By Madison Cash
A pilgrimage is defined by The Oxford Learner’s Dictionary as “a journey to a place that is connected with someone or something that you admire or respect.” Typically, pilgrimages are taken as religious exercises; believers of many faiths view them as vital to a proper rededication of faith, a heightening of religious fervor, or an abandonment of past behaviors. Throughout a variety of cultures, religions, and demographics, pilgrimage has historically been viewed as a physical movement towards an actualized goal to reflect spiritual progress. However, I argue that the concept of pilgrimage is also useful as a way to describe the mind’s development, especially in a study abroad program where intellectual journeying is coupled with physical movement.
The last two summers, I have traveled to Spain and England with Wheaton College’s Spanish and English Department, respectively. Both programs incorporated pilgrimage practices, such as journaling and meditation, as we moved across the country and visited different historical and literary sites. The England program was specifically designed as a pilgrimage and learning synthesis, so I will be focusing on that program today. The most explicit example of this integration was one of the courses the England cohort took as part of our study abroad experience, entitled “Literature and Place.” This course involved daily reading describing the place we were located, the writing of daily paragraphs after partner discussion of these readings, and a final pilgrimage paper articulating how our movement through physical space augmented our understanding of a piece or genre of literature related to that space.
My pilgrimage essay took the form of a segmented chronology of my movement through a hiking tour of Tintagel as I also memorized thirty lines from Tennyson’s “Passing of Arthur,” written about the legend of King Arthur which centers on the mysterious cliffs. I also augmented my pilgrimage of the mind by listening to a symphony based on the location before, during, and after I walked through the cliffs and described how my perception of the music and poem changed after moving through the physical space while reciting the words of the poem.
“The Passing of Arthur,” when the legendary King begins his slow death in Cornwall and the Round Table slowly crumbles, initially depressed me. The segment of the poem opens with Bedivere, the right hand to King Arthur, overhearing his lament about the destruction of his kingdom. The poem reads :
"I found Him in the shining of the stars, I marked Him in the flowering of His fields, But in His ways with men I find Him not. I waged His wars, and now I pass and die. O me! for why is all around us here As if some lesser god had made the world, But had not force to shape it as he would, Till the High God behold it from beyond, And enter it, and make it beautiful? Or else as if the world were wholly fair, But that these eyes of men are dense and dim, And have not power to see it as it is: Perchance, because we see not to the close;-- For I, being simple, thought to work His will, And have but stricken with the sword in vain; And all whereon I leaned in wife and friend Is traitor to my peace, and all my realm Reels back into the beast, and is no more. My God, thou hast forgotten me in my death: Nay--God my Christ--I pass but shall not die."
The powerful words of the poem initially seemed to have an ominous and hopeless tone at first glance, as it seemed to revel in what seemed to me a narrative glee in Arthur’s pain. In a similar manner, when I listened to the symphony before my planned pilgrimage to Tintagel, I could only hear crashing cymbals and blaring war trumpets. However, after I visited the physical location of Tintagel, on the Atlantic coast of England, my conclusion was that the serenity of the physical space of Tintagel changed my perception of Tennyson’s poem, as well as Arnold Bax’s symphonic poem, “Tintagel.” Instead of causing me to focus on Arthur’s dying hopelessness in Tennyson’s poem, or the crashing of the cymbals throughout the symphonic poem, the physical trip to Tintagel brought out the emphasis on a hopeful rebirth of culture and nature in each work.
Even so, the pilgrimage essay, while the most blatant example of an academic integration of the concept of pilgrimage and study abroad, fails to completely capture how students embark on a pilgrimage of the mind as they travel and study overseas. Instead of the academic paper, the traveling emphasis caused me to enact a true pilgrimage of the mind and body, increasing retention of information. Through common pilgrimage practices, like physical movement, journaling, mindfulness, meditation, and memorization, the cohort created personally sacred locations that became attached with literary meaning in a similar manner to pilgrims on their sacred quests to find spiritual meaning.
In a brief survey I conducted among my peers on the trip, one told me that the trip “made me far more reverent of physical spaces. Before I was more flippant about the idea of places having power; this trip most definitely changed my thoughts.” The student’s use of the word “reverent” in relation to a study abroad trip is telling: the act of pilgrimage is not limited to walking a Camino or sacred trail en route to a church or cathedral. Pilgrimage is often enacted unknowingly in learning practices, especially those that take place in experientially-focused, immersive learning environments. By understanding learning itself as a pilgrimage, and incorporating reflection practices enacted on pilgrimage, students can mindfully approach their studies in order to make real-world, practical connections from book to life.
On my trip, student learning practices were regulated and recorded by consistent journaling in response to self-generated questions, in a similar format to the pilgrimage literature that we studied. The assignment parodied our foundational reading, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, in which each tale was written as a building, chronological sequence and provides special insights into each character. It was significant that we self-generated the daily questions that we would then discuss with a partner and write into essay format. While it was an unpopular assignment given the workload and time constraints of the trip, it forced the students to enact the process of reflection on location, formulation of a literary quest in that location, and fulfillment of the literary quest in essay format. The program used self-reflection tactics to encourage deeper insights into the material.
In the short survey, I asked how the reflection questions provided a better understanding of the material. One student said that “The questions gave me a chance to focus all the thoughts I was having about the literature. The pieces we were reading gave us a lot to consider and think about; the questions just helped to narrow the scope of the thinking.”
For example, another student reflected on how the process of coming up with the question "How could such a beautiful place inspire such a nihilistic poem?" referring to Matthew Arnold's poem "Dover Beach," caused them to reflect on the irony within the poem, effectively clarifying both their analysis of the contrasts of color in the physical space and the concepts in Arnold’s poem. Several others agreed that reflection helped them to focus their impressions. The process of coming up with the questions provided a space to reflect and condense their thinking about both the physical place and the literature written in that place.
Another pilgrimage practice the cohort used regularly was group discussion and meditation about the trip’s progress. We took time weekly to process what we were learning emotionally and academically. While some students reported that this practice didn’t affect their trip, most agreed that taking time to rest and process our emotional state was vital for their wellbeing. One reported, “The most helpful part of the mindfulness, for me, was simply checking in on each other. There was an enormous amount of work given us, and it was all so much to process. Being mindful with ourselves and one another provided for a safer and healthier community, and helped sort out some of the chaos in our brains.” Another asserted that group discussions encouraged community, which in turn increased the impact of what we were reading. “ Making connections with other people about literature assisted us in internalizing the material and allowing it to change us,” they wrote.
Some students elected to meditate and personally reflect during our group visits to significant historical sites. In my survey, I asked about my fellow students’ experience with personal meditation in locations we visited and how it changed their perception of the place. The survey showed that for the majority of students, taking time to reflect and recenter oneself in nature, cathedrals, and museums created sacred and individual meaning. Many used common spiritual words, like “holy,” “sacred,” and “peace” to describe their experience. One discussed their experience in churches, writing: “Every time we visited cloisters, I was able to sit down for awhile and be silent and just breathe. I watched people passing by and felt the old stone around me and looked out at the green of the yard, and taking that moment of peace and silence made the places infinitely more holy to me. I like the association that my brain began to make between church and rest.” The respondent’s chosen words of “peace,” “holy,” and “rest” indicates that using the common pilgrimage practice of meditation changed the perception of the place from yet another field trip destination to a place of meaning. Another student decided to be silent while he walked to the ancient prehistoric landmark, Stonehenge. He said that the sounds of nature around him “colored my experience with a sense of peacefulness that I did not feel when I began the walk. I was able to enjoy the landscape in a new way, taking it in for its simple beauty, rather than its tourism. I realized that the peace surrounding the artifact of Stonehenge makes it more meaningful.” Meditating on the calming stimuli found in nature can calm us and increase our sense of wellbeing, which is especially vital in a high-pressure academic environment.
Finally, the program required us to memorize several pieces of poetry linked to a literary location where we would recite to our peers. Many elected to memorize pieces on the long bus rides or while they were hiking, linking movement with memory. Also, some students became memorization partners, quizzing each other on certain lines and building community. One student recognized the value of physical connection to memorization, responding that “I liked [memorizing] pieces of works of literature because it was a mobile exercise. I could memorize anywhere and at any time. As I memorized, I carefully considered the meaning of each individual word in the work. I roll[ed the words]over and over in my head until I found a way to connect them to...something real in my life.”
Another responded from a different angle, arguing that the act of reciting his poem in Old English, a very different dialect than modern American English, caused him to better understand the meaning of the words that he memorized. “I memorized Old English, so it gave me an odd feeling of power. Speaking words that I didn’t understand but knew the meaning of connected me in a much more visceral way to the text. My mind didn’t understand it, but my body did.” Interestingly, both students connected their intellectual absorption of literature to their physical body. For one student, memorization condensed abstract concepts into reality, into the physical realm. For another, it expanded an understanding of concrete words into a more abstract feeling, an instinct.
Ultimately, using pilgrimage practices in an academic study abroad program augmented student retention and proficiency. According to the survey I conducted among my peers, as well as my own experience, the analogy of learning as a pilgrimage of the mind is helpful for students to better understand individual academic strategies, such as memorization, meditation, discussion, and reflection that benefit their retention rates. As one student insightfully responded, pilgrimage practice is especially helpful for students studying literature, an often subjective and abstract field. “[Pilgrimage] gave me mindfulness about the journey that characters take,” the student said. She was able to begin “finding parallels to that [journey] in my own life, and really [observe] the way that the geography of the book affects the plot and the characters.”
She echoes the thoughts of Eileen Pollack, who considers movement through space a valuable contribution to writing. She said in her chapter, “Spatial Forms,” from her book Creative Nonfiction, that “Some of the most original examples of creative nonfiction rely more heavily on movements through space than movements through time...[E]ssays and books whose structures mimic the structures of objects, documents, or places comprise one of the most exciting and important segments of the genre” (295). Thus, the integration of pilgrimage practices with academic study does not just assist students in looking backwards and retaining information. It also allows students to look to the future and explore the possibility of innovative creation for a new genre of literature. As our world becomes increasingly STEM focused, integration of physical, practical movement and intellectual, creative flow is vital for the preservation of both the field of creative writing and the joy of learning for learning’s sake.
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