I was talking to someone about pilgrimage this morning, and then I spotted Sheridan Voysey's upcoming pilgrimage on twitter.
As regular readers know, my fourth book was Accidental Pilgrim - an memoir threaded around an exploration not only of conventional pilgrimage (if there is such a thing) but of the various concepts of pilgrimage that have come to the surface at different points in history. Early Christians eschewed the practice of travelling to a holy place, because that's what pagans did, and the Christians wanted to distance themselves from pagan practices. For them, the idea of the whole of life as a journey towards heaven was paramount. Later Christians recovered the practice of pilgrimage to sacred places - but in the 9th-14th century or thereabouts, travel was a difficult and expensive business, and often dangerous. The practice of walking the Labyrinth developed in Europe as a stay-at-home alternative to making the actual, ultimate Christian pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Later still, travelling to extend one's spiritual borders became blurred with the benefits of gaining social and cultural development, and the Grand Tour replaced the urge for pilgrimage for those wealthy enough to enjoy it. Thomas Cook the travel agency began as a vision to enable the less well off to gain some of the spiritual benefits of travel - Cook's earliest packages being trips to Jerusalem for the ordinary citizen.
I have always been a walker, and the idea of pilgrimage fascinated me at one level, although some of the more pious ideas associated with it were something of a turn-off. Singing hymns in a damp Bed and Breakfast? - not for me. But Chaucer's trips sounded so much more fun - stories and food and wine after a long day's walking? What's not to like?
None of my pilgrimages have been of the conventional kind - hence my title "Accidental Pilgrim". But I think maybe that's the point. For me, writing a memoir with the specific purpose of exploring pilgrimage gave me the opportunity to weave some of my love of theology together with personal stories that needed to be told. The book was originally commissioned to be a handbook to pilgrimage; I began writing down the stories just to get the writing juices flowing, and the editor jumped on my story about Rocamadour and said - "That's it! Write more like that!"