The Pilgrimage

Before psychology, and still concurrent with it, the need to help people with their behavior-change endeavors, mental health concerns, and other problems in living was met by the world’s great religions. For many people religions still serve this purpose, often outside the Western scientific view that considers them unfalsifiable and therefore irrelevant. This scientific myopia means that psychology has a limited perspective on behavior-change practices of religious derivation -- since the time of William James's Varieties of Religious Experience, religion hasn't been considered a respectable area of study. (Interestingly, we have better data about non-Western practices like yoga and meditation, which have been studied in ways cut off from their religious origins. It is mainly Christianity that was seen as outside the purview of scientific comment). One traditional practice common to many religions is the pilgrimage, a journey from home to a distant location in order to view a holy site.

You might think of pilgrimages mainly in the medieval context, as described in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. They were common throughout Europe, and are still undertaken in locations like Spain's Camino de Santiago. Pilgrimage practices migrated to the New World, particularly in Spanish-speaking countries, where new shrines were established. Sometimes the same saint could take on dramatically different characteristics in the new location, as with the Virgin of Guadalupe, originally a sixth-century statue of Mary venerated at a site in Spain, but later replicated near Mexico City with an image that looks Hispanic and integrates in some ways with ancient Aztec traditions. Hindu pilgrimage sites include 7 holy cities on the Indian subcontinent, and Buddhism includes not only 4 pilgrimage sites recommended by the Buddha himself, but many others throughout India, China, and Southeast Asia. 

Regardless of the place or the century, a pilgrimage experience includes certain features that make it timeless. These features are something that psychology might help us to understand, most of which act at the non-conscious level of the Intuitive Mind:      

• Preparation – a pilgrimage involves packing one’s things and readying oneself for extended travel. The preparation may be insufficient, excessive, or anything in between, and the energy devoted to preparing helps set the tone for the journey ahead. 
• Leavetaking – the pilgrim sets aside their everyday life for a time. In restrictive feudal societies, going on a pilgrimage was one of the few instances in which a peasant could leave the land they farmed for their lord. It was also one of the tools society could use to deal with miscreants by temporarily removing them from their normal roles (but with a chance for reform): Nobles might be sent on a long pilgrimage to the Holy Land to make restitution for their misdeeds. For us, leavetaking might be as simple as setting an email out-of-office response. Either way, it lays aside the routines of ordinary life, gives relief from day-to-day pressures and demands, and opens a space for new things to happen.
• Journey – travel is the heart of pilgrimage, the farther and slower the better. New vistas open up, and new experiences. For the medieval pilgrim, the journey to a well-known shrine involved many small shrines and local relics catering to travelers. For modern pilgrims, the journey is probably less explicitly religious in character, but still novel and interesting. Challenges are inevitably part of any journey as well, and give the experience its memorable character. Overcoming those challenges along the way, or not, provides the pilgrim with opportunities for self-knowledge and growth. Turner and Turner characterize pilgrimage as a "liminoid phenomenon," as the pilgrim may cross national borders, social strata, and other barriers, in an experience that is in some ways outside of standard experiences of time and place.
• Companions – the Canterbury Tales are a set of pilgrims’ stories, told to one another along the way. Each is a mix of what the person knows and autobiographical details, and each reveals a great deal about who that person is. Jerry Ellis reports a contemporary walk from London to Canterbury over a period of 10 days, in which he meets a wide range of people and learns from their experiences, their perspectives, and their spiritual yearnings. We learn about our companions on a journey just as we learn about ourselves.
• Destination – although the journey is important, the destination is the point of the pilgrimage. Pilgrimage sites might be grand and imposing, as with Canterbury Cathedral, providing a vast open space to highlight the largeness of God. Or they might be small and intimate, as with the La Salette shrine in France that honors a pair of poor children. Sometimes they are remote and windswept, like the caves at St. Patrick's shrine in Ireland, benefitting from their disconnection to the normal places and activities of life.
• Relics - many medieval pilgrimage sites are centered around a particular relic, which allowed the pilgrim to see or touch (or even purchase as a souvenir!) something that might previously have been only an abstract idea. Physical presence was more important than historical accuracy, a truth that led to multiple shrines offering the same relic, such as the head of John the Baptist. If the contradiction was pointed out, the church was likely to claim that was all just part of the miracle.
• Ritual – at the shrine of St. Patrick in Ireland, pilgrims walk a set route among caves on a tiny island in the middle of Lough Derg, stopping at each to pray. The whole round takes 3 days (although in earlier times it could take 6 or 9), with prescribed prayers, steps, and other rituals at each station devoted to a different saint. Although the rituals followed at a pilgrimage site might be the same in some ways as those followed at home -- e.g., in a pilgrim's local church -- their use in the new setting of the pilgrimage site endows them with greater meaning.
• Return – at the end of the pilgrimage there is a return journey, much less commented on than the initial one even though it covers the same ground. More important is the return to daily life, which requires a reintegration. Physical healing is still one of the primary purposes of pilgrimage for many people, for instance at the shrine of Lourdes in France. But people can come back from a pilgrimage changed in other ways as well -- for example, with new insights, transformed relationships, or new purpose in life.

I have been contemplating the pilgrimage experience in the context of my own family's practice for the past 3 years of visiting Valparaiso, Indiana for Easter. Here are some aspects that make the experience meaningful. Preparation and Leavetaking: This year I was particularly ready for a break from some work-related stressors. Packing for the trip gave me something to think about besides work, and it was very satisfying to log off after letting people know that I would be out of contact for a few days. Journey and Companions: Departing Denver on a Wednesday night, we trekked across the Great Plains into the hours of darkness, slept a few hours at a roadside motel, and journeyed on the next day, arriving just in time for the 7 pm Maundy Thursday service at Valparaiso University's Chapel of the Resurrection. It was a bit of an ordeal, as usual, and caused some friction between me, my wife, and our younger daughter who was along for the ride -- not exactly a relaxing vacation. But we were also able to bond over the challenges of the journey, and to celebrate our successful arrival together. At the end of the trail, we were reunited with my older daughter, who goes to school in Valparaiso. Destination, Relics, Ritual: Valparaiso is an independent Lutheran university, and the chapel is the largest one on a college campus in the United States. The celebration of Easter at Valparaiso involves the traditional Paschal Triduum, a 3-day worship that follows Jesus from life to death to resurrection. These are long church services, but I fell into a pleasant meditative state where I didn't notice the time passing. Some of the Easter rituals, such as the lighting of a new Christ candle and sprinkling the crowd with the waters of baptism, are related to everyday practices at our church, but in a deeper and expanded form connected to the holy days. The physical space of the chapel, and its music -- organ, handbells, choir, and a full brass band for Easter -- enhanced the experience. Return: Back at work this week, I have had more mental space and distance from issues that were upsetting me beforehand. It's definitely normal life, bland by comparison to the pilgrimage experience. But it is normal life at a little different pace, with a little more breathing room, with heavenly music occasionally breaking through. For the Narrative Mind there were a few insights, such as Pastor Kate's advice to prepare for the future as though it holds the promise of life rather than of death. But primarily the benefit was at the Intuitive level, a spiritual readjustment that's difficult to completely put into words. 

This type of Intuitive-level improvement could be compared to psychotherapeutic approaches that operate at least partly outside of consciousness, such as our recent study of Regenerating Images in Memory. It might even connect to biochemical behavior-change approaches using psychedelics, which patients say can lead to a similarly spiritual type of experience. But in this case, I think that I will let history be my guide, and simply say that the pilgrimage might produce psychotherapeutic benefits by way of religious practice and understanding. There are likely many more unexplored avenues for behavior change, outside the well-worn Narrative-focused paths of cognitive-behavioral treatment.