Student Cross

[helenic]

Of course as it happened, it was absolutely fantastic. After four years I should have known better. I was going to walk Northern this year until I was asked to be secretary, and I'm glad I stayed, in the end; but I think it was a good note to end on. So next year will see me doing something different, and in the meantime I can enjoy being inbetween, responsible for no-one except myself.

notably; x.   we had a new chaplain this year - or rather, an old one, although I'd never walked with him before. Fabian is seventy-five and fitter than any of us; he downs pints of mild, makes dirtier jokes than the Bad Boys, falls asleep in pubs and says mass in his ski-pants and walking boots with a stole thrown carelessly over the top. He's walking a thousand miles to Compostelle next easter. I became an instant fan of him - he's one of those rare types who has a genuine love of people, and manages to be intimate with everyone individually in a way that only the truly pure at heart can. x.   even though I've barely been to church since I was fourteen, the daily mass that week took on an entirely new meaning for me. Something struck me on that first morning, when tired and hungover we sat on the floor in a circle in our ridiculous comfy clothes: it was so far removed from the typical high-brow eucharist that it seemed infinitely more meaningful, more real. And as everyone ate their fragment of bread at the same time it seemed more resonant than ever before, this rite of consumption - symbolic on so many levels - intrinscially and primevally human, bringing everyone to the same basic level of beings that need to eat to live. The divine consumed in an act as simple and necessary as breathing, taken into the bloodstream. Fused with every cell. In that moment it seemed pure, poignant, ancient as the earth. God in my stomach, the spiritual consciousness of the universe uniting with me in a way more fundamental than sex. x.   the walking itself had a similar effect on me, if more subtle. In the fens, with no hills for fifty miles, the horizon is the lowest and widest in England. Cloudless, with temperatures reaching 32° on Wednesday and a blue that became almost indigo at its apex, the sky has never seemed so vast. We walked 120 miles in six and a half days, and as my muscles and feet complained and loosened and became gradually accustomed to it, so my mind seemed to expand almost limitlessly, to feel absolutely free. It wasn't a "religious" experience but something utterly human, stripping me of my context and letting me think and feel in an environment where only the most simple of things really mattered. And always under the same sky, continually changing. The sky has always had a profound effect on me but when you're spending ten hours a day with nothing to separate you from it, the paradox of its eternal constancy and fluctuation becomes incomparably eloquent. x.   Catherine and I had our first fight on the second day, and by the end of the week her constant snide comments and selfishness were becoming almost unbearable. Luckily for everyone she didn't walk with us but drove the support car, so they were spared our bickering during the day. I tried to get on with her (perhaps not as hard as I could have) but her attitude was really impossible. Ours wasn't the only conflict, either, but something Fabian said at the end of the week stuck in my mind: "the thing to remember is that this is a pilgrimage, not a retreat, and hence is very much rooted in real life. We don't spend our time in meditation and prayer, but in doing very real and very necessary things; we drink too much, we swear, we tell rude jokes, we quarrel and we complain. And perhaps there should be more quarrelling and complaining, if only to make us see that this is not an elitist, religious, ivory-tower experience, but one that is relevant to every day of our lives." x.   when we arrived in Walsingham, aside from the party atmosphere of meeting up with two hundred old friends who had walked different routes, the main event was the vigil on Saturday night. It begins at ten pm in the Anglican shrine, a dark, moody place that seems almost pagan with the full moon casting everything in silver and shadow. A single candle is lit, and from it we all light our own smaller candles until the entire garden is filled with light - a fantastically powerful metaphor - and the prayer said by the priest at that moment stayed in my head for days: "Christ yesterday and today, the beginning and the end, Alpha and Omega; all time belongs to him, and all ages. May the light of Christ, rising in glory, banish all darkness from our hearts and minds." (All time belongs to him, and all ages. I felt in that moment an awareness of something older than the seas, and yet more intimately connected with myself than any other person. Perhaps it was pagan; perhaps all religion since the very first has only ever responded to this awareness, this one sublime something that makes life more than just a pattern of days. It is the very ability we have to see beneath the surface; it is the interconnectedness of things.)

The paschal party which followed the vigil was as drunken and crazy as always, and afterwards a small group of us walked up onto the hill to watch the dawn, shared a joint and a glass of single malt, and ended up playing british bulldog and pile-ons and piggyback jousting, lying on the grass in the end unable to do anything for laughing. I went to bed at 7.30am and was hungover for twenty-four hours, but oh, it was more than worth it. They gave me a glow-in-the-dark BVM because I'm not Catholic and it's standing on my mantelpiece right now, in all its tacky luminous glory. I shall treasure it.

Comments

[theobscureone.livejournal.com]

Sounds like a beautiful experience.

[devevre.livejournal.com]

The response to religion isn't necessarily a 'religious' one at all. I'm desperately jealous of your pilgrimage, which sounded excellent. Some time ago I came across an article by Satish Kumar (http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC17/Kumar.htm), which regrettably isn't there any more, about how he decided to do a walking pilgrimage to all the holy places in the British Isles. Parts of the article can be found here (http://www.biffvernon.freeserve.co.uk/pilgrimage.htm).

[libellum.livejournal.com]

I read that link when you first posted it and never got round to telling you how wonderful it was. thankyou. xx