This will be an attempt to articulate some rather disjointed, nonetheless related, thoughts I have had floating around in my head for the past four or five years.
In the summer of 2004 Greg and I drove north from Dover, Delaware through Pennsylvania and into upstate New York. Our destination was the little town of Palmyra, where 174 years earlier God the Father and Jesus Christ had appeared to the 14-year-old Joseph Smith. Our purpose was to see Greg's brother and sister perform in the enormous Hill Cumorah Pageant, a celebration of that event and the truths that were ultimately restored because of it. It became a rich and profound experience for me. But what made our trip particularly meaningful was that I happened to be reading The Book of Margery Kempe at the time.
I had never been to Palmyra before, and I would finally be able to check that Church History Site box, along with the already-checked boxes of Nauvoo and Kirtland. In the weeks before our trip I mused that we were participating in the funny little Mormon tradition of going to great lengths to visit places where significant religious events took place. As if it were some quaint, somewhat artificialpractice. And as if it were an exclusively Mormon activity! Dear Margery opened my eyes. That summer I was hard at work on my master's degree, and I was taking a Medieval and Renaissance Autobiography class. The Book of Margery Kempe is one of the first (if not the first) autobiographies in English, so, not surprisingly, it was on the reading list.
With a little help from B. A. Windeatt and the introduction to his translation, as well as trusty Wikipedia, to refresh my memory, here's a little background on Margery. Born in 1373, she saw a vision of Christ during an illness after her first childbirth, felt herself called to a spiritual life, but was distracted by two business ventures (both of which failed), and giving birth to fourteen children. Finally, at the age of 40, she convinced her husband to join her in a mutual vow of chastity, and she set out on multiple journeys to holy sites around Europe and beyond, including sites in Rome, Spain, Jerusalem, and Norway, just to name a few. She sought out the religious figures of her day, conversing with the great, the humble, the recluses, and the mystics. Margery was controversial-she claimed to be conversing with Christ on a regular basis, and she expressed her devotion with weeping and loud emotional outbursts. She was nearly burned as a heretic several times! Towards the end of her life, she employed two different scribes (Margery herself was probably illiterate) and methodically dictated an account of her travels and visions. Her life is a lively mix of the ordinary and remarkable, the homely and miraculous.
Margery's book focuses primarily on her pilgrimages. There were ceaseless hardships and challenges. Remember, this was the Middle Ages--travel was slow, difficult, and uncomfortable, to say the least. She often had to beg for food and had no place to sleep. But she was not alone. She records the camaraderie (and tensions) that developed among her fellow pilgrims. This is what struck me--the apparent steady stream of pilgrims to these sites, all the way to the Holy Land even, despite the difficulty. (How many times had I read The Canterbury Tales? You would think I would not have been surprised by the idea of medieval pilgrimages.)
My first inclination was to take a condescending, somewhat amused, attitude towards Margery and her pilgrimages. Why all the trouble and hardship and sacrifice just to visit an unremarkable plot of land? But then it dawned on me: I was about to embark on a pilgrimage of my own. Not to Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, but to Palmyra, New York. The connection in my mind of Margery's pilgrimages and my trip to Palmyra illuminated them both. I could understand Margery, and, having already participated in my own religious pilgrimages (to Nauvoo and Kirtland and Temple Square), I found that I could relate to this medieval woman in a special way that other readers might not. Even more important, I saw my trip to Palmyra in a new light. While the desire to visit the Sacred Grove in Palmyra might be uniquely Mormon, the desire to journey to holy places certainly is not.
That weekend, as I watched the Pageant, climbed to the top of the Hill Cumorah, toured the Grandin Printing Shop, trudged over train tracks and through thick brush to find the banks of the Susquehanna River, enjoyed camaraderie with family, and felt a sense of fellowship with other "pilgrims," I experienced a connection to Margery. Though distanced by culture, religion, an ocean, and six hundred years, our similar act of pilgrimage united us. We both sought to show our devotion to God, to remember Him, and seek Him by standing in a place that had been touched by His hand.
I think it is fair to say that we as Latter-day Saints visit our church history sites, among other reasons, to reaffirm our faith that Christ's true church has been restored to the earth. Even more than confirming to me the "rightness" of my church, though, this particular trip connected me to a larger Christian community, stretching back through time and around the world. I felt a bond reaching back to Margery Kempe and her fellow medieval pilgrims, a bond that stretched to the old women on their way to Higuey in the Dominican Republic, to my best friend Deanna who bravely negotiated Rome jet lagged and alone and traveled to the Vatican by herself, to the humble Catholics climbing the Santa Scala on their knees, to the bus loads of modern Christians visiting the Holy Land.
The fellowship I felt with Christian pilgrims throughout time and place increased during our travels while we lived in Turkey. We visited Antioch, where the early Apostles preached the gospel, and where, in 1963, the Pope decreed that you get a plenary indulgence for visiting the church there. (I was so pleased that we earned a plenary indulgence--too bad we're not Catholic!) We drank from Paul's well in Tarsus, and made the challenging journey to Patmos, where John received his grand revelation. During our trip to Rome, we spent the early morning hours, when the sun was barely up and the roads still quiet, visiting some of the many religious sites. After a mistaken detour to the Syrian border, we visited Harran, the place where God appeared to Abraham. We sought out what arguably was the tomb of Joseph of Egypt in the Valley of the Tombs. We walked in Paul's footsteps in Cyprus and Ephesus, and drove to the house where Mary passed her final years. My memories of Palmyra, as well as Kirtland, Nauvoo, and Salt Lake too, took on even deeper meaning with each Biblical pilgrimage.
The bond I feel to religious pilgrims reaches beyond Christians. In Sanliurfa, the birthplace of Abraham according to Islamic tradition, we were surrounded by crowds of Muslim pilgrims exiting buses just over the border from Iran and families of Turkish Muslims eager to feed the sacred fish there. In the international terminal of the Istanbul airport, where we have spent some quality time, we frequently encountered groups en route to or from Mecca, fulfilling their sacred duty to perform the Hajj, the largest annual pilgrimage in the world. I remember once flying home to Adana, where we shared the plane with a small group returning from Mecca. (They could be identified because of the special way the men were dressed. They also had small Turkish flags affixed to their clothing, indicating to their fellow pilgrims from which country they had traveled.) There was an unmistakable reverence surrounding them.
Though I am no expert on religious studies, I assume that the performance of pilgrimages reaches well beyond the Christian and Islamic faiths. Throughout time and all over the world, people have journeyed to sacred sites, as an act of devotion and remembrance, as a way to reaffirm their faith, connect to traditions, seek the miraculous, and find the hand of God. Are my visits to church history sites really that different?
I like to view my Mormon pilgrimages in this greater context. When I visit early church history sites, my Mormon beliefs are reconfirmed: I am touched by the Spirit, I feel closer to the Savior, my understanding of God deepens, and my testimony of the restoration of the gospel is strengthened. But I also feel connected to a much larger family of human faith, to an ancient and worldwide tradition of belief in God.
Our family has come full circle, geographically speaking, in its pilgrimages. Greg and I visited Kirtland, Ohio the first summer we were married, and a couple years later we made that trip to Palmyra. We stood where Jesus Christ has appeared in modern times, and walked where the first prophet in modern times, Joseph Smith, worked, walked, and taught. Then we moved to Turkey and stood where God appeared in ancient times and where His prophets and apostles of old lived and preached. Now we are back in Ohio, and last weekend we took a trip to Kirtland, a place of great importance historically and religiously to Latter-day Saints. I would like to view our little pilgrimage (complete with a stay at the Holiday Inn and a trip to the zoo) as one in the greater tradition of pilgrimages by people of faith. What does a Mormon family stuffed in a Subaru heading north on I-71 have in common with a middle-aged medieval woman aboard on a boat sailing to the Holy Land? A lot.
