it or not and religion had better take account of that reality.
Let’s apply that analysis to pilgrimage. For Catholics, and for Scottish Catholics in particular, there is a fundamental break in the world which, in Scotland, can be located symbolically in 1560, the year when the Scottish Parliament rejected the authority of the Pope in Scotland and adopted the Protestant Scots Confession as the standard of the national religion. Instead of a landscape structured by sites of religious meaning such as monasteries and cathedrals and pilgrimage routes, we thereafter wandered in a desert empty of meaning and even hostile to Catholicism, where the religion lived on only in hearts and minds and in the out of the way sort of places that even those who lived there thought of as only marginal.
Of course, whatever the core truth of such a vision of Scotland, it isn’t quite right. No one is really a buffered self able to resist the leakage of meanings into their subjectivity: indeed, in the late modernity of our century, we seem to be in the odd position of creating a type of individual who, while loudly proclaiming their independence of thought and their critical intelligence, seems to be completely in the thrall of the surrounding wash of fashionable ideas and incoherent emotions. I suspect quite a lot of people feel that oddity, and seek a refuge or at least a respite from that churning sea of confusion which surrounds and enters us. And so we come to the modern pilgrimage, for all faiths and for none.
Marion Bowman, an academic who specialises in modern forms of religion, has written of the ‘Caminoization and the heritagization of religion’ in relation to the practice of pilgrimage in modern Scotland:
[T]he pilgrimage paths that are proliferating and the apparent popularity of new pilgrimage do not represent a straightforward revival of pilgrimage; they are the product of a distinctively Scottish, pragmatic, rather Protestant “rehabilitation” of it.
I’ll go into what that all means more deeply below, but alongside this ‘new’ pilgrimage, Bowman identifies a parallel, but different Catholic tradition, which sees itself as ‘continuing “authentic” Catholic tradition in relation to pilgrimage’ within Scotland. She gives as examples of this ‘continuing’ type of pilgrimage the Dunfermline Pilgrimage and the Two Shrines Pilgrimage between Edinburgh and St Andrews, both of which involve clear Catholic religious commitment and the shrines and relics of saints. Robert Proctor and Ambrose Gillick, on the other hand, dealing with the pilgrimage sites at Carfin, Whithorn and Dunfermline, emphasise the constructed nature of this continuing pilgrimage tradition:
[T]hese pilgrimages and their material culture proposed a particular view of Scotland as a nation bound to Rome through ancient ties, and indeed to contemporary Catholic Europe through transnational mobilities and allegiances. Together the clergy and the laity constructed this new religious landscape, and activated it through participation in rituals of pilgrimage.
For both Bowman’s new and continuing pilgrimages, as is typical of much modern academic religious studies, religious sites and practices as seen as constructing sacredness rather than responding to it. I suppose a straightforward, traditional Catholic view of pilgrimage might go something like this: a particular spot is made special either by the presence of a saint’s relics (St Andrews) or by a special divine action (Lourdes). In response to that particular sacred presence, people go in pilgrimage: that pilgrimage and its practices may serve to enhance the revelatory quality of that presence, but the sacred presence is objective, not constructed by the actions of human beings. From an outsider, academic perspective, Proctor and Gillick emphasise instead how the Catholic community in Scotland made pilgrimage sites as part of a project ‘to return the old saints to their places in the landscape, and to construct new places for the saints of the universal Church’.
So far, therefore, we have found three ways of thinking about pilgrimage sites: the outsider, non-Catholic versions of Bowman and Proctor and Gillick, both of which emphasise the construction of a meaningful landscape, although Bowman, focusing on ‘new pilgrimage’, talks about a ‘Scottish, pragmatic, rather Protestant “rehabilitation”, while Proctor and Gillick, focusing on ‘continuing pilgrimage’, emphasise a project of what might be described as making sites Catholic again. In addition, there is an insider, Catholic perspective, which sees pilgrimage not as a way of constructing the sacredness of a place, but rather of responding to that sacredness.
Bearing this threefold distinction in mind, let’s return to consider what appears to be the dominant understanding of pilgrimage in Scotland, which Bowman has characterised as a pragmatic, rather Protestant rehabilitation. In her article, she speaks of a ‘reframing of pilgrimage, with the emphasis no longer on the shrine at journey’s end but on the journey itself, [which] has prompted numerous (re)developments of pilgrimage paths’. Reading Bowman’s paper, the main picture that emerges of the new pilgrimage is that of a practice rooted in recreational walking and exploration of heritage, but facilitated by a variety of agencies with many purposes including ‘spiritual but also economic and social value’.
What is modern Catholicism to make of all this? Starting from our being insiders to our own tradition of pilgrimage focused on the holy places to which we journey, I think it’s important to encourage those existing sites which are already attracting pilgrims. If we are truly to return to a pre-Reformation practice, we should do so as pre-modern, ‘porous selves’, being ready to open ourselves to the sacredness we encounter, not create, at the shrines. For us, Bowman’s new pilgrimage is something to be conscious of, but at least in part as a warning of what we are not: the arrival at Jerusalem is more important than the journey to it; we go to be remade by the presence of God, not to construct that presence for ourselves and in our own image. Turning to Proctor and Gillick’s outsider analysis of our tradition, as both a Scottish reality and as part of a wider aspect of modernity, unavoidably we will have to continue to construct the landscape as a Catholic landscape. As well as benefiting existing Catholics, I think here we do also have something to offer a wider Scotland: a Catholic landscape would be somewhere better to live. It would, for example, offer places where God is accessibly present, and where we would be practising in a way that for 1500 years our forebears have practised. We would be offering a past which is still living and lively, rather than LARPing as heritage druids. Some will come only to gawp; some will be horrified. But at least we will be offering authenticity. And some will be fascinated and drawn into that.
And finally the new, rehabilitated pilgrimage. I’m among those who believe that the process of secularisation in the West will result less in atheism and more in an unstructured, rather eclectic spiritual exploration. If, as buffered selves, Scots need to construct their own meanings, then Catholicism needs to be there as part of that spiritual exploration. If we cannot always convert, then at least we can tinge that spirituality a little, encouraging more engagement with the shrines which at the moment form a merely nominal end point, encouraging more prayer, more of an understanding of the sacramental life of the Church. If, for the next 463 years in Scotland, we may not be exactly living in a Catholic landscape, at least we can try and create a spiritual landscape where the presence of the transcendent is manifest, and where the major Western spiritual tradition of Catholicism has a respected place in engaging with that manifestation.
Stephen Watt
Works referred to:
Steven Watt might be interested in the Northern Pilgrims' Way that links St Duthac's, Tain with St Magnus Cathedral, Kirkwall. This was a medieval pilgrimage route, starting in the 11th C. It is almost unique in that Duthac was honoured in Kirkwall and other parts of Orkney before Magnus became famous. So pilgrims have travelled from the North to Tain and then from Tain to Kirkwall, all following the same route. For details, go to www.northernpilgrimsway.co.uk.