On the 11th of February 1858, in the French Pyrenean town of Lourdes, Bernadette Soubirous saw a girl child dressed in white, with a blue sash, holding a rosary, standing in a grotto.  She would see her fourteen more times.  During one of those encounters, Bernadette put her mouth to the wet grass beneath her feet and drank the muddy water, as she said, in her mountain patois,  that "Aquero" had instructed her to do. 

Have you seen the 1943 film The Song of Bernadette?  Based on Franz Werfel's book, it was my (and many non-Catholics') introduction to Lourdes.  Hollywood cannot be accused of twisting it, as  romanticists and revisionists had been at it almost from the beginning.  It is a lovely film, and tells the essential story and subsequent mythology.  Werfel, a Viennese Jew,  found refuge at Lourdes from the Nazis, and wrote the book out of gratitude.

Lourdes quickly became a place of pilgrimage, though not an official one until the 1870s.  The young girl who Bernadette understood to explain that she was the Immaculate Conception became the adult Virgin Mary.
The spring water she instructed Bernadette to drink became associated with healing.   Thousands of people travel to Lourdes every year, many of them hoping to be healed of disease.  For a time, Lourdes became a
tool of antisemites and antirepublicanists.  Controversies have engulfed the place over the decades, but stories of human goodness, acts of charity, and comforting experiences also come from Lourdes, defying its
exploiters.

Nowadays in a Catholic video on four shrines associated with apparitions, spokespersons for Lourdes talk about how the place was never primarily a place of healing, but that many people leave Lourdes with a change of heart and greater courage to cope with their illnesses.  It is not for me to say whether they drink and bathe in
healing waters or whether they immerse themselves in human kindness.

Bernadette, 14 at the time of the apparitions, was the oldest child in a desperately poor family.  She had just returned home after working for another family as shepherdess and general household help.  Her father had lost the mill he had once managed, and the Soubirous were living in a tiny former jail.

Pyrenean culture was French and Spanish — and Catholic — but encompassed persistent pre-Christian folk beliefs in such things as fairies, mystical presences in caves, and the power of water to heal.  A skeptic could put these together with the lost status and abject hunger of the Soubirous and the struggle of Bernadette herself.  She should have had a different role in her family,  the equivalent term would be inheritor, with privileges and responsibilities of the firstborn, but instead was farmed out to other families as an additional breadwinner.  Her health was fragile.  She suffered from asthma.  She was hungry, overworked, struggling to breathe much of the time.  After her visions, which did not heal her, she eventually became a nun, helped care for others when her failing health permitted, and died at 35 of tuberculosis.

A year ago, a book by a British historian who is a secular Jew completely distracted me from my reason for entering a Half Price Books store.  It is this:  Lourdes:  body and spirit in the secular age . Have you ever entered a bookstore on a mission . . . and then seen something very different and compelling?  I  read the preface, acknowledgments, bibliography, and looked at the pictures.  How long did I stand there?  a long time.

Ruth Harris' book, the idea of her book, her approach, won my heart and inspired me with the strange chutzpah to say that I wanted to speak about pilgrimage from a pulpit.

Why? 

I can only identify with Bernadette through our common condition: asthma, but mine has receded from a real childhood and adolescent handicap to a mild problem. 

Certainly I would like to be healed of my other condition:  diabetes, and part of me wants to go to a sacred place and immerse in special waters and come home without this disorder.  But I have not lived this way.  It's just a wistful desire, like a fantasy.  In my real world, I know I must work to maintain my health and live in a positive and grateful way.  Next February, I will have lived with diabetes for 40 years.

Certainly I would have wished for a healing pilgrimage for my mother, who died of cancer at the age of 58.  The flowers today are in her memory on the Sunday nearest her birthday. In a recent conversation with Janet Pierce of this congregation, who was raised a Catholic, we talked about why we regard Lourdes in one way, a
respectful way, and why we regard Benny Hinn and other very visible, self-proclaimed "healers" in another way.  At the heart of the answer for both of us is the sincerity of Bernadette, who never changed her
account and did not seek to gain from her vision. 

How does one identify with pilgrims generally and with the desire to go on pilgrimage?  We should distinguish pilgrimage from  quest, from walkabout, from "wanderlust" or Kerouackian Dharma bum picaresque odysseys. 

I am the lucky child of history-loving people who loved to travel.  The trips of my childhood were not pilgrimage travel, although they often contained pilgrimage moments, planned and unplanned.  No, our trips in
the 1950s and early 1960s could best be summed up by a line from the singer/songwriter Robert Earl Keene; it was just that "Daddy had a Buick, Mamma liked to ride."

I invite you to accompany me on an abbreviated tour of the phenomenon of pilgrimage.  to consider the magnetism of certain places .

As with any beginning study, one should narrow the topic or prepare to be overwhelmed by information!  Students of pilgrimage seem to be everywhere, and they think so far out of a box or a grotto that some are at this moment focused on the universe.  When I stumbled across references to entelechy and treatises on chaos theory applied to Chaco Canyon and Hindu pilgrimage and a Provencal shrine now overrun by nonbelievers, I remembered what my contemporary Ellen Holland of Fort Worth wrote just a year or two after finishing high school: "I read until the wick became past time.  The readings searched my mind,  never failing to find new ignorance." A pilgrimage into the literature of pilgrimage confirms her discovery about learning and research.

The study of pilgrimage is ongoing.  Members of the Society of Pilgrimage Studies meet in sacred places and share their scholarship.  Universities and seminaries offer courses.  Books and journal articles add to the literature.  Those who subscribe to chaos theory and complexity theory look at the self-organizing tendency of
societies and the element of the "strange attractor" in many pilgrimage patterns.

I found there was too much to share on a Sunday morning. So . . . I will prepare a list of related websites and ask Mary Anne Clark to put this on the fabulous www.swuuc.org/fjuuc   And . . . I invite you to visit the display just outside the sanctuary today, write down the name of your most holy or essential places, and leave it inside the empty arch.  Card and pens are provided.

Although I did not wish to craft a "book of lists" sermon, I do want to discuss some types of pilgrimage here.

Sacred places mark the maps of the world's religions. In childhood,  I saw devout people progressing on their knees toward the Shrine of the Virgen de Guadalupe in Mexico.  Traditional religious shrines and centers include Mecca, the Vatican, Jerusalem, Benares, Iona, Kyoto . . . we could name so many.

There are pilgrimages of healing.  Carl Sandburg captured in almost Zen-like lines the essence of this
place, mentioned in the Bible, where people came to be healed:

The Pool of Bethesda

A man came to the pool of Bethesda and sat down for his thoughts. The light of the sun ran through the line of the water and struck where the moss on a stone was green the green of the moss wove into the sun silver and the silent brackets of seven prisms added to the pool of Bethesda. Thus a man sat long with a pool and its prisms.

Sacred people, considered national or international treasures in some societies, inspire pilgrimages. 
Buddhists and non-Buddhists seek audiences with the Dalai Lama. Ramblin' Jack Elliott and Bob Dylan visited Woody Guthrie and Carl Sandburg.  For me,  a distant relative in Winchester, Tennessee, proved to be one of these treasures. For you, perhaps it is a great-aunt or a neighbor.

Ancestral and historical places draw pilgrims.  Near Union, West Virginia, my cousin Sarah and I walked through our fifth-great-grandparents' blockhouse, built in the 1760s, and the present owner graciously scraped a bit of powder from the mortar in the rock-walled basement and put in in plastic film canisters for us.  Sarah
and I waded in the nearby creek where native people had once drunk the water and where, later, many Protestants had been immersed for their baptisms.

In 1994, with several Jewish historians and laypersons, I traveled to formerly Jewish sites in Spain and Portugal.  We walked through neighborhoods, synagogues, and other areas that had ceased to be home to
the Sefardim with their expulsion beginning in 1492.  Some of those who made this trip with us believe themselves to be descendants of Crypto-Jews who had kept their faith and ancestry secret for generations, even in the relative safety of the New World.  Perhaps it was not so safe; the Inquisition reached into New Spain, as well.

There is experiential and inspirational pilgrimage.  Many backpackers, mountain climbers, retreat participants, and others often tell that their treks feed their souls.  Laurie Simmons, our director of religious education, just returned from Ghost Ranch in New Mexico, and no doubt will affirm this.

Scholarly, vocational, and affinity journeys are common. Astronomers gravitate to Arecibo, to Marfa, and to Red Bank.  Architects visit Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater or Hollyhock House.  Baseball fans go to Cooperstown, and if you don't think Cooperstown is a shrine . . . 

Students of literature seek out the environs of authors and poets.  To walk through Thomas Wolfe's mother's boarding house in Asheville, North Carolina was, for me, an important experience.  I thought of applying to
be a guide there, since I am always repeating myself!

Bob Dylan made a personal pilgrimage to see Sandburg, although both had a less than wonderful interaction, I understand.

People touched by the plays of William Inge can go each year to Independence, Kansas, for a theatre festival in his honor, and — if they choose — can dance to the tune "Moonglow" along the river bank where William Holden and Kim Novak danced in the movie Picnic.

Sad pilgrimages are, nonetheless, vital to some for realization and even a kind of closure.  These destinations include memorials and preserved sites of tragedy. Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Armritsar, Ground Zero, the Sixth Floor Museum, a workhouse museum in Ireland.  I witnessed a sad pilgrimage, without understanding it at the time.  Once on a Sunday drive north of Dallas, my grandmother asked if we could stop at the old Cotton Belt depot in Carrollton.  She walked on the empty platform and stood looking in one of the windows for awhile, then came back to the car, saying nothing. Years later, I learned that her father, my great-grandfather, had
committed suicide there.  She just wanted to look in the window.

And so it is with those who walk across former battlefields, who go to altered wilderness areas such as Glen Canyon Dam, to cemeteries, or to "stone ghost buildings" along the Brazos River, as John Graves described
the remnants of Kimball's Bend in his book Goodbye to a River.

Some make unwitting pilgrimage. Henry Roth wrote of  his, and his literary character's, efforts to
locate and visit the site of Seville's quemadero (place where Jews and other "heretics" were burned during the Inquisition).

"Why had I come to Spain?  Ostensibly to familiarize myself with the background of my Marrano central character.  But that wasn't the reason I had come here.  It was evident now,   though all this while I had concealed it from myself.  I had        come to Spain to reunite with Judaism — via a side door.  I   wouldn't admit it until now, but that was the reason."

Nearby pilgrimages are certainly possible.  For those who practice and study Buddhism, a Bo tree grows in the
Botanic Garden Conservatory here in Fort Worth. Thirty miles to the north, the Little Chapel-in-the-Woods on the campus of Texas Woman's University in Denton is a jewel designed by O'Neal Ford and built by the National Youth Administration.  Its stained-glass windows depict women's contributions in social work, dance, nursing, and other callings.   

Electronic pilgrimage, wouldn't you know, is now at your fingertips. Virtual hajj and a virtual walk through Jerusalem are but two of many internet tours one may take.

Then there are unfortunate pilgrimages . . . Sad to say, some new-age pilgrims do not know (It is not always their fault) or (what is much worse) some do not care that they may be treading, chanting, drumming on others' sacred ground or that they have entered a sacred area at a time that is taboo in the earlier or indigenous people's calendar.  This is brought out in the stunning film In the Light of Reverence: Protecting America's Sacred Lands, recently shown at the Amon Carter Museum with commentary by Bart Weiss of the Dallas Video Festival and the UTA faculty.  In this film, we see National Park Service personnel, religious creatives, professional climbing guides, mining company owners, and native people presenting their points of view regarding the use of lands sacred to some.  The Indian people explain, in several ways, that when mountain climbers, drumming circle members, land developers and campers enter certain lands, they are entering the equivalent of a church or temple.  These are their sanctuaries.

Some places are sacred to very different groups, and the juxtaposition began centuries before our new age. 
The Mezquita in Cordoba Spain is one such place.  That incredible forest of red-and-white-striped arches built atop the ruins of a Roman temple and, after the Moors' 800-year rule ended, a Catholic cathedral built inside and on top of part of the mosque.  Where else can a mosque house a monstrance? 

Of course, the Temple Mount and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem form what must be the most volatile holy place in the world. 

Although tourism and pilgrimage can occur in the same journey, sometimes conflict and damage result. 
When a formerly sacred corner of the natural world is drastically altered and overrun, a modern term for such development is "Yellowstonization." 

The  pilgrimage  of return is, certainly, primal. This touching the past often overlaps with heritage, of course.  Last spring while my husband and I were riding buses around the Colonial heartland of Mexico, we spent three days in San Miguel de Allende, allowing me to revisit a wonderful ex-hacienda where my parents and I spent the most purely happy, fulfilling, and fascinating time of our shared lives, at least according to my memory.  What a luxury to be able to hike up the cobblestone road from town to the Atascadero and sit in the courtyard where I had sunned and watched my mother paint, where we lived for a month in 1958 while my father studied at the Instituto Allende.  It was indescribably comforting, this re-visit.

I encourage, aid and abet my husband (and enjoy watching the rediscovery and recognition) in revisiting places of his past — which include no less than five communities along Route 66 — a road I love and have called (in a poem) the Via Dolorosa of the Joads.  This spring we visited his birthplace, Tucumcari.  We walked among the ruins of his grandparents' old tourist court, searched for traces of the house where he first lived, located the earlier path of the railroad tracks toward which he had crawled and from which his mother snatched him away as a train approached (He was fearless from the beginning!)  We photographed houses and churches and gravestones.  Serendipity struck on our last day, when a flat tire situation caused us to wander around town and we met a santero — carver and painter of traditional Spanish saint figures — and his wife.

Now to return to Ruth Harris' book, which inspired this ramble.  After all her meticulous research, she decided to go on pilgrimage, and found that it was vital to her writing.  "What I saw at Lourdes touched me but did not convert me.  Indeed, the open-mindedness and generosity of the group I went with only confirmed me in my Jewish secularism."

However, this Oxford scholar brings us back to what T.S. Eliot called the still point of the turning world.  Harris concludes:

"Despite the attempts by some to romanticize, by others to politicize and by still others to medicalize, throughout history of Lourdes there has always remained one fixed point: the essential image of a young, poverty  stricken and sickly girl kneeling in ecstasy in a muddy grotto."

What, for you, are the holy places, the places of deepest significance on this earth?  Have you traveled, will you travel, to these places?

                    — Juliet George Wells

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List of Sacred Places and Spaces