Synopses & Reviews
from the Foreword by Pico Iver
Reading the wonderfully varied and unexpected stories assembled here, I was struck by how much the notion of pilgrimage today has to do with retrieving a sense of purpose (and simplicity, and constancy); with putting oneself, quite literally, in the footsteps of the past. Once upon a less secular time, almost everyone made pilgrimages, and most of the great works of our early literature--Dante's ascent into the stars, Chaucer's wanderers to Canterbury, the tales of Orpheus and Odysseus and Hercules--commemorate both inward and outward journeys; these days, I suspect, many of us travel in part to experience pilgrimage by proxy. Most of the travelers in this volume leave home, as I have done, to partake of someone else's pilgrimage, and so to learn what animates people to undertake such sacrificial tasks; the destination of pilgrimage is pilgrimage itself.
Table of Contents
Pico Iyer Foreword
Brian Bouldrey Preface
Abigail Seymour, Ultreya
Malcolm X, Mecca
Alice Walker, Looking for Zora
Alane Salierno Mason, Holy City
Marvin Barrett, Climbing to Christmas
Rachel Kadish, Reparation Spoken Here?
Gretel Ehrlich, The Road to Emei Shan
John Hanson Mitchell, Providence Hill
Barbara Wilson, Joshua Tree
Michael Wolfe, When Men and Mountains Meet
Satish Kumar, Iona
Anne Cushman, Spiritual Discomfort
Oliver Statler, Japanese Pilgrimage
Jennifer Lash, Lourdes
Gary Paul Nabhan, La Verna's Wounds